Sanctuary

by Lynn Abbey

  By then, Cauvin’s heart beat so furiously that his hands shook. He kept the cloak around his shoulders. Froggin’ sure he wouldn’t let the regulars catch him fumbling the knots holding it closed.

  Mimise, the tall, rangy wench who slept in the room beside Leorin’s, reached Cauvin first. She plunked a brimming mug of ale on the table and stayed to stare.

  “Reenie’s stone-smasher. As Ils will be my judge, I didn’t believe my eyes,” she declared with her slow, Twandan drawl. “What happened to you?”

  Cauvin took a deep breath, and said, “I lost a fight with the city guard.”

  Mimise propped a hand on her hip and leaned away from it. “If that’s what comes of losing to the guard, then we’ve all been playing this game wrong. Reenie’s out back. You want me to get her—or has that changed along with the rest of you?”

  “It hasn’t,” Cauvin answered. He broke Mimise’s stare by adding: “And it won’t, either.”

  He was calmer after the Twandan left and shed his cloak confidently. Two other wenches found reasons to walk toward his table. They hadn’t cared when their sister in service was less than faithful to a sheep-shite stone-smasher, but let him show up in a pale linen shirt and a substantial cloak—Suddenly they were ready to freshen his mug before he’d taken a sip from it. Each offered to fetch Leorin, but only after telling him that she’d been with another man earlier in the day.

  Still, flattery was pleasant, and Cauvin was listening to the second wench—her name was Rose or Rosa or Rosy, and she couldn’t be a day over fourteen—talk about her life at the Unicorn when Leorin emerged from the storeroom. She raked the commons with her eyes and smiled when she found Cauvin. Then she saw Rose, and the smile vanished. Cauvin could have warned Rose that the storm outside was nothing compared to the one marching across the commons, but that would only get him in trouble with his beloved, and no warning was going to spare Rose. The girl yelped and overturned an empty mug when Leorin’s hands clamped down on her shoulders like eagles’ claws.

  Besides, there was no flattery to compare with Leorin caushing a rival.

  “They’re looking for someone to clean up out back.”

  Leorin’s voice was cold as winter, and her fingers were white. She wasn’t at all gentle shoving Rose toward the storeroom, then she flowed into the empty chair like a cat. With a changer’s narrowed eyes, Leorin sized up Cauvin’s new shirt, his freshly trimmed hair, the heavy cloak draped over the third chair.

  Shite for sure, Leorin looked worried, and worry was not one of Leorin’s usual expressions. Cauvin could have repeated what he’d told Mimise and would eventually have told Rose—he wasn’t interested in other women—but silence had served him well lately, and there was no reason to change tactics in a froggin’ storm.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s happened?” Leorin demanded, sobering Cauvin in a heartbeat.

  He nodded. “A lot’s happened. We need to talk—”

  “I can see that. Did they all die up on Pyrtanis Street?”

  The question caught Cauvin by surprise, though it would be the simplest way to explain his change in fortune. “No, Grabar’s fine,” he mumbled. “They’re all fine.”

  “The old man—the one that gave you the box—Did he give you more silver? Gold? Did he finally die?”

  “No, nothing like that.” He and Leorin had become the center of uncomfortable attention. “Can we go upstairs? I don’t want to talk about it down here.”

  “I’ve got customers to tend—regulars.” Which meant they expected good service from their favorite wench, and she expected extra padpols each time she visited their tables.

  Cauvin took a deep breath before saying, “Let them wait. Rose can tend them, or Mimise—”

  “That Twandan witch! If she thinks she can take what’s mine—”

  Leorin spun around, looking for the tall wench. Mimise tended a table near the stairs, laughing heartily and tucking something into her bodice. It was Leorin’s tables, her regulars, and she didn’t take kindly to the invasion. She was half out of her chair before Cauvin caught her arm. Their eyes locked across the table lamp.

  He was supposed to know better than to touch her in public. Strangers grabbed at Leorin nightly, and she encouraged the regulars because a caress loosened their purse strings, but Cauvin was neither a stranger nor a regular.

  “Please, Leorin,” he pleaded, their eyes still locked. “Let it go. Just this once—I need to be alone with you.” He released her.

  As suddenly as it had arisen, the tension departed. Leorin was all smiles, brushing her fingers lightly across Cauvin’s wrist, gliding around the table to stand with her body against him while she toyed with his fresh-cut hair.

  “You’re sure?” she asked.

  Cauvin nodded. He couldn’t see Leorin’s face for her breasts, and what he was sure of had nothing to do with leaving Sanctuary. The storm, the lewd chuckling from the wenches and regulars, none of that mattered as he followed Leorin up the stairs. He found the tortoiseshell clasp that tamed her golden hair and removed it as she unlatched the door to her room. He’d dropped his cloak on the floor and started on her bodice laces before she’d closed the door.

  Neither of them needed lamplight to find the bed.

  The long knife clattered to the floor, followed by belts, boots, and shoes. Cauvin wrestled with Leorin’s bodice until the braided laces were hopelessly tangled. He solved that problem by yanking them hard enough to tear the cloth. Her breasts moved freely then within her gown, but the gown itself was securely laced in back.

  Men’s clothing was simpler. Two slipknots kept Cauvin’s breeches snug at his waist, or loosened them entirely. While Leorin used one hand to untie those knots and peeled his new shirt over his head, Cauvin grappled blindly with her gown. Leorin moved on to the leather baldric, which was snared in the remains of her bodice and couldn’t be lifted over his head.

  Her fingers sought the clasp and her shriek of pained, enraged surprise almost certainly echoed through the commons despite the storm.

  Too late Cauvin recalled the quills worked into the broker’s purse. Meant to stymie a thief; they’d gotten Leorin instead. He located her stung fingers.

  “Sorry,” he murmured, pressing her fingertips to his lips.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  Leorin exploded out of his arms, raking his cheek with her nails and elbowing his gut for good measure.

  Cauvin caught a handful of gown. “I said I’m sorry.”

  He attempted to lure Leorin back to the bed, but she’d have none of that, lashing out with her fists and snarling, “Leave me alone! Don’t touch me!”

  The blows didn’t hurt, but Cauvin had to let her go. She threw herself through the dark room, striking first the bedpost, then the floor on her way to the corner where the ceiling came closest to the floor. A stray thunderbolt brightened the room, showing Cauvin the anguish he couldn’t otherwise hear: Leorin with her knees tucked under her chin, clawing her own flesh until it bled. Before darkness returned, he was off the bed and fumbling with the lamp on her dressing table.

  Thank the froggin’ gods the lamp was full—Leorin was usually careful about such things—and there was a flint-and-steel striker dangling from its handle. Cauvin struck a flame and left the lamp on the dresser, where it shed flickering light into Leorin’s corner.

  “Leorin?” Cauvin approached cautiously, on his knees. “Leorin—I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He spoke softly, calmly. “The person who gave me the baldric showed me how it was rigged against snatchers, but I forgot. Sheep-shite stupid me forgot what she showed me—”

  Leorin lifted her head. Cauvin held his breath, half-expecting her to surge for his eyes the way an injured animal might its rescuer. But the face she showed him, shiny with tears, wasn’t masked with anger, nor even fear. It was empty, achingly empty, as if she’d never seen Cauvin before and, perhaps, didn’t see him now.

  “Leorin? Leorin, it’s all right. Come back—”

&nbs
p; Cauvin reached for her arm. She cringed and he froze, waited, then reached closer. With his third reach Cauvin’s hand circled hers.

  “Come back, Leorin. It’s only dreams and memories.” The dreams and memories and the darkness Cauvin had escaped.

  An inch at a time, Cauvin drew Leorin into his arms. The storm peaked with howling winds, crashing shutters, and bright-as-day thunderbolts. He flinched when they fell close enough to shake the walls, but he kept hold of Leorin and she, lost within herself, was blind to the storm. A few moments passed, or maybe a few hours—Cauvin had let his mind go gray and lost track of time. The rain had gentled when Leorin began to shiver. Cauvin wrapped her in blankets pulled from the bed.

  “Storm’s over,” he suggested, and Leorin began to cry in earnest.

  Leorin cried until tears had washed away whatever memories had risen earlier. First one arm, then the other emerged from the blanket cocoon. She caressed his shoulders, his back. She pulled his face to hers and gave him a kiss fit for waking the dead; but it was a wasted effort. Cauvin never loved Leorin more than when she needed him, but it was a chaste love at cross-purposes with passion or lust.

  “No.” He pushed her away. “Not now. That was a bad one, Leorin. I wasn’t sure where you were, or who you thought I was, or if you were coming back.”

  “You worry too much.”

  “And you don’t worry enough. Sanctuary’s not a good place for you—or me either. Too many memories. We’ve got to get out of here. I collected forty shaboozh today. With them and the coronations I got the other day—it’s enough, Leorin. We can pay a ship’s captain. We can go to Ilsig in style—”

  “A ship to Ilsig?” Leorin’s eyebrows arched. Her voice was acid. “Frog all, Cauvin, Ilsig’s the last place I’d go. You haven’t made any promises to some froggin’ sea captain, have you?”

  “No,” Cauvin confessed. “I just got the shaboozh.” He found the broker’s purse and showed her its secrets. “What’s so bad about going to Ilsig? Just the other night, you wanted to follow a merchant to the kingdom.”

  Leorin paused in her coin counting. “Look at me, Cauvin. Do I look like I belong in froggin’ Ilsig? If I’m leaving Sanctuary, I’m not going where I look like the froggin’ down-on-her-luck, Imperial whore. Ten days with that merchant, and everything he owned would have been mine—ours. We wouldn’t have stayed in Ilsig, not one day longer than necessary.”

  “I want to take care of us, Leorin. I can earn enough that no one would ever think you’re a whore, Imperial or otherwise, here or in the heart of Ilsig,” Cauvin proclaimed before he could stop himself.

  “No.” Leorin stroked Cauvin’s cheek. “But, if I’m leaving, I’d sooner go to Ranke. Froggin’ sure I could turn heads there. You know I could.”

  Cauvin clenched his jaw.

  “Oh, Cauvin, don’t sulk. It’s business … opportunity there for the taking. You’ll have me long after I’ve lost my looks, but until then, I can make us rich!”

  “You may look Imperial, but inside you’re just another Wrigglie. What chance have we got in a city where we don’t speak the froggin’ language?”

  She called him a child and a fool, but she did it in Imperial, using the gutter words every Wrigglie understood, then she went on with words he didn’t understand in his ears, but—perhaps—could have read, if she’d written them out.

  “Enough!” he snarled. “You’ve made your point. I don’t want to argue with you, Leorin, I just want to get you out of Sanctuary before something bad happens.”

  “What ‘bad’? We’ve been through the worst, haven’t we?” She shook out the last of the shaboozh. “froggin’ gods, Cauvin—you’ve got forty-two shaboozh here. Forty-two froggin’ shaboozh on top of four coronations and twenty-three soldats. That old pud you’re working for must be made of gold and silver. What’s his froggin’ name, anyway?”

  “It’s not the same pud. I got the shaboozh from Lord Mioklas on the Processional. You remember I built a wall in his perfume garden last spring?”

  “Forty-two—that’s just a start, just for your labor. He still owes for the stone, doesn’t he? You’re finally taking your share first?”

  “Something like that,” Cauvin confessed. “I want to get us out of Sanctuary.”

  “The Ender, can you tap him again?”

  “What Ender?”

  “The froggin’ Ender pud who gave you the coronations and soldats! Is he good for more?”

  Cauvin squirmed uncomfortably. “I never said I got those coins from an Ender.”

  “Frog all—who but an Ender has bright, shiny coronations and soldats in this city?”

  The Torch, Cauvin thought, but didn’t say. Having held Leorin in his arms and kept her safe as she wandered through her waking nightmare, he’d convinced himself that the only path for him and Leorin was the path out of Sanctuary, to Ranke or Ilsig, by land or sea, the sooner the better.

  “Forget more coronations or soldats or shaboozh. We’ve got the money to leave, and once we’re out of Sanctuary none of this will matter …” Cauvin was hoping out loud and cringing inside because if he let his guard down, then all his suspicions came roaring back to life.

  “We can never have too much gold and silver, Cauvin. Never. If there’s silver to be had, then let’s have it. If there’s gold, so much the better.”

  Cauvin answered by scooping up pile after pile of shaboozh from the planks between them. Leorin reached for his wrists.

  “What troubles you, Cauvin? If you’d rather stay here in Sanctuary—If you’re doing all this just for me—?”

  “No. No, I want to leave Sanctuary.”

  “You never did before. You didn’t when I told you about the merchant.”

  Cauvin tucked the closed purse within the heap of his cloak. “All this had barely started then. I didn’t know where it was leading.”

  “Where all what was starting and leading?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t talk about it. I want to—that’s why I wanted to come up here—but I can’t. I can’t separate the good from the bad, even in my own mind.”

  “Don’t try.” Leorin slid her arm around Cauvin’s shoulder, more friend than lover. “If you’re in trouble—If it’s more than collecting what you’re owed—”

  “No—that’s the easy part, the good part, the part I can believe happened, because the rest of what’s happened to me this week, I don’t believe it myself. It started the morning when they found the bodies at a Pyrtanis Street crossing.”

  “The bodies? Oh—the Torch and the Ender—the old pud’s spare son? Nothing hard to believe about that. A sparking Ender cut down on the streets. A froggin’ old pud. Only bit that’s hard to believe is that the Torch was alive to murder. That was one unnaturally old pud.”

  “He didn’t die, Leorin,” Cauvin whispered. “The Torch didn’t die on Pyrtanis Street. I found him the next morning. He was getting the snot stomped out of him on the Promise of Heaven—”

  “Where on the Promise?” Leorin demanded.

  “Inside the old Temple of Ils. All I saw at first was a Hiller pounding an old man—”

  “Did you recognize him?”

  “Not hardly. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman getting pounded—”

  “No, the other one—you said a Hiller. Did you recognize him?”

  Cauvin shook his head. “Some rat from the Hill. He couldn’t fight me and knew it. I’d’ve followed him when he ran, but the old pud—the Torch—he was in bad shape.”

  “He was in the temple of Ils?” Leorin demanded.

  froggin’ sure, the Torch was an Imperial priest with no business in an Ilsigi temple, but froggin’ sure Great Father Ils hadn’t been seen on the Promise of Heaven lately. “He must have gotten himself lost. I said he was in bad shape and so old you’d froggin’ swear a good sneeze would blow him apart.”

  “And you stayed with him until he died, then you took what he had on him?”

  “The Torch didn’t die, Leori
n. He’s still alive. I wanted to take him to the palace. Shite for sure that’s where he belongs, right? But, no, he won’t go to the palace. We’re arguing and suddenly he says: ‘Where were you going when you found me?’ And me—the sheep-shite idiot—the next thing I know, I’m on my way with him in the gods-all-be-damned mule cart.”

  Leorin drummed her fingers against the leg of her dressing table. The rapid movements made the lamp tremble and filled the room with flickering light.

  “The Irrune,” Cauvin continued, “who knows who they burnt on that pyre. But the Torch won’t go back to the palace. He is dying; he’s just taking his own froggin’ sweet time about it.”

  “Where were you going? You weren’t working on Mioklas’s perfume garden—”

  “No—Grabar heard that a dyer over on Sendakis Way was going to be marrying off his son. We put new bricks on the front of the dyer’s house, so Grabar figured that when he set his son up, he’d want the fronts—”

  “Where, Cauvin? I don’t care about bricks or dyers. Where did you take the froggin’ Torch?”

  “Outside the walls, up into the hills, to the old estate where we got the bricks to do the first front.”

  “Sweet Mother, there must be twenty old estates in the hills out there. Which one? What’s its name?”

  “How should I know? Nobody lives there. Nobody’s lived there since before Grabar and Mina were born—that’s what she says. She recognized the place from our description, but she didn’t know the name—never had, I guess.”

  “To the east? The west? Near the Red Foal? The White?”

  “What’s the difference? Pretty much in the middle, then. It’s brick-built but the bricks were imported. You can’t make red bricks with Sanctuary sand, Sanctuary clay. I tell Grabar I’m going out to the red-walled ruins, and he thinks I’m out there smashing bricks out of the walls, not waiting on a man too stubborn to die.”