"I am delighted at the thought of a pretty casing and fancy chime but think I'd rather have a clock that's wholly your work."

"Well, the hex part is either way, but I'm not gonna tell you which kind to get."

"No? But isn't that the essential skill of shopkeeping, talking people into the more expensive product? I suppose you have Cricket behind the till and he doesn't really seem the type for it."

"He's really not. I consider myself a spellbinder first and a retailer only incidentally. Besides, I don't keep very much of the markup for the fancy clocks, that goes to the artist uptown who assembles them."

"I am trying to imagine him saying 'can I convince you to take a look at our premium version' and it's rather failing to compute. It's impressive that you can manage a shop like that and partnerships with other spellbinders and artists only incidentally, though."

"You may be overestimating how complicated retail is? I don't have that many customers and if I did I'd have to raise my prices until they went away, I can only make one hex a day on my own and everybody who sells through me has the same limit. I spend most of my time hanging out behind the counter charting."

"That sounds pretty nice, actually. Especially if you're charting things ambitious enough to not feel stifled."

"It's pretty great!"

"...could I tempt you away from it? Potentially? If we happen to find we like each other?"

"I suspect you could."

"Famine relief has comparatively little to recommend it on the comfort and quiet charting time front."

"I think it is legal to have multiple interests, or is that something you haven't been able to get legislated yet for benign neglect reasons?"

"That would hardly even count as benign. And it would affect my father; things that do that go away immediately."

"So there you go, I can want to invent immortality and also want fewer people to have starved before I got around to it."

"If I sounded in doubt of it I have miscommunicated very badly. You have more interesting projects than almost anyone I've spoken with, and I speak to people all the time and lots of them have a lot of leverage to do interesting projects with."

"Thanks."

He pays for their meal. "Shall we walk down along the water?"

"Sounds lovely."

So they do, and he tells a story about the time his youngest two brothers got it into their heads to go visit a neighboring country with whom negotiations had stalled and "I don't actually know what they were planning to do, either stage a peasant revolt or just send their familiars around the palace to dispense advice - they were six, it was not the best developed plan" - and they set off in a canal boat with a live turtle for companionship or maybe to eat along the way.

"How far did they get?"

"Out to open waters! My mother was in a tearing worry, we raced around asking who had something for tracking, and it all kept pointing straight out to sea...luckily the current was a bit much for them..."

"They washed up somewhere?"

"Yep! And decided to sleep under the boat and try again in the morning, they're stubborn kids, but by then we'd found them. My father hadn't acted at all stressed while they were missing but he sat them both down for a month of lectures about currents and drowning statistics and boat engineering and its difficulties. They haven't done anything life-endangering since."

"Must have been some lecture series."

"My father's full attention is a bit scary, most people don't want to spend a month under it. At least they had the two of them."