“Yes,” Reynald told me. “Green suits you, Maggie.”
Great.
I made a beeline for the open door. Reynald got there before me, stepped inside, pulled his coif down off his face, and glowered.
The interior was filled with goods, some in barrels, others in chests, grouped by type, with samples on display: chunks of ore in different colors, some sort of powdered stone, big hunks of crystal . . . Quartz, maybe?
A seller hurried out from behind a short counter, keeping an eye on Reynald, and bowed to me. “How may I help you, my lady?”
“Do you sell pink salt?”
“We do, my lady. Right this way.”
Clover’s outfit did its job. Excellent.
He led me down the aisle to a group of barrels. One of them stood open, filled to the brim with small, coarse pebbles of pink rock salt.
“We also offer raw rock and fine grinds,” the seller said.
I needed to aim for just the right mix of clueless and put-upon. The kind of woman who normally couldn’t be bothered to step foot into a shop like this.
I looked at Reynald. “Is this what they call a trader rock barrel?”
“Yes, my lady,” Reynald said.
The barrels stood about twenty-five inches high. My grandpa used to have an old bourbon barrel about that size. He used it as a side table on the porch, by his rocking chair.
An overly obsessive reader once calculated the volume of one of these barrels based on Rellas’s units of measurement to settle an argument on a fan forum. It came in right at sixteen gallons. According to that post, a gallon-sized chunk of Himalayan pink salt weighed about eighteen pounds, based on halite’s density. The actual weight per gallon varied, depending on the size of the particles and type of salt. Either way, a sixteen-gallon barrel was very heavy.
And I had no idea why I remembered that so precisely. The numbers just popped right into my head.
“They seem small,” I said to Reynald. “Much smaller than grain barrels.”
“They are very heavy, my lady,” he said, his expression completely neutral. “They are sized for ease of transport. Grain barrels are larger because grain weighs less.”
The seller grabbed one of the rock pebbles and held it up to the sunshine coming through the door. The small chunk glowed softly with diffused light.
“Our pink salt is of the finest quality. Directly from Gassargand.”
“Directly?”Tell me more. I need to know when your ships arrive.
The seller hit me with his best buy-my-stuff smile. “Yes, my lady.”
“But is it fresh?”
The trader blinked.
“Salt is always fresh, my lady,” Reynald said with a completely straight face.
“Absolutely!” The seller nodded. “It was mined just a few weeks ago across the sea and shipped here. Our ships arrive every three weeks, my lady!”
“When is the next one due?”
“Next Fifday, my lady.”
We had four days. Very little time. I needed to hurry. I looked at Reynald. “Should I wait for the fresher salt?”
“I assure you, there is no difference in quality between this barrel and the next shipment,” the clerk promised.
