by Amy Raby
She laughed. “Here, of course. Never in Sardos.”
“Why do you say that? Do you impugn the morals of Kjallan women?” He smiled to make it clear that he was joking.
“Women and men are the same everywhere,” said Isolda. “But given that woman’s pregnant state, surely she is married. And in Sardos, adultery is punishable by death.”
Marius’s skin crawled. The death penalty felt extreme, even to his small-town soul. “You mean to tell me that a woman who does what Lady Fabiola was trying to do—”
“Woman or man,” said Isolda.
“It’s punishable by death?”
She nodded.
Marius shuddered. “Then I’m glad I don’t live in Sardos. Not to insult your homeland, and it’s not that I don’t disapprove of adultery. It’s just that I feel it should be a private matter rather than a matter of state.”
“We’re of the same mind,” said Isolda. “Kjall is a freer country than Sardos, and I am grateful for that. Despite the dangers my people face here, in some ways we are actually safer. But adjusting has been hard. I see things in Riat that I never saw at home.” She lowered her eyes.
Something about her manner kindled his concern. “Has someone harmed you?”
She shook her head. “I have been fortunate and managed to avoid most trouble.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded.
He suspected she was not being entirely truthful, but whatever she’d suffered, he’d have to earn her trust before she’d tell him about it. “If you’ve only been in Riat, you haven’t seen the whole of Kjall. I come from a small town in the east, and even after a number of years here, I find people like Lady Fabiola to be a bit of a shock.”
“Really?” She looked up at him. “I would have guessed you city born and bred.”
“Then I must congratulate myself for blending in better than I thought.”
“What small town are you from, and why did you come to Riat?”
Her curiosity put him in an awkward position. He couldn’t answer that second question without divulging his imperial connections, and aside from not wanting unwanted attention from fortune hunters and influence seekers, he might scare her off if she knew how highly connected he was. “I grew up in Osler, and later I moved here to be closer to my extended family. Tell me, where is Rory’s father? You said you were not married. But you must have been at one time.”
“My husband is dead. Killed in the blood wars.”
“I’m sorry.” Poor woman—a war widow, far from home with no hope of returning, and burdened with a child. Not that Rory seemed a great burden. He was a charming, cooperative boy, and already accustomed to work, but it would be hard for her to marry into a stable family when she had a child already. His heart ached for her. What was a woman in her situation to do?
He feared that her dream of buying Rory a magical education was out of reach. She was right about a few things: the high-quality jasper needed by warders was commonly available and inexpensive compared to other riftstones. Warding magic was workmanlike, the least exciting form of magic, yet it was essential to civilized society. For this reason, the empire subsidized the training of new Warders.
But no Sardossian refugee would receive one of those subsidies. They were handed out as rewards to the children of war veterans, nobles, and public figures. And while the riftstone was not too dear, the education itself was the real expense. Rory would need, at minimum, six years of university or palaestra education before he could soulcast. Marius had done it in four, but only because Lucien had provided him with full-time, one-on-one tutoring.
Still, Marius couldn’t bring himself to destroy Isolda’s hopes. Even if she couldn’t make a Warder out of Rory, she might improve his circumstances if she could buy him an apprenticeship in a high-skill trade. Perhaps he could be a baker—he seemed to enjoy making the tarts with Aurora.
He gestured at her plate. “Eat up. You’re too thin—you and Rory both. You need your strength.” He cut into his mushroom tart in case she felt uncomfortable eating without him. Drusus was setting a good example. He’d polished off two tarts already and was demolishing a third.
“These tarts are delicious,” said Isolda. “Much like what I used to eat back in Sardos. Did you have a cook last time I was here?”
“I did, but she was off work that day.”
“I was proud of you when you opened the surgery,” she said.
Proud of him? He looked at her more keenly. “You knew when I opened the surgery?”
“Well...” She bit her lip. “I saw the sign.”
Her eyes were a deep, sparkling green, like peridots. He wondered why he had not noticed them before. He couldn’t decide which was her best feature, her eyes or her smile. “Do you miss home?”
She cocked her head. “You mean Sardos?”
Did she consider Riat to be home by now? He nodded. “Sardos.”
“I miss some things about it.”
He waited for her to elaborate. When she didn’t, he added, “What’s it like? I’ve never been there.”
Isolda shrugged. “I am perhaps the wrong person to ask. While I was in Sardos, I lived in only two places, first my parents’ home in the city of Tinto, and then my husband’s home and general store twenty miles outside of Tinto. I never traveled far outside that small distance, so I only knew a tiny piece of Sardos. The country is vast.”
“Tell me about the small piece that you knew.”
“It’s cooler than here,” she said. “Hilly. Forested, outside of Tinto. We got more snow. Did you know I’ve seen snowfall only twice since coming to Riat?”
He nodded. “Riat is seldom cold enough for snow. The sea moderates our weather.”
“It moderates the temperature,” she said. “But that storm last year—I’d never seen anything like it.”
“It was unusual even for Riat, so I was told.” The damage had been extensive. Winds and rising seas had wrecked a dozen ships in the harbor that were thought to be safe from danger. Some of them were big, expensive warships, and Lucien had been distraught at their loss. But Marius didn’t want to waste time talking about the weather, and he certainly didn’t want to talk about Lucien. “Rory’s a charming boy. You and he seem very close.”
“Thank you.” She smiled fondly. “He means everything to me.”
“After losing your husband, I imagine he would.”
She shrugged again.
An odd response. “Did you and your husband not get along?”
She looked away. “It was complicated.”
He sensed old pain there, but curious as he was about its source, it would do him no good to prod at the wound. First he had to earn her trust. “You say your husband ran a general store. What sort of work did you do there?”
She brightened. “Everything. Ordering, stocking, cleaning, organizing, bookkeeping. Jauld—my husband—was good with the customers. He had a certain charm about him.”
“It sounds like you miss the store.”
“I loved almost everything about it.”
“Not the bookkeeping, I imagine.” He made a face.
“I especially loved the bookkeeping.”
Drusus, who’d cleaned his plate and kept silent throughout the exchange, finally spoke. “Marius thinks bookkeeping is a dirty word.”
“Bookkeeping is where the magic happens,” said Isolda. “You don’t know a thing about your store until you run the numbers. You may think you’re making all your money on sales of spirits, but then you do the books and it turns out that your profits are really coming from sales of cloth, or raw cotton. And maybe you’re losing money on the spirits because of transport fees.”
“Or maybe you’re losing money on everything,” said Drusus.
“If business is truly bad,” said Isolda, “But that won’t happen to a Healer. Not one as skilled as Marius.”
Marius said nothing. The surgery was losing money, and he was ashamed to admit it.
“You are
n’t losing money, are you?” Isolda asked him.
Reluctantly, Marius nodded.
“But that’s terrible! Will the surgery have to close?”
Marius shook his head without offering an explanation. The truth was that Emperor Lucien quietly covered his losses.
“But you cannot run the surgery at a deficit!” said Isolda. “Will you let me look into it for you? I’d hate to see the surgery close after all the hard work you’ve done.”
“You mean look at the books?” Not only would that reveal his total lack of business sense, but she would see the childish scrawl of his handwriting. He’d only learned to write a few years ago, and he still found it hard going.
“Well, yes, that would be the best way to go about it. If there are books to look at.”
“There are,” he said.
“Marius doesn’t want you to see his handwriting,” put in Drusus.
Marius glared at his bodyguard.
“Is that all?” said Isolda. “Poor handwriting won’t bother me at all. You should have seen my husband’s.”
Perhaps he should just be honest. If he wasn’t, Drusus would continue to blurt out inconvenient facts. “It’s not the same thing. I received my education rather late in life, so my handwriting looks like a ten-year-old’s.”
“Well, as long as I can make it out. I wasn’t educated at all, unless you count what my parents taught me.”
Marius was getting the impression her parents had taught her a great deal, far more than his own had.
“It’s readable,” put in Drusus.
“Please, let me look into this for you,” said Isolda. “I’d hate to see your wonderful surgery go out of business. There’s a reason you’re not making money. I’ll find out what it is, and that can be my payment to you for the help you’ve given me and Rory.”
“Very well,” said Marius.
He extended his hand, and they clasped wrists.
Chapter 10
Isolda was astounded by what she found when she delved into Marius’s books. The good news was that Marius, unlike her husband, Jauld, kept reasonably complete records within the surgery’s thick bound ledger, and his handwriting wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d led her to believe. Here, in a windowless room in the back of the surgery, she’d found everything she needed to make sense of his business, and in better order than expected. His records indicated that he kept high-quality stock in the dispensary, stored it properly, and turned it over frequently. And she’d already seen that he kept his home and place of business clean.
Marius’s problems were not remotely the same as she’d found in Jauld’s store before the overhaul. Marius was neither lazy nor slovenly. He ought to be making piles of money, but he wasn’t. The problem was shockingly simple: Marius was treating patients for free.
He wasn’t being charitable—at least, his records indicated that wasn’t his intent. Marius billed all his patients. But a significant number of them had not paid those bills, and Marius had not followed up with additional letters, nor had he employed a bill collector. Worse, he continued to see the delinquent patients, who piled on more and more charges, having decided that their healing and medications were free.
Marius was too nice.
She felt a little guilty coming to this conclusion, given that she was one of Marius’s charity cases herself. But Marius had not billed her thus far, in fact had told her outright there would be no charge. And there was a difference between herself, a homeless Sardossian refugee who’d come to Marius in an emergency situation, and Lady Fabiola, an apparently wealthy Kjallan who’d accumulated over thirty visits for what seemed to be trivial complaints, and who had yet to offer a single quintetral in payment.
Isolda sighed. She’d diagnosed the problem easily enough, but the cure would be difficult. She was going to have to convince Marius to be less nice.
While she waited for him to finish with his patients, she put the books in order—an easy task, since they were not terribly disordered to begin with—and wrote up some lists that would help her make her case.
Around midafternoon, Marius burst into the back room. “Do you like parsnip soup, or would you prefer bacon and barley? Aurora’s heading to market soon.” He glanced at the paper she was writing on. “I’m sorry about my handwriting.”
“You needn’t be sorry about anything,” said Isolda. “If your handwriting is like a ten-year-old’s, the ten-year-old in question is the neatest and most precise I’ve ever known. I was able to make sense of the books straightaway.”
“Did you find anything?” He scratched the back of his neck. “Not to rush you.”
“I’m finished, actually,” said Isolda. “Do you have some time? I could go over my findings with you.”
He nodded and pulled up a chair. “I’m between patients. Though honestly, I’m not sure I want to know. You know what they say about ignorance.”
“It’s the most dangerous thing in the world?”
He snorted. “You must be a follower of the Sage.”
“You’ll want to hear what I found. I think with some simple changes you could make your surgery profitable.” She pulled out his ledger, opened it, and showed him the expenses column. “First, something small but significant: I think you’re paying too much for some of your medicines. I could be wrong, because this is Kjall and the prices I know are from Sardos, but I’m looking at them comparatively. Poppy should not cost three times what you’re paying for myrrh.”
“Poppy is imported,” said Marius.
“So is myrrh. I’d wager you could find a better price on poppy from a different supplier.”
“Very good. I’ll look into it.”
“There are a few others I think you’re paying too much for,” she said. “I cannot be sure, again because my experience was in Sardos, but I’ve marked them in the margins for you—see?”
He studied the ledger. “Interesting. Most of them are from the same vendor.”
“Perhaps you ought not to do any more business with that vendor, at least not without renegotiating prices. But that’s a minor issue. The real problem with the surgery’s finances is something more damaging. You’ve got a large number of patients who aren’t paying their bills.”
Marius looked sheepish. “The truth is I’m not sure all of them are capable of paying.”
Isolda chose her words carefully. “You are a kind man and a generous one. Certainly you have been exceedingly generous to me and Rory. But let me show you the list of your patients who have not paid their bills, and I think you’ll be surprised by the names you see.” She pulled out the list, which was multiple pages long, and held it out to him.
As Marius took the list, he blanched at its length. His eyes darted down the first page. “Why do some names appear multiple times?”
“Because they have multiple unpaid bills,” said Isolda. “I wanted you to get an idea of the scale of the problem. As you can see, this fellow Ennius Antonius has been in to the surgery twenty times—”
“His arthritis,” muttered Marius. “I had no idea he was a nonpayer.”
“And there are others. This fellow has been in fifteen times, this woman and her children, eighteen.”
Marius turned to the second page, and the third. He snorted. “Lady Fabiola must be in here twenty-five times, at least. And she’s never paid me a quintetral?”
Isolda raised an eyebrow at him. Marius was getting angry. Good.
“But there’s a problem. See this fellow?” Marius’s finger stabbed a name on the second page. “He’s a street sweeper and half crippled. I’m not sure at all that he can afford to pay me. I can get tough with Ennius and Lady Fabiola and some of these others. But I don’t want to hurt this man.”
“Then don’t,” said Isolda. “Forgive his bill and go after the others.”
“Yes, but...” Marius gave a grunt of frustration. “Half the people on this list I don’t know well enough to have a sense of their finances. I couldn’t tell you what they can and can�
�t afford—”
“It’s not your business to know that,” said Isolda. “If they come to a Healer, they should expect to pay.”
“I know.” Marius sighed. “But I want to help them. At least the ones who aren’t trying to take advantage of me.”
“Look at it this way,” said Isolda. “If the surgery goes out of business, you can’t help anybody.”
“True,” he said.
He seemed not to be concerned about the potential loss of his business, which was odd.
Marius paged through the list. “Thank you. This is extraordinarily helpful. In putting this together, you’ve more than repaid the cost of your boy’s care. Now, would you like parsnip soup for dinner? It’s one of my favorites, but I find most Kjallans like bacon and barley better.”
Isolda shook her head. “Rory and I have imposed upon your hospitality long enough.”
Marius winked at her. “Bacon and barley it is. Your boy’s got to eat, or that fever may come back. I need to go back to my patients, but I’m off duty in two hours.”
Isolda sighed as she watched him leave. Who knew that kindness could be a fault? The man was incorrigible. She hoped she had gotten through to him at least a little bit, but she couldn’t stay here. She was not in the habit of accepting charity, and she and Rory had jobs to get back to.
∞
Isolda swept the aisle one last time for good measure. Jauld’s General Store was clean and bright and inviting. The shelves were freshly painted, all the sales items were neatly arranged, and she’d installed a new system of weights and measures behind the counter so they could sell bulk goods in smaller, more convenient quantities.
She’d been making changes little by little over the past several months, and sales had already tripled. Her next project would be to tackle suppliers. She’d looked at the books and was fairly certain she and Jauld were being overcharged in a few areas. Worse, the quality of the goods was substandard, and she wanted the reputation of her husband’s store to inspire more trust. She’d talk Jauld into making a trip to Tinto with her and then one to Cus to search for better, more cost-effective suppliers.