Thrown Out of the Hero Summons for a Worthless Haggling Skill, He Struck a Deal With the Dragon novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Copper House

In the Lowmarket Ryota earns a Copper card by washing a one-armed guild keeper's dishes and cooks the house dinner, and then the heroes walk in and the Sword Saint lays his royal blade on the counter for him to haggle.

The Copper House was the only guild hall in the Lowmarket, and it smelled of beer, wet dogs and onions.

A copper coin as big as a dinner plate was nailed over the door.

Inside, thirty-odd men and women sat at long tables under a board covered in paper contracts.

Ryota had learned on the walk down that this was the adventurers' guild, where people signed on to kill monsters and clear sewers for pay.

Behind the counter stood a barrel-chested man with a gray beard, a leather apron and his left sleeve pinned up empty.

He was writing in a ledger with his one hand.

"I'd like a guild card," Ryota said.

"Sponsor?"

"I don't have one."

"Then it's fifty silver, foreigner." The man didn't look up. "That's the deal."

Words appeared over the ledger in plain Japanese.

Fifty silver for a Copper card.

Under it, in smaller letters, was a second line.

He wants someone to wash the dishes he can't wash with one arm.

Ryota looked past him through the kitchen hatch.

Dirty bowls were stacked in the washtub higher than the tap.

"I've got twenty silver," Ryota said. "Here's my offer. Ten silver for the card, and I wash every dish in this place for a month."

The man finally looked up.

"Who told you about the dishes?"

"Nobody. I can see the tub from here."

"Gautier Brune." He held out his hand. "I keep this hall. Show me you can wash a bowl and I'll think about it."

Ryota hung his work jacket on a peg and rolled up his sleeves.

An hour later the tub was empty and the bowls sat in stacks of ten.

Gautier came in, lifted one, turned it to the light and set it down again.

"Name?"

"Ryota Kishibe."

Gautier stamped it into a small copper card and pushed the card across the counter.

"Copper," he said. "Sewer rats and errands. It's what we give runaways and drunks."

"I'll take it."

"What's your skill?"

"Haggle."

Gautier snorted. "My cousin had Haggle. He sold turnips."

"It worked on a king this morning," Ryota said. "His knight brought me a sworn purse, and I talked it down ten silver."

Gautier put the bowl down very carefully.

"You changed a sworn bargain."

"Is that bad?"

"Plenty of peddlers have Haggle. They use it on cabbages." Gautier leaned on the counter. "No king ever offered a cabbage seller a sworn bargain. And if one did, nobody would argue. The Temple hangs people for arguing with the stone."

"Nobody told me that."

"Well. Now somebody has." He looked at Ryota for a long moment. "Don't say it again out there."

The kitchen had a sack of cabbage, eggs, flour, a slab of smoked pork and a crock of dark plum sauce.

Ryota shredded the cabbage the way his mother did, thin as hair.

He mixed it into batter, laid pork on top and flipped the first pancake on the griddle.

Two brothers with bows on their backs drifted in from the hall and watched it sizzle.

They had the same red ears and the same hopeful faces.

"What is it?" the older one asked.

"Okonomiyaki. It means whatever you like, grilled."

"Is it a contract?"

"It's dinner."

By the time the lamps were lit, he'd made sixteen.

The brothers ate four between them and explained that they had never hit a target in their lives.

An old woman who sold candles at the door ate one, wrapped another in a cloth and put it in her basket.

Gautier ate three standing at the counter and didn't say a word until the last one.

"Your room's at the top of the stairs," he said. "The roof leaks over the bed. Sleep the other way round."

The room was the size of a closet, with a straw mattress and a bucket under the drip.

Ryota lay down the other way round and put the empty bento box by his head.

In the castle, Asako would be lying in a bed with silk sheets, sixty days from a mountain.

He had told her he'd come back and check on her.

He had no idea how a Copper card got anyone into a castle.

In the morning a bell clanged in the street, and somebody shouted that the heroes were coming.

Ryota came downstairs with a dish towel over his shoulder.

The whole hall was on its feet.

Four people in polished silver breastplates walked through the door with the knight from the gate behind them.

"By order of the crown, the heroes will take one guild contract in public," the knight announced to the room, "so the city can see them."

She saw Ryota, and her scarred eyebrow went up.

Tsubasa saw him too.

His face lit up with pure joy.

"No way. Discount-kun works here?"

Asako, at the back, lifted her hand halfway in a little wave.

Tsubasa crossed the hall, drew a long sword with a gold hilt, and laid it across the counter in front of Ryota.

"The king gave me this," he said loudly, in Ardescan this time, so the whole room would understand. "I hear you haggle. Go on, then. Make me an offer."

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