The Trubungco's Ring

Chapter 10: The Merchant Grows Suspicious

Diego noticed the boy before he noticed anything else that market morning — noticed, specifically, that Karl looked wrong for a woodcutter's son three weeks into a hard season.

Not wrong in any way Diego could have named plainly to another person. Just wrong the way a ledger looked wrong when the numbers technically added up but something about the shape of them still itched at the back of a trader's mind. Karl stood at the edge of the square, trading a modest bundle of wood with one of the other merchants instead of Diego's own stall — first strange thing, since the boy had traded almost exclusively with Diego since his father first fell ill — and he looked, if Diego was any judge, better fed than a family skipping meals over an empty larder had any business looking.

Diego watched him a while longer than the transaction strictly warranted, turning the details over with the same careful attention he gave every ledger discrepancy that had ever made him rich.

Color in his face, where three weeks ago he'd looked thin and gray with worry. New boots, not fine, but sturdier than the ones Diego remembered, the kind that cost coin a family in Karl's position shouldn't have spare. And something else, harder to name — a different way of carrying himself, less like a frightened boy hauling wood out of desperation and more like someone who'd survived something and come out the other side changed by it.

"Diego." One of the other stall-keepers, a broad woman named Ilsa who sold cured meats two stalls down, sidled up with the particular gleam of someone eager to share gossip. "Have you heard about the woodcutter's boy?"

"Which part of him," Diego asked, already fairly certain he knew where this was going.

"My cousin swears she saw him three days back near the old ruins past the eastern field, walking easy as anything, not a scratch on him — and this after everyone in the village heard he'd been mauled something fierce in Briarwood, twice over. Torn up bad enough that Maren herself was asking after him." Ilsa lowered her voice, leaning conspiratorially closer. "Healed awful fast for wounds that bad, is all I'm saying."

Diego turned this new piece of information over alongside everything he'd already noticed, and felt the particular, familiar itch of a puzzle that hadn't quite assembled itself yet but was clearly missing fewer pieces than it had been a week ago.

"Anything else your cousin happened to notice?"

"Just that he seemed different. Older, maybe. Or just — I don't know, Diego, different in a way that's hard to put a name to. You know how village talk gets exaggerated."

"I do," Diego agreed, though privately he suspected this particular piece of village talk had less exaggeration in it than most.

He watched Karl a while longer across the square, noting the careful way the boy kept one hand near his chest, like he was checking on something worn beneath his shirt, a habitual gesture Diego doubted Karl was even aware he was making. Old habits from Diego's own less honest years — years he preferred not to dwell on too closely these days, but which had left him with an excellent eye for the particular way people behaved when they were carrying something they didn't want found.

A secret. Something valuable enough that Karl had started checking on it reflexively, the way a man checks a coin purse in a crowd.

Diego wasn't a cruel man, whatever his reputation around Ashford's market square. He'd shorted the boy a fair coin here and there, the way he shorted most customers who didn't know to check his scale closely — a habit born of old fears about money and security that he'd never quite managed to shake, even in years when business ran comfortably. But he wasn't cruel, and some part of him, watching Karl's careful, unconscious gesture across the square, felt the first stirring of something that wasn't quite suspicion and wasn't quite concern either, but sat somewhere uncomfortably between the two.

Whatever the boy had found out in Briarwood — and Diego was increasingly certain it was something, not merely a run of good fortune and quick healing — it was valuable enough to hide, and valuable things that got hidden in a small village rarely stayed hidden for long. Better, surely, that Diego found out what it was before someone with fewer scruples did.

He told himself that was concerned for the boy's welfare, and mostly believed it.

"I think," Diego said slowly, watching Karl finish his trade and start back toward the village's edge, wood basket lighter now, coin purse presumably a little heavier, "I'm going to keep an eye on our young woodcutter for a while."

"Sweet on him, are you?" Ilsa asked, grinning, misreading the attention entirely.

"Something like that," Diego said, already calculating how best to find out exactly what a sixteen-year-old boy might have stumbled onto in a forest that had, by all village accounts, never held anything more dangerous than the occasional wolf or wandering bear before this month.

He watched Karl disappear down the road toward home, one hand still resting, unconsciously, against his chest, and felt the old, familiar pull of a puzzle worth solving — a pull that had made him a wealthy man once, and that he had no intention of ignoring now, whatever shape this particular mystery turned out to take.

Diego didn't yet understand how completely that curiosity was about to upend everything he thought he knew about the quiet, unremarkable village he'd called home for most of his adult life — or how directly it would eventually lead him into a fight for something far more dangerous, and far more valuable, than any coin he'd ever shorted from a customer's palm.