“I meant with you.”Dorrimin glanced out toward the largest display window, where two figures were leaning against the glass and peering inside.They were about Tommick’s age, both of them in college scarves of different colors.School friends of his.“Isn’t it colder up on the top?You should wear your gloves when outside.”
“I do, normally.”Tommick might have been lying but Dorrimin was no sort of judge of that.“But I was enjoying the crispness in the air today.”
“Why does that sound like something to do with your poetry?”Dorrimin asked suspiciously.
Tommick laughed.
“If cold air on your hands sounds like poetry to you, Dorrimin Alsarinaz, it’s because you have a poetic soul despite what you think.”
“I make cleaning products,” Dorrimin reminded him.“You’re the one who studies the stars and reads philosophy.”
“Hmm.”Tommick rounded on him with a cheeky smile that made him seem younger than Dorrimin despite having two years on him.“So I shouldn’t sneak a look at the things you doodle in the receipt books, then?”His amusement grew when Dorrimin opened and shut his mouth, too startled to argue.“My budding artist.”Tommick nearly sighed it.“Can I see?In all seriousness, I’d love to get a better look at your drawings.”
Dorrimin’s face was flaming hot.“They’re just….I just draw the bottles in the window and such.In the different lights.It’s only because I get bored here.”
“Hmm.”Tommick gave him a study.“If I told you that a lot of art was about math, and a lot of painting about the chemistry of the paints, would you feel more comfortable?”
“Art is about math?”Dorrimin repeated, sounding like a young fool and not an apprentice with years of experience.
Tommick nodded.“Proportions and ratios, Dorri.Wouldn’t you love to know more?”
A clang from the dumbwaiter startled him before Dorrimin could answer, the mechanisms protesting the cold weather or needing to be cleaned and oiled.Dorrimin dragged his attention from Tommick to walk over and open the dumbwaiter doors.On the tray was a plate of honey-and-cassia cookies.
His mother’s voice echoed down from the kitchen, which was upstairs on one of the residential floors of the house.
“Ask Tommick if he’s staying for dinner.”
Dorrimin grimaced to imagine how much of their conversation had echoed up through the dumbwaiter or the heating vents; his mother had no magic, as almost no one did, so that had to be the reason.But he only sighed as he picked up the plate to bring it to Tommick.
“I think she likes you better than me,” he complained, shoving two of the still-warm cookies in his mouth at the same time.
“Is that what you think?”Tommick said, continuing to smile, and accepted a cookie, which he ate slowly, breaking it into pieces first.Dorrimin liked the way he did it, precise and neat, even if it was probably topper manners.
He swallowed.“If you weren’t from the top, she’d probably ask you to work here.”He didn’t even have to consider it.“You’d be good at it.”
Tommick’s smile changed.“I….Oh.Thank you.”
Dorrimin, about to remark on Tommick’s family business being in his blood, stayed silent because Tommick had that tone again.The one that said his family didn’t think well of him, or perhaps didn’t think of him at all.
One of Tommick’s friends tapped on the glass.Tommick and Dorrimin both looked in that direction, then Tommick waved them off.
Dorrimin narrowed his eyes.“They could just come in.”
“They’re trying not to get in my way,” Tommick declared loftily.He glanced up, then, when Dorrimin nodded, took the last cookie.“Anyway,” he said after one small piece had been neatly consumed, “I could say the same for you: You could go out.You know, leave the shop once in a while to have some fun.Which is why I came.”He had another piece.“I like your baking too, but your mother bakes with something special.”
Baking was chemistry.There was nothing special to add, unless Dorrimin’s mother really did have magic.It was more likely that she was holding back some sort of secret ingredient or step.Which would be like her; she felt that apprentices, even family members learning how to run a house, had to learn to ask for new knowledge when they felt they were ready for it.
“Anyway,” Tommick said again, his eyes on his task of tearing a cookie apart, “did you want to?It won’t be long.Just a drink or two at a pub a few street levels down where Bartin says the beer is superb.”
Bartin being the curvy one outside the window, if Dorrimin remembered correctly.
“It’s expected to snow this evening,” Dorrimin answered, frowning over it.“Maybe heavily.”The winds were picking up, he’d heard it from a customer earlier.Eladia was known as the Windswept City and so it was, with turbines and mills on the westerly side of the mountain to provide power enough to keep lights on and trains running.If a resident said the winds were picking up, it meant people should prepare to hunker down for a storm and perhaps lose some shutters.
“Yeah,” Tommick waved that off, “but we wouldn’t be out all night.Only long enough to talk a little and have a beer.”
If the winds or snow increased to what were considered risky levels, the trains and even the horse-drawn busses and carriages would stop talking passengers.If they reached dangerous levels, the city would essentially be closed for the next day or two.Tommick knew that, and Dorrimin was probably a scowling stork now, so he didn’t say it.
“Are your exams actually over?”he asked instead, crossing his arms.
