"You’re a beast tamer?"

The man’s cup dropped from his hand and hit the roof without him noticing.

"Which clan are you from?"

His eyes had moved off Leon entirely and were fixed on the serpent coiled around his neck.

The pressure that had settled across the roof a moment ago hadn’t come from Leon. It had come from Levi, the black serpent sitting on his shoulder radiating the output of a grade four beast, equivalent in weight to a great mage, sitting there draped across a man’s shoulders like it was taking a nap and producing that energy as a side effect of existing.

"That’s none of your concern."

Leon shook his head without elaborating.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

The man’s mind was already moving through the implications.

After the great extermination of beasts ordered by the human king, the landscape of beast ownership had shifted considerably. Most of the wild population had been cleared or driven back. What remained of the weaker breeds had been captured, retrained, bound through magic circles, and integrated into the structures of specific human clans operating within the human sect.

Over time it had become something close to a tradition among those clans. Beast taming as a discipline, passed down and refined, a stable feature of their talent development. The binding methods they used left a particular signature on the beast involved, something readable to anyone who knew what they were looking at.

What this black serpent was putting out fit that profile.

Which meant Leon was almost certainly connected to one of those clans.

Which meant the real conversation happening on this rooftop wasn’t between the gang and a wealthy stranger with good fighters.

It was between the gang and whatever was standing behind that clan at a distance.

The thousand gold monthly agreement wasn’t Leon giving ground.

It was Leon extending courtesy to an organization that had the sense to send a reasonable person up here instead of someone who would have made this interaction unpleasant for everyone.

"I understand."

The man stood.

Didn’t push further on the clan question. Didn’t try to reframe the negotiation. Just stood up with the measured composure of someone who had correctly read a situation and was now stepping out of it cleanly before it became something else.

"As long as you’re in the city, no one will cause you trouble."

He straightened his clothes once.

"If you’re in any trouble, just have your guards reach out to Richard Daron." A slight pause. "After all, this is the city of dogs."

He turned, stepped off the roof, and flew away without looking back.

He had come here to negotiate and he had negotiated. The rest of what he had learned today was filed away for people above him to decide what to do with. His part was done.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

"Hehe."

Leon watched him go.

The smile sat easy on his face, unhurried, the kind that comes when something resolves in the direction you wanted without requiring more effort than you budgeted for.

He turned and stepped down from the roof.

He wouldn’t make a real splash in Davos until he was on the other side of the transcendent stage. That was the line. Once he crossed it he would have the baseline to protect himself properly inside a city like this, to deal with whatever attention his presence eventually drew without having to calculate the cost of each move carefully.

Until then, quiet was the strategy.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

That night, Arian, Ember, and Derrick set out into the eastern market.

The markets in that section of Davos ran late, stalls packed close together, the kind of place where you could find almost anything if you knew what questions to ask and had enough gold to make the answers worth giving.

They moved through it with a list and a budget that was well above what most people in that market were working with.

Forming the magic well demanded energy. Large amounts of it, sustained over the course of the process, fed from multiple sources depending on the cultivator’s specific composition. Leon’s situation was not standard in this regard. He pulled from mana, life energy, death energy, soul energy, and the dark current running through the grimoire, all of it needing to be available and properly prepared when the time came.

The shopping spree was thorough.

And thorough in a market like that drew eyes.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Inside a carriage parked at the edge of one of the wider lanes, a young man sat with the particular ease of someone who had never once in his life been in a position where things didn’t go his way.

Unassuming black hair. Long mage robes. The kind of face that had learned to arrange itself into expressions of confidence early because confidence had always been rewarded.

He was looking out at Arian and Ember.

"Those girls are my type." He said it to no one in particular, the way people say things when they expect the room to agree without being asked. "Tell them to come over with some of those treasures. They might have a chance with this young master."

The logic running underneath the words was its own complete structure.

The two women weren’t just attractive. They were spending at a level that indicated real backing behind them, real resources, real weight somewhere in their story. His father would consider that a reasonable result if he brought it home. A wealthy connection that could keep the family comfortable for a few years was not nothing.

As for why either of them would agree to such an arrangement?

He was an apprentice of the Firestone manor.

That name carried enough in this city that he had never actually had to finish that sentence before. The nod was usually enough. People positioned themselves accordingly, adjusted their posture, found reasons to be agreeable that they hadn’t had a moment before.

There was no one in Davos who wouldn’t at minimum consider throwing themselves at an apprentice of the Firestone manor if the opportunity presented itself.

That was simply how it worked here.

"Yes, young lord Jacob."

One of the guards escorting the carriage bowed quickly and moved toward where Arian and Ember were standing, delivering the message with the brisk efficiency of someone who had run similar errands before and expected similar results.

A second later both women turned.

They looked back toward Jacob’s carriage.

The expressions on their faces were identical in result if not in texture. Arian’s was flat in the way cold stone is flat. Ember’s carried something warmer, specifically the warmth of something that was very close to catching fire.

Both of them: deep, visible disgust.

Jacob saw it.

It did not register as a problem.

He stepped down from the carriage with several large strides, robes moving well, chin up, the smile of someone who had confused the absence of immediate rejection with attraction enough times that the distinction had stopped occurring to him.

He walked toward them beaming.

Completely unbothered.

Derrick, standing slightly behind the two women with a ledger in one hand and the day’s purchases organized in the other, watched the young lord approach and said nothing.

He had been in service long enough to recognize the specific shape of a situation that was about to become someone else’s problem.

He took a small, careful step to the side.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

"Ladies, I am Jacob Herat apprentice to Logan Firestone, elder of the Firestone manor. I have taken a liking to you both, please depend on me from now on" Jacob went into a slight bow but his eyes were filled with greed looking at the bag of treasures in the hands of the butler.

Once he wooed these two, all that money would be his. Such was the destiny of talents like him.