Since there is the possibility of a violent altercation with Sleidr, Heppa asks her companions, “How should we equip ourselves?”
Tric is borrowing Yrogin’s bow so that he is not carrying a distinctly elvish model. “Your sword is probably fine,” Tric suggests, since he doubts Sleidr will be examining the filigree on the handle.
“Not for her to wear dressed as a lady,” Heledd corrects. “You could wear her sword,” she tells Tric, “and then it will be around if needed.”
“That’s a good solution, Heledd,” he acknowledges.
Heledd asks Heppa if she knows how to fight with a staff since she will have the walking stick. While branch-fighting is part of shaman training, Heppa has not really studied it. She has certainly watched drills, though, and she did once fend off a shambling corpse with a necromancer’s staff. Of all the weapons under discussion, she is best with a bow. However, her most successful performance in combat was against the bats. “I wish I had that rune,” she mutters. When her companions ask what she is mumbling about, she says more clearly, “The ice shard.” Heledd looks puzzled, and Heppa adds, “It’s a rune that we found with Kachen,” since Heledd seems to be his friend based on all the messages flying around. “It was attached to a staff.”
“So not a ring?” Heledd asks. The elves tell her it was about that size, but mounted on worked wood rather than a small circlet of metal. “Well, if you manage to get your hands on the rings, you might be able to do something with them, then.”
“Like what?” Heppa asks.
“Are the rings also runes?” Tric chimes in.
“I don’t know this ‘runes’ thing.”
“Are they magic?” Tric clarifies, and Heppa asks what rumors Heledd has heard.
“I don’t know exactly what they’re for, but Kachen’s the buyer on the emerald,” Heledd shares.
“Kachen’s got five thousand gold sitting around?”
“Not in his purse right now,” Heledd says with a smirk.
“So he is a secret nobleman!” Tric concludes triumphantly. “I knew it!”
Heledd is about to respond to that when Heppa says, “Well it mustn’t be ice because he didn’t seem as interested in that.” Tric suggests that maybe he was, but the staff was more desirable. After all, they did make a deal with him.
“And he’s not paying me five thousand,” Heledd clarifies. “I could probably get five thousand in the right market, but then I’d have to find that market.” This venture has her out-of-pocket a hundred and fifty coins, the cost of fabricating a nice piece of jewelry to serve as a decoy. That is, an actual ruby in an actual setting. Buying such a ring from a merchant would cost far, far more because of the mark-up to pay the jeweler for their time as well as the transporter and the merchant. And if a ring had magical properties on top of just looking nice, it could bring in even more. “In any job you undertake,” she tells Tric, instructing him in the criminal arts he seems to have such a keen interest in, “if you don’t already have a buyer lined up, you’re doing the work ahead of time, and that’s only a fraction of the actual work that will need to be done.”
“Ah, the sales part,” Tric jokes.
“Exactly! Finding a buyer is a huge issue.”
Heppa is not sure what the nature of the problem is. “Because then you have it on your person and it’s risky?”
“And also, you’ve—” Heledd stops herself, with a wry snort. “I say I always work on commission, but here I went slightly beyond that and look, I’m getting bit for it.”
“The Rats were probably going to come after you, either way,” Tric points out. It did not matter if Heledd was carrying one ring or two.
“Not if they hadn’t seen me,” Heledd mutters, sounding disappointed in herself. She sighs. “But I had opportunities, and I took them. I thought that if I was going to be going through all that work on Kachen’s behalf, I could maybe double-down and—Argh! But I didn’t have a buyer lined up for it, anyway!” She is clearly getting aggravated with herself. “This thing that I’m telling you is a bad idea? It’s a bad idea! But I did it.”
“That’s true. And then you had to sell it to us,” Tric says.
“Yeah. And I’m not getting anything for it.”
“You’re getting the money from Kachen, and you’re not going to die, so that’s a plus.”
“The ruby. I’m not getting anything for the ruby.”
“Your life?” Tric points out. Heppa did save the waitress from dying out in the street. But to lighten the mood some, he continues, “I’ll have you know that Kachen’s life is worth one rusty halberd and a dowsing rod. No wait, there was a bag of meat, too. Kachen plus a bag of dried meats is worth a dowsing rod.” Heledd’s eyebrows shoot up but Tric does not elaborate any further.
“So Kachen is in the city?” Heppa asks Heledd.
“No, I don’t know where he is,” Heledd says.
“He just has an account at the Bank of Alric,” Tric interjects.
“He said to give the ring to you and that you would give it to him. Or, well, the note that I got said I should entrust the ring to Heppa to deliver.”
“Ah!” Heppa nods. “We’re going to see him in the summer.” She smiles, realizing that means she will have plenty of time to try out the ring. Surely Kachen will be interested in whatever her experiments reveal about its workings.
“All that is to say, if you can physically get your hand on the rings, and there is a scuffle going on, you may be able to use the rings to help you,” Heledd concludes, mind on the job that these two amateurs are handling because she is not well enough to do it herself.
“I practiced with the ice rune,” Heppa tells Tric happily, feeling confident that she could do something with the rings. Then she drops her voice. “And—I didn’t tell you this—with that piece of staff in Daddy’s library. It didn’t feel good.”
“Yeah, you shouldn’t be surprised. He said it was a necromancer’s rod,” Tric shoots back.
“Don’t tell Daddy I tried it! Oh, don’t tell Mother.”
Heledd listens quietly to this exchange between the cousins. It is unlikely that she will ever have the occasion to use this information, but it does not hurt to acquire it just in case. Maybe someday she will find herself in their forest, and a little blackmail could go a long way.
Getting back on track, Heppa asks how many people they should expect to deal with. Heledd tells the elves that Sleidr attacked her with his three ruffians. However, he and two of his underlings were injured in the process. She agrees with the assessment the elves got from Alric that none of the other Rats would be involved in this side-project of Sleidr’s. He is doing it for his own personal enrichment and would not want to share more than necessary.
“When you say injuries, do you mean battle wounds?” Heppa asks, returning to the medical condition of who they will be facing.
“I knifed Sleidr and slashed a couple of his goons,” Heledd says casually.
Heppa never got a full report on what Tric Manu and Alric learned outside. Her eyes go wide. “You went up against four fellows?”
“They went up against me.” She explains that she was focused on evasion. The four set upon her in the tunnels, and by the time she got back above ground, only three were still on her heels, the other one being too injured to follow. As a knife fighter, she fought with slashes and close jabs, and she lost a few knives to throws, but it was worth it to get away. She emphasizes that her focus was very much on flight; four-to-one odds are not good for just flat-out fighting.
“If they hadn’t poisoned you, I suspect you would have made it back,” Heppa observes. Like the barkeep of the Parting Glass, its waitress is also a lot more than Heppa originally assumed.
“I agree.” Heledd sounds annoyed, with herself or with Sleidr, Heppa is not sure. “I need to get something like that for my own knives. And I need to get a rack like that.” The waitress nods her head at the open door to Alric’s room, through which his bandolier is visible, draped across the back of his chair.
“A bandolier of throwing knives?” Tric asks.
Right now, Heledd has a couple arm sheaths and a knife in the top of each boot. Clearly she no longer feels that is sufficient. “That cuttlefish poison really laid me out. That would be really useful to have. And the bandolier looks like it distributes the weight pretty well,” she adds to Tric’s objection that so much iron would really slow a person down.
“Well, with poison, you wouldn’t need to use as many knives,” Heppa points out, but Tric insists he will stick with simple, dependable arrows. “You could poison those, too,” she suggests, starting to idly consider what poisons would work well on edged weapons.
“I don’t think I would do that,” Tric replies. Then, doing his best Terwaen impression, he adds, “That would be a dishonorable weapon.” He resumes in his regular voice, “And speaking of which, we should be heading over for the grand melee soon.”
“Oh, wait! I want to go order a drink. Let’s see if Alric can recognize us!” Heppa suggests.
“By all means, go out the back, come in the front, and try to fool him,” Tric agrees. “I would enjoy watching that,”
“He’ll probably know—”
“He will almost certainly know,” Tric replies. They discussed this very plan with the man! “But if you can fool Alric!”
“This seems like a good test,” Heppa says. If he figures out the disguise, maybe he can help them improve it. They agree on just her conducting the experiment, since she is more disguised than Tric Manu is, and Heledd suggests trying to change her voice a little since she will need to speak to order a drink. “Like this?” Heppa drops her pitch a bit comically, trying to sound as human as she can. Finally, she requests a suggestion from Heledd on an appropriate beverage to order. Heledd lists some common choices for “fancy people,” and they settle on brandy, a drink Heppa has not yet tried.