Mercer Asterion's Arc

Chapter 4 of 10

They had walked three more rows when Mouse elbowed him hard in the ribs. Mercer looked down. His cloak had slipped off his right shoulder again. The polished plates of his cybernetic arm caught the lantern light in a thin blue line from wrist to elbow. He pulled the cloth back into place without hurrying. Hurry drew eyes. Too late. A woman at a nearby stall had already stopped rearranging her jars. She stared at the seam of his sleeve, head tilted, the way a person looks at a coin she suspects is fake. Her mouth opened. "Walk," Mouse said under her breath. She caught his good hand and pulled. "You stand out like a sore thumb. We fix it now." She cut through two aisles and stopped him in front of a stall hung with azure drapes and brass-tipped posts. A carved sign read Deepwood Designs. Behind the counter stood a tall elven woman in a layered blue dress, sorting swatches with slow, exact hands. She did not look up when they arrived. She finished her stack first. "Luna," Mouse said. "He needs everything. Today." Luna Draper lifted her eyes to Mercer. They moved from his hood to his boots and back. She said nothing for a long moment. "Off the rack won't fit you," she said. "Your shoulders are wrong for the cuts I keep hung." "I need something now," Mercer said. "And something later." She nodded once, as if he had passed a small test. She pulled a cream linen shirt from a shelf and laid it on the counter. "Three acorns. It will cover the arm. It will not fit well." She set beside it a folded tunic with a deep red waistcoat and a worn belt threaded through the loops. "That one is a wayfarer's cut. I keep one made up for travelers who can't wait. Twelve acorns. Long sleeves. High collar. It hides more than it shows." Mercer counted fifteen silver acorns onto the wood. "The real garment takes three days," Luna said. She lifted a slim measuring tape marked in pale elven numerals. "Charcoal, to match what you came in wearing. Stand straight." He let the cloak fall open. She saw the arm. Her hand paused on the tape for one breath, then continued. She measured his shoulders, his chest, the length from wrist joint to elbow. She wrote nothing down. "I've measured stranger," she said, quiet. "Once. Come back on the third day." Mercer stepped behind the drape and changed. The linen shirt swallowed the silver of his arm. The waistcoat pulled the silhouette into something a merchant might pass without a second glance. When he stepped out, Mouse looked him over and nodded like a foreman signing off on work. The woman with the jars was gone from her stall when they passed it again. Mercer kept his hood down anyway. He had three days to stay unseen, and a tailor who now knew exactly what he was hiding.