Then Shana came out to see what we were doing, and Gort followed shortly after. He and Lute sat on a bench nearby now, working on patching some chain-mail and helmets. Gort and Shana were never too far from each other. If she was in the kitchen, and he had nothing to do, he would end up there. If he was working on something in the courtyard, she would come out and knit, keeping him in her view.
“It’s between batch number twenty-two and number seventeen.” Shana passed the bar to Kaiden. “How did you even think of adding maidenflower to it? Where did you learn to do this?”
“I had a friend who was interested in soap when I was Clover’s age.”
Cheyenne was my best friend through the last two years of high school. The soap-making craze was in full swing back then, and one day she announced that we should corner the high school market. I learned to make soap, got slightly obsessed with it, and kept making it long after Cheyenne moved on to other things.
We had grown apart after high school. Cheyenne was a banking underwriter now. She worked for a local credit union, had bought a house ten minutes from her parents, and got engaged. I found out about it when I delivered a grocery order to her new house.
For some reason seeing me drag a pack of bottled water to her front door had deeply disturbed Cheyenne. She tried to give me a ridiculously large tip in cash on top of what she had already put in through the app. I declined. She texted me the next day saying that there was a teller opening at her bank. I thanked her and told her I already had a job. She didn’t text again.
She thought I needed help and was trying to rescue me. I appreciated that but I wished she had invited me to catch up over lunch instead. I didn’t need another job, but I could’ve used a friend.
Kaiden lathered his hands, rinsed them, lathered them with the other bar, sniffed the soap, and held the one with the deeper purple up. “This one.”
“It’s number seventeen for me, too,” Shana agreed.
My back still hurt. I glanced at Clover.
“Number seventeen,” she confirmed. “It softens the skin, and the scent is refined. I would’ve bought it for any noble household without hesitation. There is no soap like this anywhere in the city. If we brought this bar into the soap guild, all the soap makers would bow to it.”
“I’ve finally found my true calling,” I announced. “I shall be Maggie the Soap Queen of Kair Toren. I will rule this city with my clean, soft hands . . .”
Reynald laughed.
“You should take a rest,” Shana told me. “The fumes are getting to you.”
I used to feel alone sometimes. Not lonely, just alone. I texted with my parents and my brother every day or two and hung out online, but my in-person interactions with other humans were limited to accepting payment and handing out keys at my storage job. I was never a social butterfly and the few friendships I built in college just kind of faded out. I’d dated but never found someone I wanted to stay with. That was fine. I wasn’t pulling my hair out in despair, but occasionally I became aware that it was just me and four walls.
Now I had a whole house of people to talk to. When Will came back, we would go inside and have a well-earned dinner and all the chairs around the table would be full.
I hadn’t thought of home or my parents for over twenty-four hours. It made me feel guilty, as if I had somehow betrayed them. Logically I understood that this guilt was absurd. Staying in Rellas wasn’t a choice. It’s not like I had a magic wand I could wave to teleport me home. I wasn’t deliberately choosing to stay here at the cost of panicking my parents and my brother.
The problem was that if someone had handed me that wand right now, I wasn’t sure I would use it. Leaving meant everyone in this courtyard would have to fend for themselves. Some of them wouldn’t survive.
I had to see the Hreban thing through. Stop Hreban, then search for a way to go home.
Maybe that was where the guilt was coming from.
Someone pounded on the front door. Gort nodded at Kaiden. The boy ran into the tunnel. A moment later Will staggered into the courtyard, looking haggard. He landed on a bench across from me, propped his feet up on an empty pan-oil barrel, and closed his eyes.
“How did it go?” Shana asked.
“I will never complain about a forced march again,” he said, his eyes still closed. “This was worse than Egendarr.”
Lute grinned. “Hey, Will? Let’s spar.”
Will didn’t bother looking at him. “Are you tired of living?”
Lute chuckled.
“A day of honest work is good for you once in a while,” Gort said.
“Thanks, Dad. I’ve had enough honesty till next year. I’m full up.”
“The salt ship?” Reynald asked.
Will opened his eyes. “Coming on Fifday, like you said.”
