I step onto the block. The wood is rough under my boots, and I don’t take them off. The girl before me went barefoot, ankles showing, and the bidding went fast.
I’m not performing. I’m up here because the market has rules: stand on the block, let people bid, then choose. The rules don’t say I have to look hopeful about it.
“Do I hear an opening bid?”
Silence. The room is nearly empty, most of the serious buyers gone after lot twelve. What’s left is a few stragglers nursing drinks and the Ophidian at the back wall, eyes flat, hands trembling at his sides.
Nobody bids. The auctioneer clears his throat. His assistant examines her nails.
I stand on the block and nobody wants me. The wordpoisoneris doing what it always does, clearing the room like a bad smell.
“Do I hear any bid at all?” The auctioneer looks at me like a man who wants to go home. “Starting at, let’s say, two hundred. Anyone?”
Nothing.
“One hundred?”
A drunk in the corner laughs. Someone whispers the wordpoisonerto someone else. I hear it, like something you’d scrape off your boot.
The Ophidian steps forward. One step.
What’s left of the crowd notices, because he’s hard not to notice, the scales and the fangs and the size of him, the way the torchlight comes off his eyes brighter than it arrived.
“Two thousand gold,” he says.
The silence changes. Not disinterest now; a room recalibrating. Two thousand for a lot nobody wanted. The auctioneer’s eyebrows go up. His assistant stops examining her nails.
“Two thousand gold from the Ophidian,” he says, new energy in his voice. “Do I hear twenty-one hundred?”
Nobody moves. Nobody was going to bid at one hundred, and nobody’s going to bid at twenty-one hundred.
“Going once.”
I look at him. He looks at me.
“Going twice.”
The almost-smile is there again. A dying monster and a disgraced poisoner, finding each other at the bottom of the lot list.
“Sold.”
I walk off the block, down the steps and across the floor, straight to him. Two feet away.
“That was dramatic,” I say. “Two thousand. You could have bid two hundred. Nobody was competing.”
“I know what you’re worth.”
His meaning is plain. It reaches something I keep shut, and I do what I do with things like that. File it. Don’t look at it. Move on.
“Good,” I say, because that’s what I can manage. “Take your shirt off when we get somewhere private. I need to see the scale deterioration across your back.”
The auctioneer’s assistant meets us at the side table, quick and tired at the end of the night. He counts out the gold while she records the amount, tears out a receipt, and slides a small leather pouch across the table. My lot share, per market rules: the bride keeps a portion. I take it without counting and put it in my pack.
He watches me do it, his head tilting a fraction. Then I turn toward the door and walk out into the cold.
He follows me out of the building, his footsteps heavy on the stone, clawed, the sound echoing off the settlement walls so that the few people still on the street step aside without being asked. Behind us the auction hall doors close, and the torches go out one by one.
I don’t look back.
