Chapter 2: The Old Exchange
Levi Ackerman, it turned out, owned exactly one good coat, and he wore it to the auction like armor.
It was dark green wool, buttoned to the throat, brushed so thoroughly that it looked new even though the cuffs had begun to thin. He'd shaved. His hair, black and cut close at the back, had been combed with something like violence. He was waiting outside the Old Exchange when you arrived, leaning on his cane under the stone portico, and when he saw you coming he straightened off the column and looked you over once, top to bottom, with the same expression he gave the tins on his shelves.
"You look like a buyer," he said.
"I am a buyer."
"I mean you look like someone people get out of the way for." He turned toward the doors. "Good. Let's go."
You had been in the Old Exchange a thousand times. It was a high-ceilinged hall of grey stone that had once traded grain for the old empire and now traded anything that came through the port: tea, coffee, sugar, rubber, the occasional crate of something nobody wanted to look at too closely. The auction floor was lined with long trestle tables, and on the tables sat sample tins, and beside every tin stood a row of little white cups and a kettle on a spirit burner. Buyers moved down the rows like herons in a shallow pond, sipping, spitting into brass bowls, scribbling in notebooks.
Heads turned when you walked in. They always did. You worked for Albrecht and Sons, and when Albrecht's buyer walked into a room, prices went up.
Then the heads saw who was walking beside you, and you watched the hall change.
It wasn't loud. Nobody said anything. But conversations dipped, and somebody near the coffee tables dropped a spoon, and a pair of merchants by the door shifted subtly sideways as if the air around Levi was hotter than everywhere else. A man at the sugar table actually stepped back.
Levi kept walking. His face didn't change at all. But you were standing close enough to see his right hand tighten on the head of the cane, three fingers white at the knuckle.
You stepped in closer to him. Close enough that your sleeve brushed his. You didn't plan it. It just seemed like the right place to be.
He glanced at you sideways. Said nothing. His hand on the cane loosened a little.
"There," he said, very low, and tipped his chin across the hall.
The merchant was a narrow man with oiled hair and a waistcoat embroidered in gold thread, and he was holding court at the end of a table with tins stamped EASTERN HILL - FINEST AGED. Three small shopkeepers stood around him, nodding. He was laughing at something. When he saw Levi across the room, the laugh stuttered and died.
"His name's Brandt," Levi said. "Six crates. Paid in full. Half of them were real."
"The first half."
"The first half."
You walked over together.
Brandt recovered fast; you'd give him that. By the time you reached the table he had his smile back, wide and oily. "Captain," he said. "What a pleasure. Come to restock? I've got a beautiful lot today." His eyes slid to you and widened just slightly. "And Albrecht's lady. My, my. You're keeping illustrious company."
"I'm keeping honest company," you said. "Which is more than I can say for your tins."
The shopkeepers around the table went quiet.
You picked up the nearest sample tin, opened it, and poured a few leaves onto the white tasting cloth. Under the hall's high windows, in full daylight, they looked dark and twisted and expensive. You rubbed one between thumb and finger and held up your hand so everyone could see the faint grey streak it left on your skin.
"Graphite," you said, clearly, to the shopkeepers. "To darken it. The leaf underneath is lowland, cut with dried willow to bulk it out. You can taste the willow if you steep it long, it goes medicinal." You turned the tin over and read the stamp aloud. "Finest aged. It's not aged. It's not finest. And I'd bet my position at Albrecht's it's not from the eastern hills either."
"That's a lie," Brandt said. His face had gone blotchy. "That's slander. You're doing this for him." He jerked his head at Levi. "Everyone knows what he is. A Paradis killer. You think anybody here is going to take the word of an Eldian devil over a respectable—"
"Brew it," Levi said.
He hadn't raised his voice. He hadn't moved. But Brandt stopped talking as if someone had put a hand over his mouth.
"Brew it," Levi said again, flatly. "Right here. Three minutes. Off the boil. Let them taste it." His grey eyes moved over the three shopkeepers, who were all very carefully not breathing. "Then they can decide who's lying."
The kettle was already hot. You measured the leaf, poured the water, and counted. Nobody in the circle spoke. Down the hall, the bidding on a lot of cane sugar had stalled, because the auctioneer had stopped to watch.
At three minutes, you poured. Five cups. You handed them out: one each to the shopkeepers, one to Levi, one to Brandt himself.
The shopkeepers tasted. One of them, an old woman with spectacles, made a face like she'd bitten a lemon, then spat into the brass bowl. "Willow," she said. "It's willow bark. My mother used it for headaches." She turned on Brandt. "I paid you double for this."
It came apart fast after that. It always did. You'd seen it happen to other merchants, other shipments, the moment a buyer from a good house said the word in public. One by one the shopkeepers put down their cups. The auctioneer came over. Someone went to fetch a clerk from the harbor office. Brandt's protests rose in pitch and then sputtered out, and by the time you and Levi walked out of the Old Exchange into the sea wind, he was red-faced in a corner with the harbor clerk and a ledger.
"He'll have to refund you," you said. "And the others. The harbor office takes fraud seriously. It's bad for the port's name."
Levi didn't answer. He was walking a little slower than usual, the cane tapping on the cobbles, and he was looking straight ahead.
"Are you all right?"
"Eldian devil," Levi said, to nobody. Then: "He's not wrong. About what I am."
You stopped walking. After a step, so did he.
"You were standing on a ship," you said, "between the end of the world and everyone in it, including him. Including every person in that hall." You found you were angry, not at Levi, at the whole wide indifferent town. "He doesn't get to call you that. Nobody here does."
Levi turned his head and looked at you. The wind pulled at his hair. For a moment his face did something you hadn't seen it do before, something that wasn't contempt or tiredness or that flat soldier's patience. It was closer to surprise.
"You're loud," he said finally. "You know that?"
"I've been told."
"Tch." He looked away. "Come on. I owe you a cup."
The shop was closed. He let you in through the back.
You'd never been in the back room before. It was as clean as the front, and smaller, with a narrow cot against one wall made up with blankets folded at right angles, and a single shelf of personal things: a pair of worn boots, a folded green cloak with a faded patch on the back, two wings crossed, one white and one blue. Beside it, in a small frame, a pencil sketch of a group of people around a campfire. You recognized nobody. You recognized the way he didn't look at it.
He put the kettle on. He made you sit at the little table in the corner, and he made the tea himself, slowly, with his back to you. When he poured it, you saw his right hand falter on the kettle handle, the missing fingers making the weight awkward, the spout wobbling. Without thinking you reached out and put your hand under his to steady it.
He went still. So did you.
His hand was warm and rough and scarred across the knuckles. You could feel the healed-over places where the two fingers should be. Neither of you moved. The tea went on pouring, a thin amber stream into the white cup, and then the cup was full, and he set the kettle down, and you took your hand back, and the back of your neck was burning.
He sat down across from you. He didn't say anything about it. Neither did you.
"Hange liked it sweet," he said, after a while. He was looking at his cup. "Disgusting. Three sugars. Said it helped her think. I told her it was rotting her teeth and her brain, and she said her brain was already rotten so it didn't matter." He turned the cup by its rim. "Erwin drank whatever was in front of him. Didn't notice. I made him the best cup I could manage once, before a mission, and he said 'Thank you, Levi,' like it was water." A pause. "I wanted to punch him."
You didn't say anything. You'd learned, in eighteen mornings, when he wanted you to argue and when he wanted you to listen.
"I always said I'd open a tea shop," Levi said. "After. When it was over. Nobody thought there'd be an after." He finally looked up at you. "Most of them were right. Not about me. About them."
"I'm sorry," you said.
"Don't be. Just." He stopped. Drank. Set the cup down. "Just tell me if the tea's good."
You picked up your cup. It was the eastern hill, the real stuff, the last of the good crate. Rainwater. Three minutes. Off the boil. The cup warmed exactly right.
It was perfect. It was the best cup of tea you had ever had in your life, and you'd tasted tea in the palace of a prince.
You opened your mouth to say so, and the bell on the front door jangled.
Levi was on his feet before you saw him move, cane forgotten, his hand going automatically to his hip where a blade wasn't. Through the doorway to the front room, past the dark tables, a tall figure stood in the street light, a man with dark skin and a traveling coat, a hat in his hands.
"Captain," said the man, warmly. "Forgive the hour. I knocked at the back but nobody answered."
Levi's shoulders dropped. "Onyankopon."
"I've come from the harbor master." Onyankopon's eyes went past Levi to you, at the table, and his eyebrows rose a little, kindly. Then he looked back at Levi, and his face went serious. "The ship's confirmed. The delegation sails for Paradis in nine days. They want you on it."