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With the ocean on one side of the city and the gulf on the other there was not a lot of open land outside of Fionni on those sides. Add in how far out on the peninsula it was and there wasn’t a lot of fresh water available outside the city walls, either. There were a couple of wells in the highlands where the local herders watered their flocks but they were crowded and busy from dawn til dusk. Getting fresh water without paying the outrageous gate toll to enter the city was difficult to say the least.

However Andre had a work around for that, at least to some extent.

So the next morning he went down to the gulf beaches with a cart full of the troupe’s costumes. After an hour of hard scrubbing in conjured water he had the clothes back to a fresh state, ready for the next show that evening. Satisfied he finally dumped the water out of the tub and let it vanish.

It had only been a dozen gallons or so but keeping anything in existence for so long took a toll on him, creating a knot of exhaustion in the space between his eyes akin to a muscle cramp in his Gift. He rubbed at the bridge of his nose with wrinkled fingers. Not for the first time he wondered how his hands could stay clammy and shriveled when the water that had saturated them had returned to nothing.

“That’s a neat trick.” Andre paused in the middle of folding the costumes, glancing up the rocky shore to find a short woman, possibly still a girl, crouching on the rocks and watching him. She waved a greeting. “Not only can you clean your clothes, they dry immediately, too.”

With a nimble leap she dropped down to the sand and gravel along the shoreline, grinning as she approached. She wore a pale blue apron over a yellow tunic and breeches with deep blue slashes. Her worn leather boots and gloves spoke of someone who had been on the road for some time, though the material of her clothes suggested she was wealthier than the average Neronan pilgrim. Though not quite as wealthy as a true noble or leading merchant.

Andre finished with the tunic he was holding and set it aside, saying, “It’s not the best way to keep things clean but it’s better than anything else we’ve got out here.”

“I’ve never heard of a conjuror who makes liquid,” she said, giving Andre a curious look. “Is it rare?”

“There isn’t a lot of point to it most of the time. Conjured things taste like ash and they don’t fill you up, or at least not for very long, since they vanish when you fall asleep at the very latest. So it’s not like drinking something I conjured would do anyone any good.” Andre fished through the laundry until he found Giuseppe’s torn pantaloons and grabbed needle and thread out of the cart. “I only worked at it because we have a young flame hand in our troupe.”

“Sounds like pretty strong motivation.” The girl considered the pants he was fumbling with. “What do you say to a trade?”

He hesitated in the process of trying to thread a needle. “I’m sorry?”

“I am Sophia Ravel,” the girl said, plucking a different roll of thread out of Andre’s sewing kit and holding it up between two fingers. The thread unraveled itself and spun through the air around her arm like a living thing. “My family had been on the road for almost two weeks without a chance to attend to the washing and now that we’re expecting to stay here for a few days there’s no fresh water to do it with.”

Andre raised an eyebrow and stuck a finger through the hole in the pant leg. “So I make water for your clothes and you reravel ours?”

“You won’t even be able to see where the rip was at,” Sophia said, looking quite proud of herself. “Not a bad deal if I say so myself.”

Andre looked down at the damaged garment. It wasn’t like the Maestro would be upset if he got someone else to help him keep the troupe’s wardrobe from falling apart. Conjuring water wasn’t particularly difficult. The hardest part was keeping the picture of it in his mind for a long period of time to keep it real and he’d become quite adept at that over the last month. “How much laundry do you need to do?”

“A dress, a few cloaks and tunics. Maybe a scapular?” She paused to count things on her fingers. “Yes, I think that’s all.”

“Well, go get it. I’ll pull out everything that needs mending.”

In the ten minutes it took Sophia to get back Andre managed to fold his washing, setting aside a handful of items that needed bits of mending. He guessed they would take a raveller less than a minute per garment to fix. He was going to be keeping the water conjured for at least twenty minutes so he figured she was still getting the better deal.

When the girl returned she wasn’t alone. Andre wasn’t terribly surprised at that, most self respecting Neronan women wouldn’t spend much time around a strange man alone. He wasn’t expecting Sophia to come back in the company of another girl roughly her age.

She was a little taller than Sophia and filled out her long blue dress a bit more so he assumed the new girl was the elder of the two. Her hair was a shade darker and she walked with a poise that the younger girl hadn’t developed yet but otherwise they looked very similar. Andre guessed they were cousins.

They carried a small basket of laundry between them.

The older girl gave Andre a skeptical once over as they approached and asked, “Are you the conjuror?”

“That’s me.” Andre tipped his cap to her. “Andre Stagehand at your service.”

“Belladonna.” Her lips twitched into a flat, unimpressed line then she dismissed him with a twitch of her nose and returned her attention to the other girl. “Where are we going to hang this to dry, Sophia?”

“You’ll see, Bella, you’ll see,” her cousin replied gleefully.

They dumped their load into his tub and he conjured water in it, letting the water appear in his palms, trickle down his fingers and soak into their laundry. Bella watched the tub fill up. “Is it harder to conjure liquids?” She asked after a minute of watching the water level rise. “I’ve seen conjurors make whole planks in a couple of seconds.”

“Depends on what you mean by harder,” Andre replied. “I have to picture what I’m conjuring when I bring it here and I’ve always found picturing water in my hands harder to get right than a piece of wood. On the other hand once it’s here it’s easier to keep a bucket full of water conjured than it is the same amount of wood, rocks or cloth.”

Sophia peered at the block of white, waxy stuff she’d brought with the clothes. “Can you make soap, too?”

“I can make something that looks like soap but it doesn’t clean like soap should. I’ve only tried it once or twice, though.”

Bella raised an eyebrow. “But you could make soap that cleans? If you practiced?”

“I don’t see why I couldn’t. I can make oil that burns or greases wheels, I think I could get soap right if I worked at it enough.”

“You can burn something you conjured?” Sophia asked, looking astonished. “Does that hurt?”

“No. Conjured things fade back to where they came from eventually, it doesn’t matter if they’re wood or ash when they do.”

Bella chewed her lower lip thoughtfully as she helped her cousin with the laundry. Andre couldn’t help noticing Sophia was a lot better than her at it. “How complicated a thing can you make? Could you conjure a whole wagon with working wheels? Or… a door with hinges?”

“A wagon is too big for me right now. Maybe ever. Large objects have never been my forte although I’ve tried once or twice. I can conjure a helmet with a visor so a door with hinges wouldn’t be too hard, although I’d probably have to spend a little time getting familiar with a set of hinges first.”

“That makes sense,” Sophia said, shooting the other girl a strange look. “I had to spend a while learning stitches before I could ravel much of anything.”

Andre glanced at her unusual choice in clothes then the stuff they were washing, all of which looked like better quality stuff than the typical Neronan traveller owned. “Did you make all this yourself?”

She glowed with pride. “Most of it. My father is a merchant and I’m hoping he can set me up as a seamstress in another few years.”

“You have an eye for it.” He glanced at Bella. “What about you?”

“Sophia is the one with ambitions,” she replied, looking ambivalent as she answered, “and I’m sure I’ll help her along the way. I’m destined to be much more normal.”

“She’s going to get married next year,” Sophia faux whispered to him. “She doesn’t like to talk about it because I get jealous.”

“You fancy him for yourself?”

She just heaved a massive sigh and fluttered her eyes dreamily. Bella gave her a playful shove then gestured at the tub, saying, “We need to rinse this out.”

Andre placed a grate over the top then said, “Help me dump this.”

Bella’s eyebrows shot up as the water drained out and vanished, leaving behind dry but soap stained clothing. A couple of cycles of fresh water to rinse off the remaining soap left them with perfectly dry clothing. “Impressive,” she murmured, holding up a dress and studying it with a keen eye. “As scarce as water is out here you could make a living off this, don’t you think?”

“I don’t believe there’s as much market for it as you might think,” Andre said, giving her a skeptical look as he handed the stack of costumes needing mending to Sophia.

“She likes to be clean,” the girl told him as she took them off his hands.

“I understand the impulse. Actors are the same way.” 

Bella wrinkled her nose, clearly unhappy with the thought of being compared to an actor, but he didn’t pay it much attention. More interesting was Sophia’s work.

She touched each garment lightly and they twitched, the fibers wriggling under the influence of her Gift, giving them a surreal look. Then she pawed through his rolls of thread, selecting a few, setting the rest aside. The loose thread took on a life of its own under her fingers, leaping up and darting along frayed hems or weaving through tears, mending damage in the blink of an eye. It took them twenty five minutes to wash her laundry. She repaired a half a dozen worn and ripped pieces of clothing in less than five.

“Impressive work,” he admitted, looking over each of the costume pieces and deciding he’d made the right call, letting her fix them. It was hard to tell they’d been damaged at all. “The Maestro will appreciate it as well. We’re moving the stage to the south side of the city and we’ll be hosting another performance tonight, if you want to see your handiwork atop the boards.”

“Oooh!” Sophia squealed as she grabbed Bella’s arm, hopping in excitement. “What is your show?”

“It’s Ulysses and the Dragon,” Bella said, subtly working her arm around the other girl’s waist to restrain her enthusiasm.

Andre raised an eyebrow at her as he folded and stacked his costumes. “You’ve seen our performance already?”

“You have a cloak with a gorgon head embroidered on it. That’s Ulysses’ coat of arms. It wasn’t hard to guess from that.”

“I suppose.” He hefted the handles of his cart and glanced about as the women collected their own basket. “Which way are you ladies headed?”

“We can make our own way back,” Bella assured him.

“The Maestro would have my head if I let you,” Andre replied, firm in his conviction that Mastroianni would do just that. “Besides, you’ve already saved me a few hours of work today so I might as well spend a few minutes of them seeing you back to your family. Merchants are usually near the south gate, yes?”

“Only if they’re waiting for a ship to make port,” Sophia replied. “We’re camped by the south gate, near the canals.”

“Of course.” Andre turned his steps that way.

“You know an awful lot about merchants for a stagehand, Andre,” Bella said.

He looked at her sideways, his skin suddenly prickling. Her voice suddenly had the smooth, almost singsong cadence Isobela affected when delivering a speech. “The theater touches on all walks of life. Besides, knowing where the well off camp means knowing where the audience can give us more than just applause.”

“I suppose.” Her voice went back to normal immediately.

“Do you enjoy being a stagehand?” Sophia asked, gaze full of curiosity. “You must get to meet so many interesting people, with how much you travel.”

“Stagehands don’t do most of the meeting, which suits me fine,” Andre said. “I’m not cut out for the stage.”

“Why not?”

He opened his mouth, about to give a flippant answer, then paused. There were a lot of reasons but he wasn’t sure how to get them out of his brain in a way that made sense. He’d tried explaining it to the Maestro and his wife more than once. He even suspected Mastroianni understood him, although more because the Maestro was a keen student of people than because of anything Andre said to him. For her part, Isobela had never gotten it.

Still, he didn’t want to just brush off Sophia’s question.

Sophia lightly cleared her throat, jolting Andre out of his wool gathering. He thought she was growing impatient. Then he saw that her gaze was fixed on something in the middle distance and he followed her line of sight to a pair of men in the colors of Fionni’s guardsmen. A strange warmth washed over him.

Leaning towards the girls he dropped his voice to a low whisper and said, “Watch this.”