“What?” The young man’s voice was very raw and light, as if it might still tend to crack at times.
“I can polish it bright for you, if it needs to be seen,” she said. “Or leave it dark in the blade, if it needs not.” She had learned that delicate phrasing quickly, after accidentally scaring away a few potential customers whose work required that their blades be inconspicuous. “Either way, the edge is the same.
Four in copper.”
“Two.”
“You think you’re dealing with a scissors grinder? The Stepsons brought their blades to me, and the Prince’s guard do still. The thing’ll be able to slice one thought from the next when I’m done with it. Always assuming that you can keep it out of the tables at the Unicorn after this.” That got his attention; that much Mriga had been able to pick up from the blade itself, though it wasn’t talkative as steel went. “Three and a half, because 1 like your looks. No more.”
The young man screwed up his face a little, slightly ruining those looks. “All right, do it dark. How long?”
“Half an hour. Take mine,” she said, and handed him her “leaner,” a plain, respectable longknife with quillons of browned steel. “Don’t ‘lose’ it,” Mriga said then, “so I don’t have to give you a demonstration with this one.”
The young man ducked his head and slipped into the growing crowd. Rahi said something not in a bellow, and it got lost in the increasing noise of people crying fish and cloth and ashsoap.
“What?”
“You ever have to demonstrate?” he wheezed in her ear.
Mriga smiled. Siveni, so long unprayed-to by mortals, had been losing her attributes. And as such things will, one attribute-the affinity for things with edges-had slipped across into mortality and into the person best equipped to handle it: Mriga. “Not personally,” she said. “Last time, the knife did it itself. Just lost its balance all of a sudden… slipped out of the thief’s hand and stuck her right-well, whatever. Word got around. It’s not a problem now.”