“We have a lot to talk about, though, don’t we? I mean … ?” She gestured at the sweeping homunculus. “Why don’t you sit down, Satchel?”
“If it’s all the same to you, m’lady, I have a great deal to do. This place is …” He examined the shelves, and somehow managed to look like he was trying to be diplomatic. “Desperately in need of my further attention.”
Viv raised her brows at Fern. “Well, he seems to be settling right in.”
The door banged open and Gallina trotted inside. “Holy hells, he’s out!” she said, in an echo of Viv’s entrance. “And he’s sweepin’?”
“We’ve already had this conversation,” replied Fern, with narrowed eyes. “The housekeeping wasn’t my idea.”
“Now that we’re all here, we have to decide what to do with him though, right?” asked Viv. At Fern’s expression, she amended, “Or … we have to find out what he wants to do. Assuming a necromancer doesn’t swoop into town and murder everybody before then.”
She caught Satchel’s gaze, hoping he’d have a response, but he only looked uncomfortable as he fingered the spines of the books.
“What do you want, Satchel? If you could choose?” asked Fern.
The homunculus glanced between them, and the fires of his eyes twirled faster. “It does not matter. I can never be alone. I must always serve a master. There is no other way.”
“You don’t have to serve nobody. We could just, like …” Gallina rubbed two fingers together. “Dust you and let you get on with it. Right?”
Satchel was silent for so long, his broom immobile, that Viv thought he might have seized up, his enchantment somehow halted. But then he slowly replied, “I should like to simply be for a while. To … serve in the way I choose.”
Fern’s voice was firm. “Of course. But you don’t have to serve anybody but yourself. Do you understand?”
He nodded, but Viv wasn’t sure that he believed it. Or maybe he just disagreed. At any rate, it wasn’t going to do any good to belabor the point.
“Hey, somethin’ else you said yesterday,” said Gallina. “That guy, Balthus. You said you weren’t all he stole.”
Viv had forgotten about that, and from her expression, Fern had, too.
Satchel bobbed his head but said nothing.
“Well?” prompted Gallina. “What else did he take?”
The homunculus hung his head. “Alas, the Lady’s secrets bind me. I cannot say.” Then, in an abrupt change of subject, he addressed Fern. “I do so look forward to tidying here. Sorting. Organizing. It gives me great peace. I wonder, what do you discover when you bring order to things?”
Something about his tone bothered Viv, something plaintive, but he already sounded so eerie that maybe it wasn’t worth marking. Still, Satchel was regarding one of the bookshelves with strange intensity.
Viv opened her mouth to ask, and—
“Guess that’s that then, huh?” said Gallina, clapping her hands to the armrests. “And if Varine does show her face, well …” She fingered the knives on her bandolier. “Maybe it won’t be so boring around here.”
“Let’s not tempt the Eight, shall we?” said Fern.
Viv didn’t miss the way Satchel stilled at that exchange. His jawbone opened as though he meant to speak, but then it slowly closed, and he turned away.
She watched him thoughtfully, then tilted her staff toward the gnome. “On that note, I’m heading up the bluff to get in a little workout. Are you game?”
Gallina was.
24
Viv’s feelings of high alert ebbed slowly over the following days. No invading army of wights appeared on the horizon, and no gray-clad strangers menaced them. In fact, nothing happened to warrant so much as a suspicious glance, much less a bared blade.
In her experience though, things tended to get quiet right before they got loud.
They discovered that Satchel became even more nervous when customers entered the store. Any time the door opened, he collapsed instantly and rolled his component bones underneath one of the shelves, only emerging when Fern reassured him that the intruders were gone.
Potroast also liked to gnaw at his ankles and could not be deterred.
As a result, Satchel mostly kept to his satchel during the day.
Maylee showed up one late afternoon, put her fists on her hips, and demanded, “Well, where is he?”
When Fern sprinkled dust over the bones and Satchel made his rattling appearance, she took it in stride. Viv supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised, given her history. When the dwarf extended a hand for the homunculus to shake, Viv couldn’t help but think of her long-ago encounter with the goblin across the river.
Fern rigged a box on the countertop with a slit in the front that Satchel could occupy during the day, but for the most part, the homunculus preferred to be up and about outside of business hours. The animating force granted by the bonedust ebbed over the day, and he seemed to sense when it would desert him.
While awake, however, he could not be dissuaded from tidying and arranging, with rag and broom, soap and polish.
“I can’t get him to stop,” Fern said, chin in paw. She looked miserable. “It’s not right. I can’t let him just … do things around here without paying him.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “He insists he doesn’t want anything. That it’s his choice. But that doesn’t make it any better.”
Thistleburr was definitely tidier. The wooden floors fairly glowed, the walls had been washed, and Viv could swear that Satchel must have trimmed away the errant binding threads on some of the older volumes. Even the scent indoors was improved, smelling more strongly of paper and ink and wood wax than dust and salt and gryphet.
“Maybe you need to start lending him books, too,” said Viv, only half joking.
“Does he read, do you think?” she asked, glancing toward the box on the counter, currently occupied.
“He has a better vocabulary than I do.” Viv unwrapped another of Maylee’s brown paper packages. Four enormous, rugged scones lay tucked within, larded with nuts and fruit. The gryphet napping on the floor twitched in his sleep and uttered a drowsy hoot but didn’t wake.
Fern selected one and nibbled at it as they watched Addis, the gnome who owned the perpetually closed junk shop, ambling slowly beside a shelf. Addis was a serial browser, and Viv had never once seen him purchase a book. He muttered a lot to himself and often selected a volume, only to open it, nod as though discovering some important bit of information, and then reshelve it. Viv found it maddening, but Fern seemed used to it.
“Must not be any silver in the junk business,” muttered Viv as Addis rejected yet another book.
“Speaking of a lack of money, did I tell you I finally ordered that fresh shipment?”
“The one you’d been marking in the catalog?”
Fern sighed. “I guess I forgot to mention it. Although there’s been an awful lot going on these past few days.” She knocked gently on the top of Satchel’s box, and a very quiet bump echoed back from within.
Viv leaned more heavily on the counter, extending her leg and flexing it. It was sturdier by the day. “I thought you said you didn’t have the room? Satch—Uh, I mean it’s definitely more organized, but where are you going to put the new books?”
“I suppose I’ll have to stack them in the back. I can barely get to my bed as it is, though. There are old books everywhere. I live under threat of perpetual landslide. Still, I have to try something. I’m doing a little better financially, but if I can’t get things to pick up …”
“It’d be best if you could sell the old ones though, wouldn’t it?”
Fern stopped with her scone halfway to her mouth. “My, what a brilliant fucking idea. Whyever didn’t I consider that? Thanks.”
“If there are that many books people don’t want, though, then what’s the use in having them around?”
“They’re books. You don’t just throw them away.”
“I didn’t say that! But … I mean, if nobody wants them, then …”
“They just don’t know they want them yet. That’s the point. How many have you been through now?”