Had Mrs. Macnair just implied she was planning to use the bloodroot to poison someone? Ozymandias wasn't sure he'd heard her correctly, or that he was interpreting her tone the right way. The Macnairs were one of the old wizarding families, imminently respectable, so of course she couldn't be serious. She must have had a dark sense of humor. That, or she was trying to fluster him for her own amusement. Based on what he knew of socialites as a class, that didn't seem incredibly far-fetched. Words were their weapons of choice.

At her question, he glanced down at the quill, as though he'd forgotten how closely he'd put his hand to it (of course he hadn't; making it impossible for her to claim the quill had been entirely the point of this stance). "Actually, perhaps I'll borrow it for a minute or two," he decided, with a quick smile. "There's a pair of self-repairing socks on the next aisle and someone must have walked off with the quill by mistake. I think I'll take this one to go bid on them and be back shortly."

Not that he actually wanted a pair of self-repairing socks; he'd constructed the story about their missing quill. It was the most banal thing he could think of in the moment, though, and absconding with the quill for several minutes might be a good way to get his name back on the bloodroot. Surely she wouldn't be so obvious as to wait here and stake it out.

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