Fable (Fable #1)(29)
Her face was stone, but the slightest flinch ignited in her shoulders.
“Two weeks.” West held out his hand, clearly changing the subject.
“Two weeks.” The man shook it, and we moved down the aisle without another word.
I looked back over my shoulder, where the merchant’s narrowed eyes were still watching us. There were goods in the ship’s cargo hold stamped with the seal of Sowan’s merchant’s house, so I knew the Marigold had been there. And whatever they’d done had followed them to Dern. If they were a shadow ship, there was no telling what it was.
I tried to keep up, staying on my feet when someone shoved into me and not losing more than a foot between me and West. If I did, I would be taken with the crowd back the other way. He haggled with another merchant, and I watched beyond the rise of the stall, where Auster was bartering with a gem trader. One of the red leather purses Hamish had given out was clutched in his fist.
Behind me, Willa argued with a small woman just down the aisle, four sparkling gems that looked to be amethyst in her hand. Another one of the red leather purses sat on the table before her.
West caught Auster’s eyes over my head, jerking his chin toward Willa. “She better not leave your sight.”
Auster nodded, moving closer to her, and I looked around us. There was a lot of coin in this room and a lot of bodies. It would only take a second to lose a purse at your hip. In fact, there were probably people in Dern who made their living that way inside this merchant’s house.
My hand went to my own belt, where the few coppers I had were tucked into the little pocket I’d sewn. Paj watched around us, his eyes scanning in every direction as we moved from stall to stall, and I bumped into West as he suddenly stopped in front of me. His attention was on a man who stood along the back wall, leaning into the frame of a greased window.
“Stay here,” West muttered before he disappeared into the crowd. When he reached the man, he pulled the cap from his head, running one hand through his hair as they talked in hushed whispers.
“Who is that?” I watched the way they turned their backs to the room.
Paj didn’t answer, but he looked as curious as I was, his eyes pinned on West.
Willa rejoined us with a sack of fish hooks slung over her back, Auster on her heels. “Where is he?” She looked around us.
“Price?” Paj gestured to the fish hooks, and I watched, paying close attention to the way he stepped in front of her to block the view to the window. He was distracting her. Covering for West, even if he didn’t know why. And now that I thought about it, they all seemed to do that.
Willa pulled a piece of paper from her pocket, handing it over, and shoved her empty red purse into her jacket. It was then that I understood what they were doing. It wasn’t coin in those purses; it was gems. Just a little in each one. Every crew member was splitting off one at a time and trading the small amounts to different merchants.
Trading a few pieces of pyre from Jeval was one thing. But you needed a special permit from the Trade Council to actually run a gem trade, and I guessed they didn’t have one. There weren’t many in the Narrows who did, because the powerful gem merchants in Bastian controlled the trade.
It was the perfect way for an illegitimate operation to hide beneath the guise of trading large amounts of anything but gems. Just a little here and there to avoid notice. A few stones wasn’t going to turn heads. But this looked rehearsed. Planned. They probably did this at every single port, and there were probably a lot more purses hidden in the hull than the one I’d found.
If they were Saint’s shadow ship, they’d hold a permit to trade gems because he would have made sure of it. But they didn’t, and that could only mean one thing—they were running side trade and pocketing on Saint’s ledgers.
It was genius. And also, enormously stupid.
West pushed back through the crowd without a word, and we moved to the next stall, where an old man sat before a tray of gemstones and melted-down metals. The onyx in his merchant’s ring said he was a gem merchant. The guild required ten years of apprenticeship for that ring, and even then, it wasn’t guaranteed. The guilds were as cutthroat as the traders. If a sailmaker or shipbuilder or gem dealer was caught conducting business without one of those rings, it was a crime punishable by death.
The bronze scale that sat in front of the man caught the bright light from the window as he dropped three raw emerald stones into one side. “West.” He nodded in greeting. “Pyre?”
So, this was where he offloaded the pyre. And if I was right about what they were up to, he probably traded the pieces for just a few gems instead of coin. Enough not to draw any notice on the ledgers. It was probably the only trade with a gem merchant he’d make in the open.
West pulled a pouch from his jacket, handing it over, and the man dumped my pieces of pyre onto the cloth folded neatly on the table. “Where are you getting these stones? The past few months you’ve sold me better pyre than I’ve seen from any trader in two years.”
I smirked, watching him pick up the largest one and hold it against the light.
“If you bring more next month, I might have a better price. There’s a jeweler here who’s been making some new pieces with them.”
“That’s the last of it. We won’t be stopping in Jeval anymore,” Hamish answered.
I looked up at him, confused. When I’d traded with West on the barrier islands, he hadn’t said anything about it being his last time in Jeval. In fact, he’d offered to pay the next time he came.