"- wow!" says the proprietor, picking up Shiny first. "I can give you eighty for this, maybe more, let me get a blanket and see how bright it is in the dark, okay?"

"Go ahead. It works better the longer it's in the light." He thinks back to the prices he saw on the way here. Would 80 get him a quality pair of shoes, a new set of clothes, and a sturdy bag with any leftover? How many moderately priced meat based meals would it get him if he just spent it all on food?

80 would get him all of those! On food alone with meat included it'd last weeks.

The proprietor disappears under a tablecloth. "Wow! Where did you get this?"

"The Hedge. It's where I came from before arriving here, but not where I'm from originally."

Part of him winces internally, knowing such a straight answer might just lead to more questions and maybe even have him viewed as crazy sooner or later. But while he's not sure if he qualifies as fully Lost or not anymore, even the idea of straight lying feels like tearing a hole in his soul, or leaving a his back exposed to a charging animal.

"Eighty might be reasonable, but I'll have to look around a bit more before deciding." It seems like a lot of money given what it can buy for him, but he still has no sense of scale for how easy money is to get here, and right now he's mostly trying to get a sense of what his "emergency fund" is if he needs one. "Any offers for the others?"

"I've never even heard of the round." The proprietor reappears from under the tablecloth, touches the ruby. "Are any of the others more special than they look or just the glowing one?"

Danny is about to explain that the ruby one doesn't, then suddenly has a concern about saying a stone isn't magic before selling it to someone who finds out it is. Not just because it means he misses out on more money it would be worth, but because some of the stones he found in the Hedge had magic effects that weren't exactly fun or pleasant...

Shit, does this mean he shouldn't sell any of them? Even Shiny might give people cancer or something...

Double shit, what if it brings the fae?

Ugh, why didn't he think of think of that sooner, it's exactly the sort of thing the Gentry would do in case anyone brings a souvenir from the Hedge back to their world...

"I'm sorry, I just realized selling these may be a bad idea." He quickly recollects his stones. "Thank you for your time."

He leaves and starts walking again, jaw tight and heart hammering at the near miss. Bad enough if some fae hunting party finds and drags him to Arcadia, he wouldn't be able to forgive himself if someone else gets taken because of him.

Ugh. Not only does this mean he shouldn't sell the stones, he's not even sure if destroying them would help or not.

"Come back if you change your mind!" calls the proprietor.

Danny lifts a hand in a distracted wave over his shoulder, then starts walking for a while, lost in dark thoughts of what might happen if the fae come looking for him. Just as he'd started to emotionally accept that this place is actually real, and not some elaborate trap, he's got a different set of worries now, each person he sees someone he feels a need to protect rather than be suspicious of.

He's heard harrowing stories from those who escaped Arcadia, gaze constantly over their shoulder, and he finds himself doing it now, looking around and behind him as if expecting a fae hunting party or stalker to show up at any minute.

Nope. Just people, Hollywood-pretty of all adult-height ages busy with their business and travel.

Eventually he'll be away from the settlement around the harbor and walking among farms. There's sheep. There's wheat. There's potatoes.

It's a good thing he learned how people here are made before he arrived; a ship full of extremely attractive people was weird enough, and he would be much more confident all this was more directly "fake."

Now that he has a different, more specific worry, it's almost like that new worry is taking the energy from the earlier one. Like there's some kind of... conservation of worry, between all the ways the fae might be trying to get him.

But the change in scenery slows his steps and pulls him out of his head a little. He spends a few minutes enjoying the idyllic calm of it all, and suddenly has a new worry.

Back home, hunting was something you needed a permit for, and you could only get those during certain periods of time. He saw some dense woods from the ship, but he's not sure if he'll be allowed to hunt it freely.

He decides to stop at the door of one of the nearby farmhouses and knock.

A woman who looks about fifty (so she's probably not more than thirty-five, chronologically) answers the door. "Hello there!"

"Hello," he sings, then clears his throat and speaks more deliberately. "I am not from this round. I wonder about hunting..." Legal wasn't in any of the songs. "Allowed? Where, when?"

"Hunting for what?"

"Anything?" He gestures to his bow. "Animals, birds. Maybe fish?"

"You can fish as much as you want. You shouldn't bow-hunt without a group, because you might accidentally shoot someone if you were alone and no one was checking for others and if you were too stealthy you might get shot yourself."

For an instant, he has the absurd mental images of a forest full of stealthy people all accidentally shooting each other, like something out of Loony Tunes. Maybe I should invent hunting jackets.

"Thanks, I'll remember that. But it's allowed?"

"You mustn't hunt a farm animal, but no one owns the wild ones."

"Glad to hear. And do farms need extra work hands, sometimes? Yours or others?"

"You can pick up some work when the harvest comes in but farms generally... have the number of people they need during less busy times..."

Context clues help him guess the meaning of words he hasn't learned through song yet, and he nods, sighing, He figured as much, but it seemed worth checking, as a backup plan. "How long until next harvest?"

"Oh, different things at different times. If you're going to be near here then my wheat comes in in another thirty wakes weather permitting."

A good reminder that he'll need to carefully track "wakes" in some method other than his own sleeping patterns, or else he'll drift too far off schedule from everyone else. "Maybe I'll see you then. Oh, excuse my manners. I'm Danny."