by Lynn Abbey
“He gave you the coins for saving his life while he was praying to the old gods?”
“No,” Cauvin corrected and cursed himself a heartbeat later: Bec’s conclusion was simpler—better—than the truth he’d condemned himself to tell. “The old pud wasn’t praying. He was—He’d been looking for whoever killed those two puds at the crossing, but he got himself froggin’ set upon and robbed. He was beat-up pretty bad when I found him. I would’ve taken him to the froggin’ palace, but nothing would satisfy him, except I took him out to the froggin’ red-walled ruins—”
“But you said you never went to the red-walled ruins. I heard Poppa say you didn’t bring back any bricks!”
“Look, Bec, I’m telling you the truth, so froggin’ keep quiet! You want to listen or you want to, maybe, stumble on your way down the ladder?”
The boy blanched and didn’t say another word until Cauvin had cobbled together a version of his misadventures in the ruins and at the Broken Mast. He left out his meeting with Leorin at the Vulgar Unicorn.
“It’s a good thing it’s turning cold—” Cauvin concluded, “or we’d be smelling that rotten blackfish up here. Probably will be anyway when the sun comes up.”
“You went to the Broken Mast?” Bec asked with wide-eyed astonishment. “That’s a bugger’s den.”
“Who told you that?” Cauvin couldn’t hide his surprise. “Who tells you sheep-shite nonsense like that?”
“Nobody tells me. I keep quiet and listen whenever people come to buy stone, and especially when Momma has me go to market with her. Teera the baker says that Cervinish would rather spend his nights at the Broken Mast with the seamen than with his new wife—”
It was Cauvin’s turn to gape. When he’d been Bec’s age there wasn’t anything he didn’t know about the things men did alone, with women, with other men, and sometimes with boys who weren’t strong enough to defend themselves. But Bec wasn’t living in the streets or under the Hand. There was no reason, Cauvin hoped, to think he understood the rumors he’d repeated. There better not be. Cauvin didn’t care what Cervinish did or didn’t do with his wife, but if that froggin’ little man had laid a finger on Bec!
Some of Cauvin’s anger got into his voice. “Don’t go repeating sheep-shite stories you froggin’ don’t understand. You hear me?” he snarled.
“But I do understand,” the boy protested. “There’s never any women at the Broken Mast, just like there’s never any women on a ship. Seamen and sailors, they’ve got no use—” The boy’s words caught in his throat and when he spoke again it was in a whisper. “You’re not a seaman, are you, Cauvin? You and Leorin—you’d make babies with her if she’d let you?”
Cauvin couldn’t think of a way to answer that question without backing himself into a froggin’ deep, dark corner. “Froggin’ gods all be damned, Bec, the—” Cauvin barely kept himself from blurting out the geezer’s name. “The old man told me to go to the Broken Mast to redeem a box—that box, the one you’ve put back together—so I’d have the coins to buy him froggin’ parchment, ink, and quills tomorrow morning before I go out to the red-walled ruins.”
“The old man, he’s a seaman?”
“Froggin’ gods—he’s an old man, the oldest I’ve ever seen. His pizzle shriveled up years ago.”
“You saw it?”
“No!” Cauvin raked his hair in frustration. “Look, he gave me a token, I took it to the tavern, and redeemed the box. That’s froggin’ it. There’s nothing more to tell.”
“You were gone a long time.”
“I stopped at the Unicorn on my way home. To see Leorin.”
“Did you make babies?”
The ale Cauvin had drunk at the Unicorn was souring in his gut. He covered his eyes and shook his head repeatedly. “That’s not a question you ask someone, Bec. Not anyone, not froggin’ ever. It’s late, too late. Mina will have our froggin’ hides if she finds out you’re outside the house.”
“Did you?”
“Are you listening to me? That’s no froggin’ concern of yours.”
“She’s mean, Cauvin. Reenie’s real mean. I bet you told her about the old man, though, and getting the box from the Mast and the coins.”
Cauvin lowered his hand. “Yes, I told Leorin about the old man. I showed her the box. We’ve pledged to each other. We don’t keep secrets.”
“And she still didn’t let you make babies with her? Even after she’d seen silver and gold together?”
If it hadn’t been his nine-year-old foster brother asking outrageous and barbed questions, Cauvin would have been pounding his questioner’s skull against the nearest wall. As it was, Cauvin could barely keep his hands at his sides. “All right—since you’re so froggin’ determined—when Leorin saw how much was in the box, she wanted us to leave Sanctuary right away—tonight, in fact.”
The boy was at an age where words could hurt more than blows. He shrank in his skin, and whispered, “What did you tell her?”
“That I had to come back to the froggin’ stoneyard.”
Bec’s mouth worked, but moments passed before he made a sound. “You’re leaving, Cauvin? You’re really leaving and not coming back forever?”
By the way Bec glanced around the loft, a stranger might have thought he was a cat cornered and looking for a way to escape. Cauvin knew better: The boy was checking the whereabouts of the few possessions Cauvin called his own. They were few enough in number and less in value. Had Cauvin meant to leave Sanctuary, he’d never have bothered to collect them, but for the boy’s sake, he made a different excuse—
“I gave my froggin’ word to that old pud. I told him I’d be back in the morning with his froggin’ parchment and quills. Gods all be damned, Bec—he’s an old pud. Got no business spending a night like this in a roofless ruin. I left him with fire and wood for the night, but sure as shite, he’s wounded in the leg and can’t stand to tend it—” In his mind’s eye Cauvin saw the Torch sprawled helpless and dying on the cold ground. “I should’ve taken him to the palace. He wouldn’t go but, frog all the rotted gods, I should’ve just drug him; he couldn’t have froggin’ stopped me.”
“You should’ve gotten him blankets and a flask of brandy to keep himself warm if you were gonna leave him out in the ruins all night.”
Cauvin nodded absently. He owed the Torch an armload of the best blankets and brandy in Sanctuary along with the best parchment, best quills, and ink. The old pud had made him a rich man.
“What did Reenie say when you told her about the old man?”
“She didn’t think I needed to come back here, Bec. Sure as shite she didn’t tell me to check on the geezer,” Cauvin conceded.
He could purchase brandy at any tavern, but Mina made their blankets, and he couldn’t very well ask her for help.
“I’ll bet she did. I’ll bet she asked if he had any more boxes filled with gold and silver.”
Cauvin recalled a blind man south of the market who bought and sold secondhand clothing.
“She did, didn’t she? I’ll bet she got mad at you when you wouldn’t do what she wanted, and she wouldn’t let you make babies with her, would she? But if someone—not you—offered her one of those silver coins—”
Cauvin made a fist. The boy gaped, and after a moment of silence it was Cauvin who felt ashamed.
“Leorin didn’t get mad. It wasn’t like that. When she saw the coins, she wanted to leave Sanctuary tonight. And when I said that I couldn’t just up and leave, she froggin’ started to cry.”
“I’ll bet that’s not all she did.”
“Stop betting. You don’t have any money. You can’t ever afford to lose money you don’t have.”
Bec was unimpressed by Cauvin’s pearls of wisdom. “You’ve given your word to Poppa and Momma, too—you promised to be their son and to take care of me no matter what else. You can’t leave Sanctuary.”
Cauvin met Bec’s eyes and saw not just a nine-year-old boy, but Leorin and all the countless others—includin
g the froggin’ Torch—whose wits were quicker and sharper than his. He swept the coins up and squeezed them so tight his fingers hurt. “I said I wasn’t going anywhere, not tonight, not tomorrow, not froggin’ ever!”
“’Cept out to the old red-walled ruins to see the old man … after you buy him his parchment and quills and blankets and brandy and anything else he might need.”
“Yeah,” Cauvin conceded in defeat.
“And me. You’ll take me with you.”
“Hell no.”
“Hell yes,” Bec insisted, his mood shifting like quicksilver. “What do you know about buying parchment, eh? Momma buys a full skin every season—for the yard accounts. I go with her, so I know what to look for. You don’t. You’ll get cheated. They’ll offer you the cheap stuff—goat hides with splits and cracks. That’s all right for doing accounts, but not for someone from the palace. And quills! You don’t know anything about quills. You’ve got to be careful. The best quills come from a white goose, but the scriveners, they’ll try to cheat you with bleached feathers. A buyer’s got to know what he’s looking for … you don’t, but I do.”
Bec was right: Cauvin didn’t know about quills, but he did remember that the Torch had given him similar instructions. “What froggin’ difference can it make what froggin’ color the froggin’ bird was?”
The boy gave him a withering stare. “It makes all the froggin’ difference.”
“Don’t curse.”
“The white-goose feathers are thicker and stronger. They squeeze up a lot more ink. You didn’t know that, did you, Cauvin? I know you didn’t. Take me with you tomorrow. I can help. Honest. I know where all the good stuff is. Momma takes me everywhere. I watch. I listen. I remember.” Bec tapped the side of his head.
“Name me a good ’changer, then, on this side of the Processional—someone we don’t usually go to. Someone who’ll give me a fair exchange on all these bright silver soldats, and won’t go running to Grabar the moment I walk out of his shop.”
The boy’s shoulders sagged, as Cauvin had anticipated, but not for long. “Swift the blacksmith, he couldn’t change all of them at once, and not the golden ones at all, but he could change a few soldats.” An’ he won’t tell Father, ’cause Father says he still owes for the wall behind his forge.”
It was a good suggestion, though Cauvin thought he would have remembered that Swift would sometimes melt small amounts of silver in his forge and take the purified metal to the palace for reminting. “Thanks, I’ll pay my friend a visit. I was only going to change one soldat tomorrow anyway.”
“Two,” Bec corrected. “You’ll need one for the parchment, quills, and ink. You gotta have ink, less you think he’s going to use his own blood. And for Batty Dol, too, for blankets. She’s got piles and piles of old cloth in her pantry—collects it from the Enders, fixes what she can, makes candle wicks and stuff from the rest. Some of it stinks a little, but we can air it out at the red-walled ruins. The other soldat’s for the brandy—can’t be pouring the Well’s rotgut down his throat, not if he’s an old man used to the palace. And for food, too. If the old man’s not dead, you’ve got to feed him, and you can’t snitch from Momma. She’ll spot it right away.”
Bec was right about Mina and maybe the brandy, but not Batty Dol. “Batty’ll tell everyone, starting with your mother.”
“Not if we tell her it’s a surprise. She’ll stay quiet for a day, then she’ll forget.”
“Not ‘we.’”
“Then I’ll tell. I’ll tell Poppa everything—about the old man and his treasure, and how you set him up out at the red-walled ruins instead of smashing bricks. And how you went to the Broken Mast and what goes on there and that you’re planning to run out on him and Momma and me.”
“You’d be telling lies, Bec. The fish—” He started to say the fish would get him while he slept, but he knew too much for those old threats.
The boy stuck out his tongue before Cauvin thought up a new threat.
“It’s your word against mine, an’ I can tell a better lie than you can tell the truth. But I won’t, if you take me with you. Please, Cauvin. Please? I won’t make any trouble; I swear it. I’ll swear anything you ask. Just take me out to the red-walled ruins? Let me meet the old man who gave you the box? Momma never lets me do anything exciting.”
Cauvin weighed the trouble the boy would be against the froggin’ trouble his tales could make at the stoneyard. Bec could tell a damned lie better than Cauvin could tell the froggin’ truth. And if the geezer were still alive, then the boy could tote and fetch for him while Cauvin smashed bricks out of the wall. It wasn’t as if a few coins, even a few gold coins, meant he didn’t have to work for his living. “All right. You can come—”
The boy whooped. Cauvin quieted him with an upraised finger.
“You can come if Mina and Grabar agree. I’m not stealing you out there, and you froggin’ remember what they said this morning. If either one of them says no, you’re staying here, and it’s not my fault. You understand that, Bec: It’s not my froggin’ fault, so you keep quiet with your froggin’ lies.”
Unfazed by Cauvin’s conditions, Bec declared, “You leave Momma and Poppa to me!” before he leapt at his foster brother’s waist—half hug, half wrestle, all enthusiasm.
It was no contest, or it shouldn’t have been, but Cauvin let the boy back him across the loft. He remembered himself at Bec’s age: alone on the streets, ripe for the Hands to pluck. Bec wouldn’t have gotten caught by the Hands; he was too clever, too charming. He’d have found his way into one of the houses that kept their children close.
Cauvin wrapped his hands beneath Bec’s armpits and hoisted him up into the rafters. He could feel the boy’s scrawny ribs beneath his palms. A little effort—or even an accident—and those bones would break like kindling sticks. Mina worried about her son, and rightly so. Without the love and strength of his family, Bec wouldn’t make it through a hard winter. He wasn’t built for hard times.
Cauvin lowered Bec to the floor again. “Now—get out of here! Sure as shite, it’s hours past midnight and you’ve got work to do tomorrow! Get back to your own froggin’ bed and for gods’ sake don’t get froggin’ caught!”
The boy was all smiles and confidences as he disappeared down the loft ladder. Cauvin kept an ear out for sounds of trouble, but there was only silence. He blew out the lamp and crawled into his nest of straw and cloth, expecting to lie there, wide-awake, until dawn. But sleep caught Cauvin from behind, and the next thing he knew one of the roosters had crowed, and the loft was filled with gray dawnlight.
An ice scum had formed overnight in the trough. Cauvin broke it with his fist. He shook like a wet dog while he washed the night from his face and mouth. Old Hazard Eprazian up at the Well, they told stories about Sanctuary before the Hand seized it, when there was a mage’s guild south of the palace. There were so many hazard-mages at the guild and they were so powerful that Sanctuary’s winters were warm.
Ice never thickened on open water, and snow never fell.
Cauvin believed those tales about as much as he believed Batty Dol’s tales about her dead husband sitting at the foot of her bed each night. In his experience, dead was dead, and Sanctuary’s winters were froggin’ cold enough to turn whole men into shivering eunuchs.
Grabar was already up and keeping warm by squaring stone. No bitter water for him on mornings like this. If the stoneyard’s master washed between now and spring, he’d do it from buckets his wife heated at her hearth or down at the public baths in the Tween. He chuckled when a shivering Cauvin joined him beside a heap of unsquared stone.
“Cold enough for you yet, lad?”
Cauvin ignored the gibe. Let Grabar have his memories of mild winters; he remembered the Hands and the pits. For ten years he’d never washed except in the rain. Shivering was a small enough price to pay to feel clean every morning.
“Thought I’d go out to the red-walled ruins this morning—” He’d almost said back out to the re
d-walled ruins. “I’ll smash out the bricks I didn’t get yesterday—unless you’ve got plans for Flower and the cart?”
“You take the mule and the cart and go about yesterday’s business. That’ll be fine. I’m not going to be making deliveries across the Processional ’til that damned Dragon leaves town. No deliveries, no business, no money neither. You run into some merchant who wants you to do a day’s work for him, that’ll be fine, too.”
Cauvin didn’t mention Bec. He was counting on Mina to crush the boy’s dreams. But Bec was grinning ear to ear when Cauvin came into the kitchen, and Mina was packing a basket with food.
Froggin’ truth to tell, the boy came in useful throughout that morning, though not at the forge. Swift was the closest Cauvin came to a friend on Pyrtanis Street. They were a lot alike—wary young men who got by on hard work rather than cleverness—though Swift hadn’t fallen into the Hands’ grip. Swift held three of the Torch’s soldats between fingers that were half again as thick as Cauvin’s. He set them gently in one pan of a swing scale and dribbled pellets of iron into the other pan until both pans were level beside each other.
“Where’d you say you got these?” Swift asked, swirling the pellets back into a sack.”
“I didn’t. How many padpols?”
Swift scowled. “If they’re as pure as they look, there’s as much silver in each of them as there is in one of Arizak’s shaboozh. Course, I’d have to melt them and measure them again to know if they’re that pure.”
“Go ahead, but give me an advance—how about twenty padpols?” It was a generous exchange, though merely fair if Swift were right about the coins’ purity.
Swift was a fair man and a friend. He gave Cauvin twenty-five padpols with a promise of more once he’d melted and measured the purified soldats. They sealed their bargain with a handshake, and Cauvin left Swift’s forge with a fistful of gritty coins thumping against his thigh and Bec yanking on his sleeve.
“You should’ve held out for more. If he was willing to give you twenty-five he’d’ve been willing to give you thirty.”
