Thrown Out of the Hero Summons for a Worthless Haggling Skill, He Struck a Deal With the Dragon novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Haggle
Summoned off a bullet train with four strangers, Ryota draws a peddler's skill, sees the crown's side of the heroes' oath is blank, refuses to swear and is thrown out, then haggles the king's purse at the gate and pays for it with his mother's voice.
The crystal on the brass stand was the size of a melon, and when the man in the track jacket touched it, it blazed gold.
"Sword Saint," said the old man in the gray robe.
The nobles in the hall clapped.
Ryota Kishibe stood fourth in line with his mother's bento box still in his hand.
Twenty minutes ago he'd been in seat 7D of the 7:12 bullet train out of Shin-Osaka, peeling the lid off it.
Then the car filled with light, and the five passengers nearest the door landed in the Kingdom of Ardesca, as its heroes.
The man in the track jacket had bleached hair and teeth so white they looked expensive.
"Tsubasa Mikami," he told the line in Japanese, arms spread. "Two hundred thousand followers. Please tell me somebody's filming this."
The salaryman from Nagoya got Great Shield, and the student from Sendai got Great Sage and cried.
The woman ahead of Ryota wore a beige cardigan and a child's hair tie with a plastic strawberry around her wrist.
On the train she'd been doing a crossword, and she'd lent him her pen.
She touched the crystal, and it went white as milk.
"Holy Light," said the robed man. "A healer."
She looked past the nobles at the king.
He sat on a gold chair on a raised dais, with a heavy circlet and a ring on every finger.
"Excuse me," she said. "I'm Asako Nomura. I have a six-year-old daughter in Nara. When can I go home?"
"When the Ash Dragon is dead, my lady," said the king.
He smiled at her, and nothing else in his face moved.
Ryota stepped up and laid his palm on the crystal.
It gave off a weak brown glow.
The robed man who bent to read it was bald, thin as a coat rack and inky-fingered, and looked at least eighty.
"Haggle," he said.
The hall went quiet.
"Lord Morvaine?" said the king.
"A peddler's skill, Majesty. Half the cabbage sellers in the Lowmarket have it. It tells them when a customer will pay more."
Tsubasa laughed first. "You got a discount skill? Discount-kun!"
The nobles laughed because the Sword Saint had.
Ryota had haggled at the counter of his mother's secondhand shop in Osaka since he was nine.
"At least it's a skill I've actually used," he said.
Servants set a black stone the size of a loaf of bread at the foot of the steps.
"An oath-stone," Morvaine said. "Swear on it, and it binds you. Break your word, and it takes the forfeit."
"Swear to climb the Cinder Peak on the Day of Ash, the first day of winter, sixty days from now. Slay the dragon, and the crown will send you home."
Tsubasa slapped his hand on it first, then the salaryman and the student.
Asako held her strawberry hair tie for a long moment, then put her hand down too.
Ryota laid his hand on the stone.
Words appeared in the air above it, in plain Japanese.
[You swear: to climb the Cinder Peak on the Day of Ash. Forfeit: your life. The crown swears: nothing.]
Nobody else in the hall was looking at the air.
He took his hand off the stone.
"Excuse me, Your Majesty," he said, in the kingdom's language, which he somehow spoke now. "Your side's blank."
"I beg your pardon?"
"We put our lives on this. You put nothing on it. Sending us home isn't in the oath at all."
Morvaine's face didn't change. "The crown's word needs no stone."
"Then it won't mind going on one."
"Oh my god," Tsubasa said. "He's reading the fine print on a quest."
The whole hall laughed again.
Asako wasn't laughing. She was staring at her own hand.
"Swear," said the king, "or get out of my castle."
Ryota looked at the stone, at the four who had already sworn, and at Asako's strawberry.
"I'll get out," he said.
A tall knight in a long blue coat walked him out, with ash-blond hair cut at the jaw and a scar through her left eyebrow.
As they passed the line, Asako caught his sleeve.
"Kishibe-san," she whispered in Japanese. "Is it really blank?"
"It's blank," he whispered back. "Don't swear to anything else. I'll come back and check on you."
Nobody else in the hall understood a word.
At the castle gate the knight held out a leather purse sealed with red wax.
"The king's mercy," she said. "Thirty silver."
"For what?"
"Taking it is your yes. It was sworn on the throne-room stone before I brought it down."
Words hung over the purse in the same plain Japanese.
Thirty silver for his place on the heroes' roll, and his word that he would never pass this gate again.
"What roll?" he asked.
"The list of heroes. You come off it." Her jaw tightened. "I've waited my whole life to walk heroes to that mountain. Today I'm walking you to a gate."
Ryota looked at the purse the way his mother looked at a broken rice cooker someone wanted ten thousand yen for.
"Twenty silver," he said. "And I keep the gate."
"Nobody changes a sworn price."
"Then saying yes costs you nothing. And it saves your king ten silver."
She stared at him, and one corner of her mouth went up.
"Fine. Yes."
The wax seal went soft and pressed itself flat again with a new mark in it.
Ten silver coins slid out of the purse into her open palm.
"That's the king's seal," she said. "It changed."
[Commission: one memory of home.]
He thought of his mother calling up the shop stairs that dinner was ready, as she had every night of his life.
He could see the narrow stairs and her flowered apron.
He couldn't hear her voice at all.
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