Oh, did that sound like they were close to a deal? How very naive of you. This was only the third item out of an itinerary of twenty they were set to bicker over. See, that was the thing about merchants. They were all in competition with one another, even if they were supposed to be tacitly co-operating under the banner of a guild. Thankfully, they didn’t handle what issues one silk merchant had with the new upstart who just waltzed into town. What they did handle was negotiations about prices between other merchant guilds from the other towns. Hey, Fallow was on his route outside of town anyway, and he bumped into representatives of other guilds regularly, why not throw this on top of everything else he did for them? It was not as if he was helping keep the roads safe or anything.