“Of course you can keep it,” Darshan insisted, gently taking the stone animal from the boy. He turned back to the merchant, who was still staring at the coins, and handed the statue over. “See that this makes the castle in one piece, would you? Let them know it is a gift for Prince Mac.”
“A-aye, me lord.” The merchant snapped a salute, his dark eyes darting to the boy and back. Had the man not realised who stood before him? “I’ll oversee it meself. Watch the stall whilst I’m gone, lad,” he added to a young man, waving the boy over. His son, judging by the similarity in their features and tanned skin. Packing the tortoise into a box already sitting on a handcart, the man pushed the clunky thing off into the crowd.
Darshan perused the rest of the stall’s offerings. Little caught his eye. What scant pieces did draw his attention certainly weren’t suitable gifts for his sister. He laid his hand on the brow of a sitting stone dog. Cool, polish stone greeted his palm. It sat about as high as his hip, its nose pointed up and its floppy ears perked in anticipation of a command. Whilst the piece was carved as finely as the tortoise, he feared the journey to Minamist would see it reach her broken. A pity. Anjali was quite fond of their father’s lanky hunting hounds.
There was a stone mouse tucked behind a pair of black, polished seashells, white as pipe smoke. He plucked the creature from its mournful place to find the piece was almost round. The carver had chosen a pose that had the dear thing on its haunches and peeking over its shoulder, its cheeks stuffed with food and a crumb of bread still in its little paws. In the full light of the afternoon, the stone had a translucent quality. A chunk of marble, perhaps.
“Why a mouse?” he mumbled to himself. The little things were both pest and pet in Minamist—and sometimes also training aide for falconers, although he’d never had the heart to feed them live to his father’s birds. But surely mice could only be considered as pests in Tirglas.
“For good luck,” answered a soft voice disturbingly close to his ear. “Stone ones, anyway.”
He glanced over his shoulder to find Ethan staring adoringly up at him. The boy was perhaps half a foot shorter than himself, and he appeared to be bouncing on his toes to gain a smidgen of extra height, but there was no mistaking that slight tilt of his head that suggested mischief or an attempt to curry favour. Had the boy been older, he would’ve labelled him as smitten.
Darshan looked about for the others, spotting them two stalls down, before returning his focus to the boy. “Luck?” he queried. “Are they not vermin?”
Ethan gave a disinterested jerk of his shoulder. “Sure. But the priests say mice always pop up in times of plenty and, when Great Ailein was trapped in the cave of the Grey Bear, unable to leave, it was mice of ivory and onyx that the Goddess sent to him with food.”
“Great Ailein, huh?” he murmured, handing over a silver coin to the merchant’s son and ignoring the young man’s gaping mouth. It sounded like common folklore. His knowledge of that was sadly lacking. If only he’d had the chance to immerse himself in the nuances of Tirglasian culture before arriving then he wouldn’t be left feeling wool-headed over simple things. But his father had opted to give him little time to prepare.
“Do you nae ken the tale?”
“Not a bit,” he confessed. A glance down the row of stalls revealed the rest of their group was steadily moving further away. “You must tell me it. But at another time.” Popping the mouse into the small, rather empty, pouch dangling beside the one bristling with coin, he hastened to catch up to the wandering trio.
Ethan trotted at his side, bouncing past the stalls without a care towards losing sight of his siblings or uncle. “Does your sister really have a tortoise the size of a dog?”
“Yes.” He thought of the hounds wandering the castle. Did they come in any size apart from massive? “Although, maybe a touch smaller than you are imagining,” he conceded.
They meandered around the stalls, pausing every so often to peruse the more likely establishments and finding little in the way of suitable offerings. I could return with nothing. He often did for his half-siblings, preferring not to show favour to any lest one of the others targeted them. But if he came home empty-handed after such a journey, Anjali would never let him forget it.
A ramshackle stall almost tucked away around the corner of a building drew his eye. He sidled closer, hesitant to show any obvious interest to what could amount to little more than utter filth.
An old woman sat behind the rickety table. Her dark eyes seemed to light up as he stopped to survey the little wooden ornaments scattered across the cloth, each piece glittery with scraps of metal and bits of seashell cobbled together. “See anything you like, love?”
“No, I think—” A tiny bear no bigger than his thumb lay at the feet of far chunkier works. Darshan plucked it from the table. Where the carving of the other pieces was crude, this had the sheen of time and care. Small black stones had been worked into the paws, held there by fine pieces of wire.
She doesn’t have a bear. He couldn’t be certain of the other animals, but there were no bears amongst Anjali’s collection of Cezhorian figures. They considered the animals akin to demons and ill omens to have in any form. “This one.” Not taking his eyes off the creation, he handed over a coin before slipping the bear into the pouch with the marble mouse.
Content with his purchase, he relaxed a little and ambled along the outer ring of stalls and
