Elias delivered the finished attire himself, staggering up the tailor's narrow stairs with two heavy bundles wrapped in oiled paper, his hangover apparently cured by the promise of double wages.
"Charcoal wool, boiled leather at the joints, exactly as you asked, Uncle Faust," he said, laying the bundles across the cutting table with something close to reverence. "Though I confess I don't know what manner of clergyman needs his sleeves cut for a fencer's reach."
"The discreet sort do," Faust said, already shrugging out of his travel-worn coat.
Isfrid unwrapped his own bundle in stony silence, held the coat up to the weak morning light, and grunted his approval before he could stop himself. The cut was severe and handsome, dark enough to disappear into any shadow, loose enough at the shoulder to draw a blade without ripping a seam. Despite himself, he looked almost like a nobleman's bastard heading out to fight a duel. rather than a boy dressed for a very long lie.
"Well?" Faust turned a slow circle, settling his collar.
"You look like a raven that's swallowed a bishop," Isfrid muttered.
"High praise from someone who spent last month smelling of old canal water."
Elias, wisely, excused himself to fetch a second breakfast, leaving them alone with the folded parchment resting on the table between them.
Faust had not yet let Isfrid read it in full. He slid it across now, watching his godson's face with open amusement as the boy's eyes moved down the page.
The seal itself was unremarkable, a disc of red wax pressed with the twin-keyed crest of the Fürstbischof's tribunal, but the writing beneath it was not.
It ran four lines in a clerk's brisk Gothic cursive: Unrestricted authority to investigate, interrogate, and adjudicate matters of heresy, witchcraft, and demonic influence, within the bounds of the Inquisition rule, at the bearer's sole discretion.
Two names were inked beneath the seal in a clerk's careful hand.
Doctor Johann Faustus. Isfrid Ernst Frost, aide.
Isfrid set the parchment down very carefully, as though it might catch fire.
"You put myname on it."
"Naturally. A magician traveling with an unnamed, heavily armed young man draws considerably more suspicion than one traveling with a documented aide of the Church."
"Faust." Isfrid's voice had gone thin. "Do you understand what this is?" He dragged both hands down his face. "I am going to Hell. I am going to Hell for this specifically, separately, from whatever else damns me."
"You worry too much for a man who wrestles frost dragons for sport."
"That was one dragon, and it was already dead, and Grandfather made me do it as a rite—" Isfrid stopped himself, visibly deciding this was not the argument he wanted to be having. He picked the parchment back up, turned it over as if the reverse side might absolve him of something, and set it down again with a defeated sigh. "You're actually pleased about this."
"I am delighted," Faust admitted freely. "Do you have any notion how many doors close to a demonologist, godson? Officials ask for papers. Innkeepers ask for papers. Suspicious mothers of pretty daughters ask for papers, and one hundred years has not made me any less fond of pretty daughters." He folded the parchment along its worn crease and tucked it into his breast pocket, over the place where Elena's pendant sat cold against his chest. "Besides. If God is so foolish as to let a half-demon carry 'His' own seal unquestioned, I consider that 'His' error, not mine."
Isfrid opened his mouth, closed it and reached for the second parcel.
He shook out the rough grey traveling cloak, then lifted the carved walking cane. A crust of rime clung to the dragon-head pommel, cold enough to bead the damp air in the heated room.
He held it a moment longer than strictly necessary before slinging it through his belt.
"Where to?" he asked.
Faust considered the window, the pale Thuringian sky, and pulled his gloves taut over his knuckles
"Erfurt," he said. "It's the nearest tribunal large enough to have a genuine backlog of cases no one wants. We might find something there." He clapped his godson once warmly on the shoulder. "Come. Let's go be servants of God, godson. I hear the pay is terrible and the company worse."