With the exception of his first night in Vienda, Karo had not found it necessary to bear arms within the city with the exception of his job hunting on Soliloquy Lane. He had not borne fruit in that venture yet, but he was hopeful. Karo had left his possessions in a hiding spot provided by an obliging witch who dealt with such petty things as storage and lodging for the wicks who slipped in and out of this damnable city. He'd not like to be shook down by some aggravating excuse for Seventen and get snagged here, of all places. No, that would not do.

He did want to see the fuss and bother of Vienda's sights, though. It bothered him to be confined to the Dives. Karo did not acknowledge that there was every right to want to shun him from certain places--after all, he truly meant ill--but he resented the common assumption, that his race were thieves and vermin and should be treated as such.

So Karo came later, as the shops were closing and kept to the sides, and looked at the statue and the facades and imagined the simple lives of the humans who passed him by and worked soundlessly and without complaint for their galdori masters. He was reasonably sure that no one knew his face, save for that blacksmith and a few unsavories, all located safely in the Dives.

The air was humid and it had rained on him more than a few times, forcing him to seek shelter under eaves and fancy awnings that were all too . . . open, for his taste, but with a combination of luck and keeping out of sigh or following with groups, he avoided too much notice from any local patrol. Perhaps tonight he was just a wick, foreign-looking but harmless.

Karo leaned now against a damp bit of brickwork of a shop specifically selected for the smoothness of its material and the tucked away nature of the location. He could see the court but it was difficult for the court to see him. Perhaps it was time to go. At this time, Soliloquy Lane might be picking up, and he would feel more comfortable, amongst his own kind.

Seven lemons. Ginger. One bag of sugar. Three oranges. One hundred grams of walnuts.

Dahlia mentally checked off each item as she walked through Crosstown Court. Her master had so kindly told her as she served him dinner that he was expecting his mother late morning the following day. Normally Mr. Aquin gave her more warning of such plans and so she passed on the news to Cook with trepidation. Her uneasiness was well founded as Cook informed her that there were no cakes, muffins or slices of any shape or form that were suitable to be served up to someone such as Lady Ellenora Aquin. This caused a problem as Cook would have to make such tea foods and prepare a larger lunch in case their master’s mother decided to dine with him (which she tended to do). Another complication was added when it was discovered the fruit bowl contained one very sad looking lemon, completely unsuited for the meringue pie that Cook had been planning. To solve this, Dahlia was bundled up in her coat and sent to Crosstown Court in search of stalls selling the much needed cooking ingredients.

Walnuts were easy to find. There was a wick that brought in nuts from the farms to sell at his stall in the Court and sold them cheaply. They were of a good quality too and their cheap price was attributed to the fact he mainly sold them as a snack for the entertainment. His caramel coated peanuts were a particular favourite with children. Dahlia procured the ginger from an apothecary who used it to soothe upset stomachs. Of course, it wasn’t her attention to use it for that purpose but instead in a ginger slice but she still smiled and nodded when the shop owner told her its wondrous qualities as she did whenever the maid came in to buy other herbs. It was the sugar and the fruit that caused Dahlia the most trouble to find. She had left it to last and had found that the small fruit stalls had already packed up and left, leaving her to spend a considerable amount of time wandering the streets on the direction of a flower girl who said her cousin ran the “bestest” grocer in all of Vienda. However, the seller had neglected to inform Dahlia of the considerable distance from Crosstown Court that this grocer was. The walk was made even worse by the humidity and drizzle.

But in the end she found everything and was on her way back to Mr. Aquin’s townhouse. The drizzle drove her under the eaves and awnings of the shops around the court, hugging her purchases in their paper bags to her chest protectively. She was conscious of the people who carried around her, especially the weaker fields of the wicks. It was common knowledge that they had light fingers, picking the pockets of hardworking maids like herself. Their little stalls where they performed card tricks and flashy shows were just another form of thievery. Not all of them were like that though. Dahlia knew it would be wrong of her to criticise an entire race when some of them very kind to her (such as the wick her sold her walnuts). A dark red dress in a shop window caught Dahlia’s eye long enough for her to stumble over some poor wick’s feet. She cried out (a sound more suited to a kicked dog than a human woman) and landed heavily on one hand, the other still clutching at her brown paper bag. Not all her purchases stayed in the bag though and she frantically dove after three escaping lemons.

Just as he had taken the first few steps away from the Court and to the Dives, a human woman seemed to pop up from nowhere--not nowhere, just nowhere with a convenient field. Karo wondered if humans had such difficulty orienting themselves around other people because they did not have fields. It did not explain his own clumsiness. He couldn't rightly blame that on anything but his own ungainly nature. She was looking at something--Karo instinctively turned to look himself and then he nearly fell himself as she tripped him up, screeching unattractively as she did. The spell for balance was almost at his lips until surprisingly, he righted himself.

The woman, however, was not. Karo scowled, but the human woman inspired a little pity in him. One of her three lemons rolled past him and Karo stooped to pick it up between his thumb and the three remaining fingers on his left hand. He judged a second to be perfectly in her grasp, but the third rolled away so quickly that Karo took a few steps and collected it himself. For a moment he was struck by how incongruous this was to his nature; perhaps Vienda was softening him.

Oh well. He returned to the human, two lemons in his whole right hand. Might as well finish what you started, Karo. He stood over her, appearing slightly irritated, but not hostile, and offered both the lemons, and his free hand to help her to her feet.

There was some sympathy in him for simple clumsiness, it seemed.

Dahlia instantly recognised the weak field of a wick and began apologising in fear she was about to get a knife in the middle of her back. It was just her luck to go bumping into a wick. A nasty, screeching wick. "I'm sorry, so sorry, really sorry!" she cried as she snatched up a lemon, stuffing it back into the paper bag. Her reason for not jumping to her feet and curtseying deeply, and thus avoiding being stabbed in the back, was because the lemons were purchased with her master's money which made them more valuable than her life. A dutiful servant must risk stabbings in the street for the sake of their master's lemon meringue pie.

Dahlia's felt sick to her stomach when two of the lemons vanished into the wick's hands. She was never going to see them again and she would have to pay Mr. Aquin back. She could hear his patronising lecture already, how she was such a 'silly girl' incapable of walking in the streets alone. He would make Cook's son chaperon her on all her outings in case of further robbery or worse. And Cook, oh Alioe, the scolding she was going to get from Cook when she got back. They couldn't make lemon meringue with only one lemon. Lady Ellanore would be scandalised if there was no lemon meringue pie. Tears welled up in Dahlia's eyes as she looked up at the wick.



He was giving them back? Dahlia stared up at him dumbly, almost pointing at herself to make sure he really was giving them back to her and not someone else. But no one else was taking them and the wick was hardly bolting down the street so she hesitantly reached out and took them from him. "Th-thank you?" she stammered, still quite in shock. How could she have thought such things about a man who had saved her such horrors as Mr. Aquin's lectures? And he was holding his hand out to help her further. She stuffed the lemons into the bag and took his offered hand. "Ohh...your finger," she murmured absently, noting the missing finger. Dahlia's mind fluttered about, thinking up heroic actions that could have costed the wick his missing finger.

Yes, you. You aren't that great a fool, are you? Karo managed to keep this thought to himself. This looked like one of the crying sort of women, who burst into tears at the drop of a pin. Or a lemon.

"You are welcome," Karo said in a clipped tone. He threw in a bit of free advice. "Attempt caution, next time."

He helped her up. She was a definitely a hale, hearty human girl, not particularly light but not that heavy either. Karo briefly wondered if she might be stronger than he was. His strength had always been in what he was willing to do, rather than what he could.



Karo almost made a terrible, awful snide remark, something a little cruel and probably relating to her ploughfoot intelligence. But then he glanced at her dress, her load of groceries; surely that could not be for her. She was some sort of servant girl, probably to a galdor. Working in a galdor's house. A pearl of an idea began to grow in the back of his brain. He re-evaluated what he was going to say, with what he should; even Karo could turn on a little inborn wickish charm if he truly required it.

"My littlest finger and I parted on some professional disagreements some years ago," Karo said, shrugging as if he could not recall the cleaver, or begging to save his thumb. "I haven't seen him since, and he does not write. My name is Gradan, by the way."

He didn’t sound like other wicks. Dahlia found that most wicks (and most humans for that matter) sounded like they were talking out a gutter. Accents thick like muddy water and dotted with barely comprehensible debris all the while slurring its way to some inevitable end. Now this wick didn’t contract his words or stop short on the endings but instead sounded them out fully in a respectable manner. Neat, tidy and precise, just the way she liked things.

Dahlia took her hand back, thanking him again as she double checked the groceries. Everything was accounted for and she began to relax. The joke also did a lot to soothe her nerves and she laughed softly, rubbing the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “I don’t imagine he would write”. A small smile had spread across her face out of amusement at Gradan, as he had introduced himself. He seemed nice enough, helping her up after her fall and rescuing the lemons from the feet of passer-bys. With Dahlia’s line of work, it was probably the most heroic thing that was ever going to happen to her. “Dahlia, my name’s Dahlia,” she told him, her own voice quiet as usual. “Mr. Aquin would have had a fit if I had lost the lemons. I mean, not that he’s prone to fits mind you...just that he did want lemon meringue pie for tomorrow”. She was very fond of her master and it wasn’t respectable of her to make out to complete strangers he was horrid man. He wasn’t at all. A bit messy and somewhat patronising of her, but not horrid.

Karo chuckled with the girl, to put her at her ease. She introduced herself as Dahlia, and rambled a little. Karo listened for the important bits and nodded where appropriate.

"Mr. Aquin is your employer?" Karo asked politely. That sounded like a reasonable galdori name. He began to spin a little tale from the top of his head; Karo had read more than enough pulp as a child (and even now) to know what was plausible. He made a little gamble. "I wonder if Mr. Hawking knows him. He's my employer, you understand."

He smiled, attempting some sort of camaraderie of profession. "I always feel that the galdori all seem to know each other," Karo confessed, although he held no true opinions on the subject.

The wick didn’t seem to think too badly of what she had said about her master, instead nodding in what seemed to be an understanding manner to her. “Mr Bain Aquin. I’m his parlour maid,” Dahlia explained. She was quite proud of her position. She had worked very hard for a very long time to get the privilege of serving her master directly. Sometimes she heard her master talking about people he had met at various functions but Mr. Hawking’s name didn’t ring any bells and she shook her head apologetically.

Gradan’s comment, however, brought the smile back to her face and Dahlia nodded enthusiastically. “Oh they do!” she agreed. The galdori seemed to practise the art of name-dropping in a way of making themselves seem more well-known then they actually were. “But Mr. Aquin is an artist, you see, and they tend to keep to themselves,” she confessed. Talking to another employee of a galdor always made her feel safer talking about her master without the fear of being misunderstood. “May I ask what it is you and master do?” Dahlia inquired, tilting her head to the side.

Karo nodded, as if that cleared it all up. "I wouldn't expect them to mingle, if Mr. Aquin is an artist. Mr. Hawking is not . . . he is a good master, but he has no strong feelings toward the arts. I work in shipping, moving things from here to there. Mr. Hawking can't possibly oversee everything, so he sends me to make sure the path is smooth for the goods," Karo explained.

In truth, he was making everything up directly on the spot. There was a little bit of truth buried under all that. He was very good at moving things from place to place. Dahlia seemed to have a certain slavish devotion to this galdor, which put a foul taste in Karo's mouth. He tried not to let his disgust show.

He looked up at the sky, blinking as if surprised that it was growing darker out. "Won't your master miss you if you linger?" he asked. Karo hesitated, intentionally, then continued. "I could lend a hand, if you need."