“He wants to take me to a wax workshop, right? It’s better if I have Fran with me, so how about the day after tomorrow in the morning?”
“Nah, apparently there’s someone who wants to meet you.”
“...Whaaat? Aw.” My hype died in an instant. I wanted to go to a wax workshop as soon as possible, but my dreams were not being granted. I agreed to go, albeit with pursed lips.
“You might want to bring Gil with you instead of Fran. Master Benno said it’s a craftsman from an ink workshop.”
Those words made my hype roar back up like a reborn phoenix. I had been wanting to meet someone from an ink workshop to talk about developing new ink; this would be a good opportunity to talk about making colored ink.
“Eheheh. I can’t wait, Lutz.”
“Your mood sure improved fast.” Lutz shot me an exasperated look, which made me realize something. The deceased head of the Ink Guild had been probing for information about me. Maybe the new head was carrying on his legacy.
“...Um, wait, should I really be meeting and talking with someone from the Ink Guild?” I asked worriedly.
Lutz looked at me, then fell into thought for a second before replying: “If Master Benno thinks it’s fine, it probably is.”
“Okay. I’ll go ahead and look forward to it then.”
On the scheduled morning, Lutz came to get me, and we departed for the Gilberta Company with Damuel and Gil. Even though Mark seemed really busy, he still came outside upon noticing us through the store window.
“Good morning, Lady Myne. Your visitors are already here.”
“Good morning, Mark. Would you be so kind as to take a moment from your busy day to guide us to them?”
With his usual calm smile, Mark guided us to Benno’s office in the Gilberta Company building, where I found a familiar-looking foreman and a not-so-familiar young woman waiting. The ink workshop foreman had his brows furrowed in the same high-strung way I remembered from last time.
I could tell that the young woman had come of age because she had done her reddish-brown hair up, though it was just a single braid that she had twisted into a bun, so I could guess she didn’t care all that much about appearances. The way her gray, curiosity-filled eyes flitted all over made her look really young.
“Hey, hey, Dad. Is that her?”
“She’s rich. Don’t point.”
Apparently, they were father and daughter. He warned her in a lower voice, and she immediately hid her pointing finger behind her back. But her eyes—two little balls of unceasing curiosity—remained locked on me.
“Good morning, Lady Myne.” Benno welcomed me into his office and gestured for me to sit next to him. I nodded and looked up at Damuel, who smoothly escorted me there and helped seat me with trained elegance. I expected nothing less from a noble.
“I’m Bierce. Wolf passed away, and now I’m the new head of the Ink Guild. I didn’t want this, but now that I’ve taken the job, I want to do as much as I can to help save the Guild,” the foreman said before rubbing his brow and explaining what was happening in the Ink Guild.
Apparently, the circumstances of Wolf’s death had been very suspicious, and none of the ink workshop foremen in Ehrenfest wanted the job. Nobody had stepped up to the plate, instead trying to push the responsibility onto someone else until Bierce ultimately took the fall.
My sympathy.
“I don’t like speaking ill of the dead, but... Wolf went too far and got involved in things he really shouldn’t have,” Bierce said, his head hung low. It seemed he was having an extremely hard time cleaning up after all of Wolf’s messes, which had been mercilessly pushed onto him.
He continued, kind of mumbling his words like someone not used to talking much. “I want to keep the workshops running and bring them all together. But I’m not a good talker, as you can tell. I’m no salesman.”
Normally, ink workshops just had to make ink; the actual selling was done by merchants from the Merchant’s Guild or local stores. But there was only one stationery store in the lower city that sold ink, and Wolf had been using forceful measures to monopolize business with nobles.
“The craftsmen were fine making ink no matter how it was sold, but somebody’s got to deal with the nobles now that Wolf’s dead. You wouldn’t expect the old man running the stationery store to suddenly have to start dealing with nobles out of nowhere, would you?”
Business with nobles brought in a lot of profit, but there were more than enough problems to balance that out. From my perspective, Benno may have been dealing with nobles no problem, but in reality he was deeply on edge whenever he met with Sylvester or the High Priest, with plenty of stress-induced headaches following afterward. That was reasonable—there was a lot you had to memorize just to greet nobles, and a single mistake could financially ruin you.
It would just be cruel to expect a store used to casually dealing with the richer demographic in the lower city to suddenly have to do business with nobles. The store owner wouldn’t know how to deal with them, and neither would his leherls or successor. They would have no real opportunity to learn about nobles, and they would be replacing someone who had died in a mysterious way while dealing with them. Nobody would agree to that.
...Anyone would run away if they thought nobles were involved.
In reality, only the owners of the largest stores in the city had direct relations with nobles. There really weren’t many, and if you thought of which of those stores could reasonably deal in ink, the number shrank even further.
“The guildmaster’s store deals in goods for nobles, doesn’t it? Why don’t you ask him?” Benno asked with a raised eyebrow. The fact that he hadn’t offered to sell the ink himself and had instead thrown the offer the
