Thrap! The hard impact on the knocker plate seemed to echo through the stillness. Cerryl waited.
A gray-haired man in a blue tunic and trousers opened the door. “Trade is at the side door.”
“Master Tellis told me to deliver this to master Muneat, to his own hand.”
“I’ll take it for him, boy.” The servitor smiled pleasantly.
“No, ser. Only to his hand. I can wait, if he would like. Or I can come back again.”
The man in green frowned. “Wait.” The door closed.
Cerryl shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The sun seemed to beat on his back, even the back of his legs.
Finally, the door reopened, and the green-clad servitor looked at Cerryl. “Master Tellis, you said?”
“Yes, ser. The scrivener.”
A faint smile cracked the thin lips. “I’m Shallis, and I’m not a ser. I’m the house seneschal.” He opened the door and stepped back. “You are to come in and wait here in the foyer.”
Cerryl eased inside. The foyer ceiling was high, twice as high as the showroom’s in Tellis’s shop, and polished dark wood planks stretched between the arching granite supports. The base of each pillar was a polished rose-tinged stone, so smooth that it shimmered in the light from the open door.
“You may sit on the bench there.” Shallis closed the door and pointed to a white oak bench with a low back, set slightly away from the waist-high polished rose marble wainscotting. His eyes went to Cerryl’s boots. Then he nodded. “Master Muneat will be here when it suits him.”
“Thank you.” Cerryl didn’t know what else to say. He sat on the front edge of the bench as Shallis stepped through the archway into the house proper.
Cerryl’s eyes followed the seneschal, taking in what he could see of the hallway beyond the foyer, a hallway that was larger than the large common room in Tellis’s house, even larger than the kitchen and eating area in Dylert’s house.
The sole archway he could see from the bench was draped in blue, a fabric that dropped in fine folds that shimmered in the indirect light from the windows Cerryl could not see. The hallway floor beyond the foyer arch was polished marble, set in interlocking squares, so smooth and so clean that Cerryl would have feared to walk on it.
A gilt-framed portrait hung on the wall, but Cerryl could not see much except that the figure was a white-haired man in a white shirt, and with a blue short jacket of some sort and dark trousers. The portrait was flanked by two lamps set in bronze wall sconces, polished to a fine sheen. Even the lamp mantels glistened.
The scent of flowers was stronger inside the foyer, reminding Cerryl of Dyella’s gardens above the mill. He shifted his weight on the bench again, looking down at the velvet-wrapped book.
The faintest of rustlings caught his ear, and his eyes went back to the hallway, where a woman, impossibly slender, crossed the marble floor and entered through the archway the room on the left side of the hall, past the shimmering hangings. Her gown—not tunic and trousers but a form-fitting dress or gown—was a deep red that also shimmered in the indirect light. Cerryl thought she had worn silver combs in dark hair, but she had moved so gracefully and silently that he was not sure.
A different scent, one like fruit and roses together, slipped past him, then seemed to vanish.
Cerryl swallowed as he heard a clicking on the marble. A short figure in deep blue—even in deep blue leather boots—was walking toward the foyer. He wore a shimmering white silk shirt, and a dress jacket and matching trousers of a deep blue velvet. The bald forehead, the silver hair, and the white-silver mustache told Cerryl that master Muneat approached, and the apprentice jumped to his feet, waiting. Behind Muneat walked the seneschal, his face blank.
“Young fellow . . . Shallis said you were from master Tellis.” A surprisingly shy smile crossed the broad and jowled face.
“Yes, ser. Master Tellis sent me to deliver this.” Cerryl extended the velvet-wrapped book. “He said it could only go to your own hand.”
“To my own hand, ha!” Muneat laughed again, taking the book. “My own hand. Would that others respected my hand so much.”
Cerryl didn’t know what to say. So he waited for the older man to stop laughing.
“And you would not be budged, not if you’re from Tellis. Verial was like that, too. Two golds I promised your master, and two golds it shall be. And a silver for you, and two for him.”
Cerryl managed to keep his mouth shut as Muneat handed him a small leather pouch and then a silver. “Your master’s coins are in the purse. The silver is yours.”
“I thank you, ser.” Cerryl bowed. “And Master Tellis thanks you.”