Free Havenstar by Glenda Larke

to acknowledge Keris could not manage the house as well as
the map-making, and he’d been willing enough to pay Mistress Pottle
to work double her normal number of hours.
    He himself
went to the tavern in Upper Kibbleberry rather less and spent most
of his time working on the copies in the shop or serving behind the
counter. He raised the price of all maps of the Unstable, an action
which drew instant protest from his Unstabler customers. As much as
they grumbled, in the end they paid up. No one else in the First
Stability sold such good charts, and to try to cross the Unstable
without the benefit of the latest maps would have been foolhardy
for even the best of guides.
    While she
worked at the main table in the kitchen, Keris propped the door
between the room and the shop ajar so that she could listen to what
the customers had to say. It annoyed her that Thirl was not
interested in the stories people had to tell of their crossings;
too often he would cut short a tale of adversity or adventure with
a curt, ‘Well, which map is it that you’re wanting then?’
    Once, when
Yerrie came tearing into the kitchen in total panic, she heard the
gravelly tones of the man with the obsidian eyes as he bought a
sequence of maps, asking for coloured ones. Thirl, impatient with
his request, answered him rudely. The man insisted, his tone
steely, and Thirl offered him the master charts at an outrageous
price. Keris gritted her teeth to stop her protest. Piers had never
sold master charts.
    Protracted
haggling finally resulted in a price they both agreed on, after
which Thirl brusquely added there’d be no more updated maps from
the workrooms of Piers Kaylen next season. The man said, ‘I’m not
surprised. I had heard Piers had died and I have also heard that
Thirl Kaylen couldn’t match his sire.’ The words were said politely
enough, but Keris had the feeling that the man knew perfectly well
he was talking to Piers’ son. She suspected the remark was made to
exact revenge for Thirl’s manner and his exorbitant prices.
    Keris almost
heard Thirl bristle. ‘Who told you that?’ he asked. But the man
gave only a noncommittal answer, and Thirl, when he came through
into the main room afterwards, looked strangely disconcerted.
Master obsidian-eyes has that effect on people, it seems, Keris
thought, wryly amused.
    ‘Creation,’
said Mistress Pottle, who had also heard the exchange, ‘that one’s
got a voice like a mountain on the move. I wouldn’t like to cross
by him on a dark night.’
    Harin Markle
came several times in the evenings, ostensibly to see Thirl, more
covertly to court her. He made a poor job of it. Lacking in
imagination, he was puzzled by the absence of any enthusiasm for
marriage on her part, unable to accept that she was simply not
interested. He’d decided her indifference was all an act. Such a
plain girl, he thought, must want to marry him and she was
therefore playing hard to get. She found his dogged attentions, so
obviously inspired by greed rather than passion, both ludicrous and
insulting.
    Thirl merely
shrugged in a disinterested fashion when he saw she was not going
to encourage his friend. ‘You always were too stubborn for your own
good,’ he remarked.
    She knew he
was continuing with his plans for the tavern. Mistress Pottle told
her he had ordered chairs and tables from the carpenter in the
village. The blacksmith’s wife, dropping in with some mutton-brain
jelly one day, said that she’d heard Thirl had made a large order
of wine from the vintner’s up near Kt Weddon’s, and Keris herself
overheard Thirl talking to the brewer’s man from Beckle East about
ale and beer, and to Harin about purchasing some mead from Middle
Kt Beogor.
    She didn’t ask
where Thirl was getting the money from to make the orders; she
knew. He was raiding the coins behind the lose brick at the back of
the sink; pipeweed money, Piers had called it, meaning money to buy
the luxuries and necessities of his old age