by Lynn Abbey
If he’d wanted to make Mina miserable, Cauvin could have started cursing in the gutter Imperial he remembered from the pits, but making people miserable wasn’t something Cauvin ever wanted to do. He had to be froggin’ mad before he let his temper go because shite for sure, he always regretted losing it afterward. A dream about the Bloody Hand made Cauvin jumpy, not angry. He sought peace with his foster mother:
“Grabar’s a good man. The quarter respects him … and you. When something happens, people come to the stoneyard to talk about it. Just like Batty Dol did this morning.”
Mina swiped her eyes with her sleeve, but not because Cauvin had calmed her. Grabar himself had come through the door, and not two steps behind Grabar came Bec with the egg basket. She wouldn’t let her boy see her crying.
Grabar got the biggest bowl and rashers of crisp bacon laid one by one atop the porridge until the man of the house said stop. Bec would get bacon, too. If there were any rashers left when those two were through, then Cauvin would get another taste. Cauvin’s eyes were on the bacon; he almost missed Bec grabbing for his empty bowl.
There were bowls enough on the sideboard, but the boy would rather have Cauvin’s. Every chance she got, Mina made froggin’ sure Bec knew that Cauvin wasn’t kin, wasn’t even an apprentice or a journeyman with a claim on the stoneyard. The sheep-shite boy was too young still to care about kinship or inheritance. He wanted Cauvin’s bowl for the same reason he wanted Cauvin’s cast-off shirts: anything was better if Cauvin had used it first. When Cauvin looked at Bec, he saw the trust and love he’d never had for himself.
He teased the boy a moment, then surrendered the bowl with a grin.
Bec darted past his father, who sighed heavily but kept hold of his porridge and mug of small beer.
“‘S’gonna be a dead-slow day,” Grabar groused while straddling a table bench. “The Dragon’s loose on the Processional. Even if a man wanted to do an honest day’s work, we can’t get him the stone. And you know that if Mioklas hears about our little problem with bodies piling up at the crossing, there’s no way he’s coming up to settle his account. He’ll ask us to risk our damned necks getting bluestone to him, but that’s different than him paying for it.”
“I could knock on his high door,” Cauvin offered.
He’d been persuading the stoneyard’s laggard customers to pay their debts since Grabar brought him home from the palace. The good people of Sanctuary didn’t know half of what had gone on in the palace while the Hand held it, but they knew better than to argue with anyone who’d survived it.
Grabar waved him off between bites of bacon. “Not today. Mioklas can keep his coin box locked for another day, and we’ll keep our stone. You harness up the mule, instead, and take the wagon out to the old red-walled place. I’ve got a hunch Tobus the tailor’s going to be marrying off his son this winter. His wife won’t take another woman into her kitchen, so Tobus’ll be needing a new house next door to the one he’s got. Sure he’ll want the fronts to match, so you break out ten or twelve paces of those red walls and bring ‘em here.”
Cauvin nodded and tried to hide his disappointment. He’d rather knock on Mioklas’s high door.
“You know the place?” Grabar misinterpreted Cauvin’s hesitation. “I showed it to you once. The roof’s been down for years, and there’s trees older’n you growing in the master’s bedroom.”
“Where we got the bricks for Mistress Glary’s garden?”
“The very same. No sense letting those bricks go to waste in the sun and rain. You knock out enough of those bricks to front Tobus’s new house.”
Cauvin calculated the work and suppressed a groan. As bad as breaking out old stone was, breaking bricks was worse. Stone was harder than mortar, but bricks weren’t. For every hour he spent swinging the mallet, he’d spend three or four chipping mortar away with a chisel.
“There’s bacon for you,” Mina called, as if any number of rashers would make any difference to Cauvin’s shoulders by the end of the day.
Yet, Cauvin would have to be dead before he’d turn down bacon. He left the table to retrieve his treat from the hearth.
“How about me?” Bec asked, and not about the bacon. “I want to help Cauvin smash bricks. Please, Poppa? Please—I’m big enough now.” The boy preened with his skinny arms and mimed a swing with the mallet.
“No,” Mina decreed from the hearth. “Cauvin can work alone. I don’t want my Becvar pretending he’s more bull than man like the two of you—especially not outside the walls. He’s fine-boned, like my father, and not made for heavy work. What if something happened out there beyond the walls?” She shivered dramatically.
“He could chisel mortar off the bricks,” Cauvin suggested.
Bec wouldn’t waste much time working, no matter what, but Cauvin would be glad of his company. The boy had named all the household chickens, and the stories he made up about them were better than the ones Bilibot and Hazard Eprazian told for drinks and padpols in the Lucky Well at the other end of Pyrtanis Street.
“Grabar!” Mina trilled. “I won’t have it! Bad enough when you’re with him in the yard, but Cauvin’s sheep-shite stupid. Becvar could chisel off a finger, and Cauvin wouldn’t notice ‘til he’d bled to death!”
“Calm yourself, wife. The boy’s fingers are safe for another day. Not that they’d be at risk. Like as not, our Bec would jabber like a crow, and Cauvin wouldn’t get a day’s work done.”
Cauvin could have done with a better defense. He could have done with the wits to do something more than smash stone all day. He could have done with lots of things, but he made do without. “Tough cess, pud,” he advised Bec, tousling the boy’s hair as he spoke and nudging Bec’s scowl into a bit of a smile.
“Sweet Sabellia! How many times to I have to tell you—mind your tongue around Becvar. Bad enough you run like a sewer around us who shelter you. Think of his future? What master’ll have him if he runs off like you?”
“Don’t worry, Mama. I remember what you’ve told me about talking to masters and lords and ladies. ‘Yes, my lord’ and ‘as you wish, my lady.’ Cauvin knows I’m no lord or lady—same as you when you call him ‘sheep-shite’ or ‘turd-head’ or when you and Batty get talking about—”
“That’s Mistress Dol to you, young man!” Mina snapped at Bec who rarely heard the edge in his mother’s voice. Then Mina turned on Cauvin. “You’ve got your orders for the day. Go harness the mule and get gone. You’re naught but a bad influence around here.”
“Fine!” he snarled on his way to the door. “I’m leaving! Leaving for good and forever. Got that? Find someone else to smash out your red bricks, someone with a priest’s tongue in his head!”
Cauvin hated her just then, hated her as much as he hated the Hand and everyone else who’d ever pushed him around with fists or words. He had a bad temper—that was no secret—and he had the scars to remind him what happened when he lost it. He was through the door and letting it slam when Bec caught the wood.
“You’ll be back for supper?”
Gods knew where Bec had gotten those huge dark eyes—not from his parents, for froggin’ sure. He could charm a snake out of its scales and have it hissing thanks in the bargain. Bec’s soft-eyed smile wouldn’t last the night on the Hill or in the Maze—and that was another reason the boy could get whatever he wanted from Cauvin.
“I’ll be back by sundown,” he promised, and tousled the dark hair again.
“I’ll help you harness Flower?”
“Nah—” Cauvin whispered.
“I’ll tell you a story … a new story—”
“Later, Bec. There’s no time now. Get back to the table and make your mother happy.”
“How come I have to do all the hard work around here?”
“Sh-h-sh, and get your ass back in there.”
Cauvin led Flower in her harness out to the wagon and began attaching the traces. Bec waved to him from the far corner of the work shed, where he was practicing his letter
s on a loose slab of slate. No shortage of writing material in a froggin’ stoneyard.
The boy had shown Cauvin how to write his name in both Imperial and Ilsigi characters. Mina wouldn’t have approved, but Mina didn’t know. She didn’t know that sheep-shite Cauvin could read numbers and a few Ilsigi words—the sort merchants and mongers wrote on the slates tacked to their market stalls. The stoneyard’s account book, which Mina kept in the language she knew best, was safe. Cauvin couldn’t read a froggin’ Imperial word—except the name Bec had taught him. But Mina was only fooling herself if she thought she was going to stay in charge of her son’s life for very much longer. The boy was froggin’ clever, cleverer than his parents put together, not to mention a sheep-shite stone-smasher named Cauvin.
The previous spring, when it had rained so much they’d thought they’d all drown, Bec had come up with an idea to channel the roof runoff into a covered cistern. It had taken Cauvin three tries to get the cistern built right—the boy didn’t understand that wood bent and swelled when it got wet until Cauvin explained it to him—but the whole idea had been Bec’s, and they’d been froggin’ sure glad of the cistern’s clean water a month before, when the well went rank.
Cauvin went to get his tools. Grabar intercepted him in the shed, where neither Mina nor Bec would witness their conversation.
“Don’t go taking the wife to heart, son.”
“I’m not your son, Grabar; your wife froggin’ sure never lets me forget that.”
“She frets over the boy, but she don’t mean no harm by it. Those bodies in the crossing this morning. She fancies she should’ve known the sparker. You know how it is: We all got things we don’t talk about, don’t think about neither—’til something up and grabs your balls.”
Cauvin shouldered out of the shed with an armload of chisels. “Now Mina’s got froggin’ balls?”
“Cauvin.” Grabar’s tone pled for peace. “Cauvin, the stoneyard’s yours after I go. I said you were my son when I brought you home from the palace. I meant it then, and nothing’s changed since. You’re the eldest, Cauvin—the burden falls on you because you’re the one who’s strong enough to bear it. Bec’s your brother. If I’m not here, you’ll see to it that he’s set up someplace that suits him … and you’ll take care of the wife—because the wife’s your mother, too, not just the boy’s. You’re my son. The wife’s your mother. The boy’s your brother.”
The clatter of wood and metal as Cauvin dumped the tools in the cart served as his reply.
“You’re family, Cauvin. The wife knows it. There’d be no talk of jewelers and apothecaries but for what you’ve done these last ten years. You’ll inherit the yard, Cauvin, I swear it. The quarter knows; they’ll stand up for you … all the way to the palace.”
Cauvin took the mule’s lead rope and got the cart moving toward the yard gate.
“I’m an old man now, Cauvin. I can’t run the yard without you. You go now, and it won’t be just the wife and me who’ll suffer. The boy’ll suffer. You know he’s not made for smashing stone and brick. He’ll break early. You don’t want that, Cauvin. I know you don’t.”
There was a desperate edge to Grabar’s voice that burrowed under Cauvin’s skin. “You want me to smash out those froggin’ redwall bricks or you gonna stand in front of the froggin’ gate all day?”
“I’m trying to ease your mind.”
“Froggin’ sure, I’m family, Grabar. If you weren’t passing me off as your sheep-shite son, you’d have to pay me wages, and that’d put a froggin’ quick end to Bec’s apprenticeship. No froggin’ goldsmith or ’pothecary’s gonna take him for less than a fistful of soldats—old-fashioned, froggin’ sweet on the tongue, silver soldats. Or some nice gold coronations from an emperor who didn’t cut his coins with copper. If you had ’em, you wouldn’t be sending me out to smash bricks froggin’ nobody wants. An’ if the palace knew you were hoarding coins ‘stead of paying your froggin’ taxes, they’d be down here digging up the garden and knocking on the rafters.”
Grabar’s mouth worked, but no sounds came out. They’d never talked about where he kept his little hoard. Maybe he thought Cauvin didn’t know. Froggin’ sure, if he’d chosen better hiding places, Cauvin wouldn’t.
“Froggin’ sure, I’m family,” Cauvin repeated. “Up to my froggin’ neck I’m family.”
He reached for the bar across the gate, and Grabar, at last, got out of his way. At an arm’s length, people usually got out of Cauvin’s way. They usually got hurt if they didn’t. His temper made life simple, not good. Time and froggin’ time again, Cauvin found himself too far gone and looking for a way back.
“I’ll be home for froggin’ supper,” he snarled over Flower’s withers as he led the mule out of the yard.
Grabar got the last words, but they were lost in the scraping of wood against dirt as the gate closed. Alone on Pyrtanis Street, Cauvin endured pangs of regret and echoes of the things he could have said to calm his foster parents. They were both good people—better than a sheep-shite like him deserved, better than he’d have had if his blood-kin had shown up at the palace to claim him ten years before.
Lost in mulling thoughts as he walked, Cauvin was blind to the street around him. He didn’t notice the city guards until he was between the pair of them in the crossing where the bodies had been found.
“Hey, Cauvin! Where you headed?”
The men of both the guard and the watch knew Cauvin by name, and he knew them by type. No matter who sat in the palace, order got maintained by city-bred bruisers—big men, mostly, tough, and just enough older than Cauvin that they’d stayed clear of the pits even if they hadn’t always stayed clear of the Hand.
“Takin’ the mule for a walk,” Cauvin replied as the more grizzled of the pair reached into the cart to peel the canvas back from his smashing tools. “It’s too nice to keep her in the yard all day.”
Steel gray clouds were scudding in off the ocean, driven by a raw, southwesterly wind. It didn’t take froggin’ sorcery to know that the warm days of autumn were giving way to the storms of winter. Like as not Cauvin would be warming his blankets tonight with coals cadged from Mina’s hearth.
“Mind your own business, pud.”
“Always do, same as you. So, who got killed here last night? Mina says you sheep-shites hauled off two bodies.”
“Not us,” the second guard grumbled. “We’re lookin’ for the bits that might’ve got left behind.”
“Find any?”
“Not yet,” the grizzled guard said. “Pork all. We’ll be here the whole porkin’ day.”
Cauvin thought he looked familiar; if he was, then his name was Gorge and he was honest, for the guard. He didn’t know the second man from a shadow.
“Somebody important, then?”
“Atredan Larris Serripines,” not-Gorge spat, as if the name said everything that needed saying.
And, in a way, it did. Mina was right—a Land’s End sparker had come to his final grief a few hundred paces from Grabar’s stoneyard. The Enders were squirrelly. Most of them never set foot in Sanctuary. They let their gold speak for them, their gold and the Irrune.
“Good cess to you, then,” Cauvin gibed. “You’re froggin’ sure going to need it. City’s got to suffer if the Enders do. What about the other corpse? Don’t suppose the sparker slew the pud who slew him?”
“Not a porkin’ chance. The other body was one of ours,” Gorge said, throwing the canvas back over Cauvin’s tools. “Believe it or not, someone finally killed the froggin’ Torch.”
“Froggin’ shite!” Cauvin exclaimed with genuine surprise. “I figured him for dead years ago.”
Gorge shook his head. “Don’t get out much, do you pud? He was stuck to Nadalya like her porkin’ shadow an’ he stuck to Arizak the same way once he came back to Sanctuary. Can’t figure what him and a shite-face sparker were doing in this porkin’ quarter middle of last night.”
“Going to the palace,” Cauvin replied and wished he hadn
’t, by the way both guards stopped cold to stare at him. “Any dog knows the fastest way from the East Gate to the palace is up the Stairs and across the Promise to the Gods’ Gate. How much do you get out?”
Gorge and not-Gorge exchanged heavy glances.
“I was sleeping alone in my froggin’ little bed last night,” Cauvin insisted honestly. “Talk to Grabar. Shalpa’s eyes—I’ve got no cause against the Torch.”
“You said you thought he was dead,” not-Gorge reminded Cauvin.
“Lay off him, Ustic,” Gorge commanded, then speared Cauvin with a stare. “Killer wasn’t you, not unless you’ve taken to throwing Imperial steel.”
“Shite, no!” He carried a knife—just about everyone did—but it wasn’t his weapon of choice. When Cauvin got into a right—which was more often than either he or Grabar would have preferred—he relied on his fists. “Imperial steel—that’s too rich for my blood. You’re looking for Enders, or one of your own.” He wished he’d swallowed that remark, too.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Gorge snapped. “Maybe you and your shemule better keep on walking now.”
Ustic added, “Don’t go picking up anything that’s not yours.”
“Never do,” Cauvin promised with a grin as he got Flower moving again.
It was an open secret that Grabar sold scavenged stone and brick. Grabar froggin’ sure sold new goods when he could get them, but the nearest stone quarries were deep in Ilsigi territory, and the local clay pits were flooded three seasons out of four, so Grabar froggin’ sure sent Cauvin out scavenging three days out of four.
Long before Cauvin’s mother ran afoul of his froggin’ father, Grabar had worked for the Imperials scavenging stone from Sanctuary’s old Ilsigi-built wall for reuse in the higher, longer new wall that was supposed to keep the city safe from the hazards that had laid Imperial Ranke low. Froggin’ sure, the new wall hadn’t protected Sanctuary from sea storms, plague, or Dyareela’s Bloody Hand.
Grabar said Sanctuary had shrunk by half since he’d been a boy; and by all the empty, gutted buildings Cauvin saw, Grabar was overly generous. Whole quarters were abandoned and ripe for scavenging—if they’d ever held anything worth scavenging. The best pickings were outside the froggin’ walls, where the rich folk once lived. Their sheep-shite gold hadn’t protected them any better than walls had protected Sanctuary.
