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She doesn't recognise that tree.
She's been here before, she's not that far from the estate, this isn't some unknown place. She must've taken a wrong turn, of course, but where? She should probably just try to retrace her steps, Jaol will be incredibly mad at her...
And after a bit, during which a few people go in and out of the office, he's informed that the secretary will see him now.
"I can scribe, I'm very good at maths, I don't have a trade," he says quickly, trying to be careful not to stammer any words while still getting all the information out.
He takes out three pieces of paper, then puts all three on the desk facing Sadde along with a quill pen and ink. One is blank, one has a short paragraph, and another has a few equations of varying difficulty. He gestures to the chair. "Sit, copy the paragraph, and then solve the equations."
The secretary appears to be timing him. When Sadde finishes, he pears at the paper for a few minutes. "What's your name, boy?"
He asks a few more questions, mostly about where Sadde's from, how long he's been in the realm, etc.
"Come back tomorrow, at the second quarter past dawn, and I'll see about an assignment. We have openings for clerks, and the royal astronomers especially need those skilled in arithmetic. Pay is two silvers a week, plus room and board."
Tetsuma gets back to the inn a bit after he does, and asks how his day's gone so far.
"That's great! I learned a good bit from my wanderings - managed to find someone who wanted to ramble about the place's history. Apparently the lord's from a longer lived species or has somehow made himself unaging. Or various other conspiracy theories, but the lord's been there for as long as living memory goes back. No heirs, either, as far as the gossip networks can tell. Mostly keeps to himself, but maintains a surprisingly large court for the lord of an only medium-sized island. He pays well, taxes are mostly fair - except on the weavers, he's unpopular with them - and no one I talked to knows how he can afford to support such a large household."
"It's not all necessarily suspicious. I'm guessing magic has a lot to do with - everything. Also the 'maintaining a household above his station' thing was pretty common back home, and you could reliably draw conclusions from it - usually that someone is vain and prone to showing off - but I don't know what it says about his personality here. There's not many other nobles to impress, the way the islands are set up. Maybe he used to have a higher station and is holding onto the trappings out of vanity."
"I was thinking we check out, pretending to leave when Sarati does, though in reality I'll spend some more time in the markets under a different face - the city's busy enough no one should notice we didn't actually leave - and then just move out into the wilderness somewhere. From there I'll work on spying on the castle at a distance."
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