Kai set the pace and the rest of them followed.

  The lower district gave way to the middle district the way it always did, gradually and then all at once, the streets widening by increments, the buildings straightening their posture, the quality of the cobblestones improving from functional to considered. The morning was fully established now, the sun clear of the rooftops, the city in its working register. Carts moved with purpose. Vendors called across streets to each other with the familiarity of people who had been doing this long enough that the calls had become a kind of language.

  Aris walked beside Kai at the front of the group, satchel over his shoulder, his hands in his pockets, watching the city change around them the way it always changed when you moved upward through its rings. The lower district smelled like bread and soil and the faint mineral undertone of dungeon proximity that you stopped noticing after a while unless you left and came back. The middle district smelled like money, which was a different smell, cleaner and more deliberate.

  Behind them, two sets of footsteps. One careful and measured, managing effort without showing it. One steady and composed, matching the careful ones without making it obvious that was what it was doing.

  "You've thought about this," Kai said, not looking at him. "The Veilmarket."

  "I thought about the spell tracker," Aris said. "The Veilmarket is just where it is."

  "Right," Kai said. "I'm asking if you're sure you want to go in there."

  "Why wouldn't I be."

  "Because," Kai said, with the patience of someone preparing a person for something they have decided is inevitable, "you are going to see prices that will do something to your sense of reality and I want you to be prepared for that."

  "I've been to markets," Aris said.

  "You've been to the market on Cours Edren," Kai said. "Where a good day means the Deepbloom was fresh and you saved forty coins on the canvas satchel." He looked at him sideways. "This is not that."

  "I can handle a market," Aris said.

  Kai made a sound that was not agreement and was not disagreement and contained within it the entirety of his position on the matter.

  "Fine," Aris said. "I'll be surprised. I can be surprised and still buy the item."

  "We'll see," Kai said.

  Behind them, Elysse was walking with her eyes forward and her jaw set with the specific expression of someone who had decided on a pace and was going to maintain it regardless of what maintaining it cost. Her right hand had found the edge of her borrowed pauldron and was resting there, not gripping, just present, the unconscious steadying gesture of a person whose balance was being managed actively rather than automatically.

  Colette was beside her.

  She had positioned herself there without announcing it, the same way she'd matched Elysse's pace without drawing attention to doing so, and she was watching the street ahead with the expression of someone who was also watching something else from the corner of their eye.

  "You should have stayed," Colette said. Quietly, below the street noise, below the range of the two in front. "The priest wasn't wrong."

  "Edric worries," Elysse said.

  "Edric is correct," Colette said. "You walked the length of the nave this morning on cracked ribs and called it fine."

  "I'm walking better now than I was this morning."

  "That's a low standard."

  "It's an improving one," Elysse said, with the flat certainty that ended discussions. She looked at the street ahead. "I can't let him deal with this alone."

  "Him," Colette said.

  "Aris." Elysse said the name with the matter-of-fact quality she used for things she had already decided. "He found me on Floor Six. He carried me out of the dungeon. He's treating a condition that apparently no one in Valerne has seen before and he's doing it with a level one Eido and whatever he learned in a lower district clinic." She paused. "The least I can do is walk to a market."

  Colette looked at her.

  "He looks kind," Colette said, after a moment. Not an observation exactly. Something quieter than that.

  Elysse was quiet for a moment too.

  "Yes," she said. "He does." She watched him at the front of the group, the dark hair, the satchel, the way he was listening to Kai with the focused attention he gave to everything. "He's embarrassed about it. He pretends he isn't but he is."

  "How can you tell,"

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  "The way he looks at the statue when he thinks no one is watching," Elysse said. "Like he's having a conversation he doesn't want overheard."

  Colette looked at the front of the group.

  "I'm glad it was him," Elysse said. "Whoever found me. I'm glad it was him."

  "So am I," Colette said, and she meant it in more directions than one.

  The upper middle district announced itself with architecture.

  The buildings here had been designed rather than built, which was a distinction that became obvious when you crossed the invisible line between the two. The streets were wider, the stone cleaner, the ornamental details on the facades of the buildings the kind of details that existed to be noticed rather than to serve any structural function. Guild banners hung from iron brackets above several of the larger buildings, the colors and crests of the Compact's peer institutions, houses whose names appeared regularly in council records and less regularly in lower district conversation.

  Wanderers moved differently here. Not faster or slower but with a different quality of purpose, the purpose of people who had somewhere specific to be and the equipment to justify being there. Armor that caught the light in ways that suggested significant expenditure. Weapons that had been commissioned rather than purchased. The specific confidence of people whose guild backing was visible from a distance.

  Kai looked at all of it with the expression he'd worn since they'd crossed into this district, which was the expression of a person looking at something they understood thoroughly and found thoroughly objectionable.

  "Every coin in this district," he said, to Aris and no one else, "came from someone who didn't get to keep it."

  Aris said nothing. He'd heard this before, or variations of it, in different registers depending on how recently Kai had encountered something that reminded him of it.

  "The licensing fees alone," Kai continued. "Do you know what the Veilmarket charges independent dealers for a counter space for a single month."

  "I don't," Aris said.

  "More than you make in a year," Kai said. "Which is why there are no independent dealers in the Veilmarket. Which is why the only people who can sell in there are guild-affiliated or noble-backed. Which is why—"

  "Kai," Aris said.

  "I'm just explaining the system."

  "You're explaining the system to a person who can't afford to eat at the restaurants in this district," Aris said. "I understand the system."

  Kai was quiet for a moment.

  Then:

  "There it is," he said.

  The Veilmarket did not look like a market.

  It looked like something that had been built to make the word market feel insufficient. Five floors of pale dressed stone, wider than any three buildings they'd passed on the way here, with tall arched windows along every level that caught the morning light and returned it in a way that suggested the light had been improved by the encounter. Iron ornamentation ran along the roofline in the pattern of dungeon flora, Deepbloom and cave fern rendered in dark metal with the precision of craftspeople who had been paid well enough to take their time. Above the entrance, in letters cut deep into the stone lintel:

  VEILMARKET — FIRST EXCHANGE OF VALERNE

  Guild banners hung on either side of the entrance, more of them than Aris could count quickly, the crests of every major guild in the city represented in silk and embroidered thread, shifting slightly in the morning air. The doors themselves were open, tall and wide, the kind of doors that said something about what waited inside them.

  Wanderers moved in and out with the ease of people for whom this was a regular errand. Their armor told stories that Aris could read without trying, floor levels and guild standings and expedition records written in the quality of equipment the way text was written on a page.

  "First time," Kai said, looking at Aris looking at it.

  "First time," Aris confirmed.

  "Prepare yourself."

  "You keep saying that."

  "I keep meaning it," Kai said, and walked through the doors.

  The inside was worse.

  Not worse in any bad sense. Worse in the sense of more, larger, further beyond the reference points Aris had brought with him than he'd been prepared for even after Kai's warnings.

  The ground floor alone was the size of the entire block Saint Edren's sat on. The ceiling was high enough that the upper floors were visible as balconied levels overlooking the main floor, each one lined with counters and glass display cases that caught the light from the windows and sent it moving across everything below. The sound was the contained sound of a large space with many people in it conducting serious business, not the open noise of the Cours Edren market but something more deliberate, conversations at counters, the occasional chime of an auction bell from one of the upper floors, the movement of staff in clean uniforms carrying items between display cases with the care of people who understood the value of what they were handling.

  The items in the nearest display case were weapons.

  Aris looked at the nearest price card.

  He looked at it for slightly longer than he'd looked at anything else this morning.

  "Kai," he said.

  "Yes," Kai said.

  "This sword," Aris said.

  "Yes."

  "This sword costs—"

  "Yes."

  "That's what it costs,"

  "That's what it costs," Kai said.

  Aris looked at the sword. At the price card. At the sword again. He did a brief internal calculation that involved his current savings, his projected earnings from the next month of clinic work, and a rough estimate of how many Deepbloom harvests it would take to close the gap between the two numbers.

  The calculation did not produce an encouraging result.

  "The simple items," Kai said, moving them along the floor with the ease of someone who had been here enough times to navigate without looking, "are on the ground floor. Weapons, standard armor, enhancement compounds, basic expedition supplies." He gestured upward. "Specialty items, enchanted equipment, rare reagents and magical tools are on the upper floors."

  "Magical tools," Aris said.

  "Third floor," Kai said. "Spell trackers would be there."

  "And the price," Aris said.

  "I told you," Kai said. "I told you before we left the church."

  "You said expensive," Aris said. "I understood expensive. I didn't understand—" he gestured at the display case they were passing, at the price card on the item inside it, "this kind of expensive."

  "Now you understand," Kai said. "This kind of expensive."

  Aris's head was doing something that wasn't quite spinning but was in the same family. He looked at the counters, at the glass cases, at the staff moving between them with their careful hands, at the Wanderers browsing with the ease of people for whom these numbers were reference points rather than impossibilities.

  He looked at Kai.

  "Tell me," he said, "that the spell tracker is on the cheaper end of the third floor."

  Kai looked at him with the expression of a man who had been his friend for two years and had a great deal of respect for him and was not going to lie to him.

  "I'm going to show you the spell tracker," Kai said. "And then I'm going to tell you my other idea."

  "What other idea."

  "After the spell tracker," Kai said, and led them toward the stairs.