The town square was lively and bustling. Today was a market day — the townspeople brought all their goods and wares to the market in an act of grand scheduled exchange. While the occasional peddler, like Mary’s aunt and uncle, would hawk their wares whenever they were in town, normal people had to work most of the time and couldn’t spend all their time trading.

  It was busy with chatter and birdsong, yet he couldn’t deny it was oddly empty. There was room for forty stalls, but maybe twenty hawkers were there.

  He nodded to Mary, who had pulled out a notebook. He knew she wasn’t fully literate yet, but she knew more than she gave herself credit.

  Raehel, thankfully, took the hint and lingered conspicuously a few paces away. She was obviously out of place, but normal people were often too busy living normal lives to pay attention to such matters.

  And that the source of an odd discomfort. If he didn’t feel the distant vibrations of magic crawling up and down his spine, among the commoners who could never dream of Gem, he could’ve imagined he was in 16th century Europe. Or whatever century.

  He could see the smith, selling pots and pans and trinkets. What weapons he had to sell were low-grade, as even the finest sharpened steel was most useful in the hands of a wielder of a Gem-blade, and normal people only needed knives and hatches and scythes for their daily lives.

  The baker, selling loaves of bread, some fresh but most doomed to stale, one of the few merchants who was always at the market, ready to sell.

  The carpenter, with a pile of chairs and tables to fix behind him at his stall.

  None of the detritus of the Dungeon had made its way to the market square yet. He expected that would change soon.

  A place like this organized itself. Or rather it had organized itself over many iterations of trial and error, as different people figured out what day worked for them in terms of the market to meet their commercial needs.

  In his past life, he’d taken a single course on Project Management from Google and spent no substantial time implementing its teachings. When he was much younger, he’d read the SCRUM manifesto and also not bothered implementing a single one of its teachings. But here these ideas were foreign and alien. This was a world that had never heard of the concept of the middle manager and project management. He could completely revolutionize this world if he so desired.

  But bringing a philosophy of project management to squeeze a few more drops of labor and efficiency out of a bucolic fantasy world felt deeply, deeply pathetic.

  And speaking of pathetic…

  “Yo, look who it is,” said a reedy boyish voice as a figure swaggered forth from the carpenter’s stand. “It’s Granavale.”

  “Xander Cooper,” said Archmund. He wracked his brain for what little he knew of the boy. Had they been friends, or had they taunted each other in the harmless way immature boy are wont to do?

  Most of his memories were useless — Xander’s father had been a cooper five years ago, making barrels in Granavale County, but since the place had been hollowed out by the Crylaxan Plague he’d taken on the mantle of carpenter as well in the time since. Like in the Black Death on Earth, the need for specialization weakened when so many specialists died.

  “I know why you’re here,” said Xander, speaking with the wholly unearned confidence of a ten year old boy. “Here to say nothing and do nothing and say that means you’ve done a good job with the Harvest Festival!”

  It would be pathetic, Archmund reminded himself, to get mad at this. It would be pathetic to rise to a ten year old’s taunts. Even if he was currently nine himself. It would be deeply, deeply, pathetic.

  “Young master,” Mary said, her voice low with warning.

  “I can’t believe he makes you call him that,” Xander said, turning to Mary. “I hope he’s not beating you too badly.”

  He bit back a retort that he would never lay a hand on her, because any denial would be taken as confirmation.

  “Xander, show some respect.”

  “See? What happened to you, Mary?”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Ah. So maybe that was it? Maybe Xander and Mary had been childhood friends, and they’d inevitably drifted apart upon her employment as a servant, and Xander was taking out that anger on Archmund?

  “I’ve heard of all sorts of the wicked things nobles do,” Xander said. “How they treat commoners like cattle and also horses sometimes.”

  Archmund looked at Mary. “That’s a quote from Ardur’s Fables.”

  “I may have… shared the stories on my last break. As just stories, though!”

  He sighed. Even in his old world there had been people with great difficulty telling the difference between made-up stories and the truth — and Mary had the special authority of actually working with real-live nobles, which would’ve confused the matter even further.

  “Look, none of that’s real, Xander,” Archmund said. “Let me talk to your father.”

  “Whatever you want to say to him, you can say to me,” Xander said, with the unearned bravado of a young boy who’d hit his growth spurt already.

  Archmund would have sighed, but he just really thought this was honestly kind of adorable and precocious. There had to be a way to flex his superiority over a ten year old that didn’t lead to a lifetime grudge and that, more importantly, wasn’t also deeply, deeply pathetic.

  “He’ll be building the stage for the Harvest Festival,” Archmund said.

  “We’ll be building the stage for the Harvest Festival,” Xander said smugly. “Now that my older brother’s taken on Dungeon duty, I’ll be town carpenter of Granavale in five years’ time.”

  That was a good data point. There were still people who took pride in honest work, even if they were mildly annoying.

  “You have all the supplies you need?” Archmund said. He would treat this like a business thing. Yeah, that was the way forward.

  “Of course we do,” said Xander proudly. “We have no need for noble charity!”

  Archmund wondered whether all of this really had come from Mary’s stories on the days she got to go out of town, or whether some adults were fomenting anti-noble rebellion. It wasn’t entirely out of the question. After major upheavals, like when the Black Plague had killed half of medieval Europe, there was often a boom in social mobility as living people got better jobs because the people who used to have good jobs were all dead. This was just like that, because the Crylaxan Plague had killed a lot of people. True, those people had included his mother and siblings, but the common people had arguably suffered worse, because they lost their mothers and siblings too but weren’t rich.

  “And there’s the matter of his payment for building the stage for the Harvest Festival,” Archmund said flatly. Far better to keep this moving.

  “You want even more in taxes?”

  “No,” Archmund said, resisting the urge to add a “you idiot”. “Payment rendered for services due.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “We — the House Granavale — are paying you, the Granavale Coopers, money for your help in building a stage for the Harvest Festival.”

  “I said we don’t need your charity!”

  “Can I please just speak to your father.”

  Xander glowered at him. It didn’t seem like he’d budge.

  “Young master,” Mary said, her voice completely level.

  Archmund sighed. They stepped away, giving Xander this small victory. He swaggered off, back to the carpentry.

  “You shouldn’t listen to him,” Mary said.

  “Of course not,” Archmund said. “Obviously the Coopers get paid for their work. If we stiffed them they’d never work for us again.”

  “That’s not what I meant—”

  “Mary, half of Ardur’s tales are about good and righteous nobles. The ones that aren’t are about ragged princes who learn they’re secretly nobles or magically become nobles. How on earth did he go from those to thinking all nobles are bad?”

  Obviously there were issues with an entrenched hereditary nobility that had access to magical rocks that made them superhuman, but this resentment had nothing to do with that. It was out of the blue. It was reasonable anger for illogical reasons.

  Mary had gone pale.

  “I just… tell them… about some of the things you do,” Mary said weakly. “It’s nothing bad! I told them about the mayonnaise, and how you’d been so reckless to charge into the Dungeon, and how you’d forced me to learn to read—please don’t take it out on the town, it’s only him who’s like this for some reason, I swear!”

  Archmund hadn’t been planning on it, because even though he was emotionally nine years old and spoiled there was a part of him that was roughly thirty and thought it was immensely, immensely pathetic to pick a fight with a ten year old, but he was pretty sure he couldn’t allow this to spread. Somehow.

  “Mary, we’ll just have to figure something out,” he said. He walked back to the carriage to get out of the market square — a few pairs of eyes had started drifting towards him. An altercation between two young boys was pedestrian, but when one of those boys was impeccably well-dressed in clean linens and a vest, whispers would spread.

  It wouldn’t do if he got a reputation as a bully.

  “That really was quite something,” Raehel said, having walked right up behind them. Mary shrieked; Archmund didn’t flinch. Somehow, he’d sensed ripples of her magic through the Numen, or maybe he was fooling himself.

  “I think he’s maybe got a crush on you,” Raehel continued, nodding at Mary.

  “What, Xander? I… no, that’s never going to happen,” Mary said, shaking her head. Archmund glanced back at her and she quickly darted her eyes away.

  “Hard to get married to anyone other than an adventurer, a noble, or a mage when you’re one of the Bejeweled Elite,” Raehel said airily. “You’ll live longer, move faster, be stronger, think quicker… Better let him down easy.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s not like that. At all. He’s just a kid I took care of a few times, years ago,” Mary said.

  Archmund didn’t want to think about things in these terms either.

  “Either way, though… you can’t let him just mouth off to you like that,” Raehel said. “If you don’t, one day, he’ll try to stab you in the back or hammer a nail through your eye.”

  “He’d fail,” Archmund said.

  “Yeah, he’d fail, but you’d have to kill him,” Raehel said. “And I only see one carpenter in this town. You really want to let it get to that point?”

  She really had an odd intuition for these power dynamics for someone so young. Academic politics really must have been quite vicious.