Trades at the Veil

*This story was born from a bet I once overheard in a farmer's market: how much heat can two people who already trust each other carry in plain sight? No aliens, no fate-of-the-world stakes. Just pride and a pair of hands. Thanks for reading.*

The binding took me the better part of an hour, and Andres yawned through forty minutes of it.

I want to be plain about the setup first, since it matters. My name is Alicia, I'm thirty-three, and I do weddings. Not flowers and cake, actual weddings. Binding contracts, the old kind, where two people get tied together with a cord and a word and a little bit of my blood in the knot. It sounds dramatic. Mostly it's paperwork. There's a lot of paperwork in magic, which nobody tells you when you're young and stupid and signing up for the guild.

I was working under the veil-booth awning at the Sink-the-Nail market, which is the biggest thing that happens in this town all week. We sit between two dead volcanoes, and the dead part is arguable, because the well in the middle of the square glows green some nights when the ground shifts. The merchants say it's luck. The well says nothing. Wells are like that.

Anyway. The couple I was binding, Torv and his bride Maret, both twenty-something and nervous as cats, stood in front of me holding the cord between them. Behind them stood Lel, Maret's aunt, who held opinions about everything and voiced them at a volume meant for far larger squares. Beside us, a charm-seller had set up his table, the one with the bracelets against sour milk hanging next to the love-bracelets, which is the kind of market logic you get out here.

I said the word, cinched the knot, and the cord took. It always takes. Four years I've been doing this in this town and I've never had one fail, which is a brag, but an honest one.

"Done," I told them. "Don't cut the cord for a year. It unravels on its own and then you can fight about dishes like everyone else."

Maret laughed. Torv paid me. Lel told me my awning was crooked, which it was, and then they drifted off into the market crowd, happy.

And that left me with Andres, who was leaning against the support post with his arms crossed, looking like a man watching paint dry in a color he didn't pick.

My husband is thirty-six, built like the caravan guard he used to be, and handsome in a way that annoys people who meet him on a bad day. We met four years ago at a guild fair, where I hired him to stand behind me and look intimidating while I worked a difficult contract. He did the job, then he stood there another six months while I circled him, and then I married him. He has never once let me forget that he let me circle.

"You yawned," I said, packing up my kit. "Twice. During a binding."

"I didn't yawn during the binding. I yawned during Lel."

"Fair. But still. You stood there like a man waiting for a ferry."

"I am waiting for something," he said. "It hasn't shown up yet."

And that was the needle he handed me, and I took it, because that's marriage. "This is what I mean about ambition," I told him. "You used to guard caravans through the pass. Now you hand me ink pots and complain the market bench hurts your back."

"I have never once complained about the bench."

"You complained about the bench Tuesday."

"That was the bench's fault, not mine."

I tied off my kit and looked at him. He was smiling a little, the way he does when he thinks he's winning a conversation. People pay me to read couples, to tell when the knot will hold, and I can read my own husband like a large-print book. He was bored. He wanted me to fix it, but he'd rather swallow gravel than ask.

So I did the thing I probably shouldn't have done. I looked up at him and said, "You can't make me come standing here, with Lel and the charm-seller right there."

Yes. I said that. Out loud. In the square. In daylight. The veil-booth awning is not exactly private, and the charm-seller was maybe ten feet away sorting bracelets, and Lel was in shouting distance, and Lel does not need a reason.

Andres lifted one eyebrow. Slow. Infuriating. The eyebrow of a man who has just been handed a ferry after all.

"Is that a dare?" he asked.

"It's an observation."

"It's a dare. You made the bet, I just have to decide whether to take it." He pushed off the post. "I take it."

"You're bluffing."

"Alicia. I guarded caravans through the pass for eleven years. I've been bored worse than this."

The thing about dares between the two of us is that we keep score, and the score is not really the point. The point is that after four years of marriage I still want to prove I know him better than he knows himself, and he wants to prove the reverse, and every so often one of us escalates and the other one, instead of being sensible, matches it. That's our whole dynamic. It has worked so far. Ask me again in an hour.

He stepped in close. Not touching yet, just close, close enough that I could see the gray coming in at his temple that he pretends isn't there. He rested one hand on my hip, light, over the apron I wear for work, and he leaned in like he was going to kiss my cheek, which is a normal thing husbands do in markets, and nobody would look twice, and instead he put his mouth near my ear and talked.

"The healing-spring stall," he said, quiet. "Back corner. It has a curtain, and Old Sef doesn't watch his own booth after the noon rush. I could put you up against the wall back there and have you before the kettle boils."

My pulse jumped. That's the truth of it, and I can't dress it up. Heat went through me like I was the well on a fault night. My body voted yes before my brain finished objecting.

"No," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected, which I'll count as a win.

"No?"

"No. Sef counts his takings back there at noon. I've watched him do it. And his curtain is wool and it doesn't reach the floor, and the woman who sells fever tea would see your boots under it, and she gossips worse than Lel."

Andres pulled back enough to look at me. He was grinning now, actually grinning, because he had felt me go warm under his hand, we've been married too long for me to fake that, and we both knew the dare was live now whether I liked it or not.

"You looked into it," he said. "You've already thought about it. The curtain, the boots, the tea woman. You scouted the location."

"I scout everything. It's a professional habit."

"You scouted a place to be fucked in the market and then you dare me like I'm the one without ambition."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I did what any sensible woman does. I started reorganizing my ink pots, which did not need reorganizing.

He laughed. He has a good laugh, low, and I felt it more than heard it with him that close. "All right," he said. "The healing spring is out. I'll find somewhere better. And you're going to stand there and let me."

"That's not how the dare works. You have to make me come, and I have to not make a sound in front of the entire midweek market, and you have about an hour before the evening rush and my four o'clock appointment."

"Four o'clock?"

"The Fenners. Renewal binding. They're paying double because they missed the spring fair."

"So we have an hour," he said, "and I have a willing wife who already knows every blind corner in this square, because she has clearly been bored longer than she's admitted." He straightened up and took a step back, hands loose at his sides, looking around the market like a man pricing stalls. "I'm going to walk. Don't follow me. If you follow me, you lose."

"Those aren't the rules."

"The rules are whatever I say they are now. You set the stakes, I set the terms. That's how bets work."

And he walked off into the crowd, unhurried, nodding at the pickle woman like he hadn't just turned my entire afternoon into a countdown. The charm-seller looked up from his bracelets and asked if I wanted one against sour milk. I said no. I have no use for milk charms and never have.

I stood under my crooked awning with my pulse still doing things I didn't authorize, and I realized two things. One, I had badly miscalculated, because Andres does not lose bets, he just takes longer to collect them. And two, somewhere in the last five minutes I had stopped being the one running this game, and I could not point to the exact moment it happened.

The four o'clock was in fifty minutes. I watched the crowd for the top of his head.

I did not see him for ten minutes, which for Andres is an eternity, because the man can find trouble faster than most people find bread. I sold a luck cord to a shepherd and re-inked my thumb and pretended my heart rate was a professional matter.

Then he reappeared, coming up the row from the candle stall like a man returning from a stroll. He had bought nothing. He had, apparently, been thinking.

"Candles," he said, setting both elbows on my table.

"What about them."

"You're low. Your taper stock is down to three and I can count. And I noticed the candle woman has a new lot of beeswax out, the good yellow stuff." He tipped his head toward the far end of the row. "You should go negotiate."

"I should."

"Yes. And while you're doing it, I'm going to stand behind you and put my hand under your skirt."

I looked at him. He looked back, pleasant as Sunday. Around us, maybe forty people haggled over pickles and wool and charms against sour milk, and not one of them knew that my husband had just proposed a felony.

"That's the second dare?" I said.

"That's the second dare. You said I had to make you come without a sound. I'm breaking it into steps. This is step one. You negotiate a full price on candles, the woman agrees, you pay, you thank her, and you don't flinch. If you flinch, I win."

"If I flinch, you win. And if I don't?"

"Then you get to keep going. And step two gets worse for you." He smiled at me with his whole face. "Well?"

The candle woman was watching us from her stall with the frank interest of a market wife who has nothing better to do. The fever tea woman was two stalls past her, pouring for a customer. The well glowed its faint daytime green, that is to say it looked like ordinary water, which is what it does until dark.

"Fine," I said. "But if you get caught, you're the one who explains it to Lel."

"I fear Lel more than the volcano," he said, and that was true, so we went.

* * *

The candle stall sits at the bend of the row where the crowd thins, which Andres had clearly noted on his walk. Petra, who sells the candles, had her good beeswax laid out in ropes, and I put on my merchant face, which is different from my binding face, flatter, more patient.

"New lot," I said, picking up a taper.

"Larium wax, rendered twice." Petra crossed her arms. "Fifteen a bundle."

"Fifteen? Petra, I've bought from you four years. Nine."

"Eleven, and I throw in the stubs."

And at that point Andres, standing behind me with his hands at my sides like a proper husband waiting on his wife, slid one hand down and under the hem of my apron and then under my skirt, and laid his palm against the inside of my thigh, high, and left it there.

He did it slowly. That's the part I want to tell you, the slowness, like he had all afternoon, which he did, the ass.

"Eleven," I said, and my voice held. Somewhere behind my ribs a bell rang, but the voice held.

"Twelve, and you get the stubs and the broken half rope," Petra said. "That one's for you anyway, you're the only one in this town who buys tapers by the rope."

Andres' thumb moved. Not higher. Just a slow stroke along the soft part of my thigh, an inch of nothing between his hand and everything else, and he kept it exactly there, which was worse.

"Twelve," I agreed. "Half rope. But you wrap the broken ones in the straw, last time I got ash on my kit."

She bent to wrap them. Andres' thumb kept up its slow stroke, never going that last inch, and I discovered that my body held opinions my merchant face was not consulted on. Every pass was a promise he wasn't keeping yet, and Petra was saying something about the straw and I was nodding and the whole market went on existing, which seemed rude of it.

"Twelve silvers," Petra said, holding out her hand.

I paid her. That is the sentence I am proudest of in this whole story. I counted twelve silvers into her palm, coins that had been in my pocket all day and had no idea what they were funding, and I said thank you, Petra, see you at the fall fair, and my voice did not shake, though the rest of me had quietly become a different substance.

Andres did not stop while she wrapped. He did not stop while I paid. His thumb stayed where it was, moving in small slow strokes, and I stood there holding a rope of candles and doing arithmetic in my head to keep from giving anything away, and the arithmetic stopped working around the number four.

"There," Petra said, handing the bundle over. "Tell your husband he's a lucky man."

"He knows," I said, and I heard my own voice come out lower than I meant it to, and Petra gave me a look that said she had noticed something but wasn't sure what, and I walked away from that stall at a completely normal pace with my husband's hand leaving me at the last possible second, sliding out from under my skirt like a pickpocket in reverse.

We got three stalls down before I turned on him.

"You," I said.

"Me," he agreed, taking the candle rope out of my arms because my hands weren't steady and he knew it.

"That was the second dare and I don't flinch and you know I don't flinch, so say it. Say that I won."

"You won the candle part." He was already walking us toward the center of the square, toward the well. "But the dare was never about candles, love. The dare was about making you come, and I would call that a down payment."

I should have argued. I had nothing. My whole blood supply had been reassigned to one region and my brain was running on what was left over.

* * *

The well sits in the middle of the square, stone lip about waist high on me, and on fault nights it glows green enough to read by, which the town pretends is charming. In the daytime it's just a well with a low wall, and on the far side of it the crowd thins because the linen-seller's awning blocks the foot traffic on that angle, and the linen-seller was busy with two women arguing over a bolt of blue.

I knew all of this. I want it noted that I knew all of this, because I scouted everything, it was a professional habit, and Andres had figured out that my professionalism was the map to my own ruin.

He steered me around the well by the elbow, casual as anything, and