Darkspell - Katharine Kerr [79]
“Do you want one of the lasses while you re here?” she handed the coin over. “Free, of course.”
“My thanks, but I can’t. I’ve other business to attend to.”
“Come back tonight if you want.”
“I will, then. That blond with the kohl round her eyes—tell her to be ready. Will you remember the price you just set?”
Gwenca smiled, all gap-toothed.
“For you I’ll remember. Huh. Someone told me your tastes ran to lads. Did they lie?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Naught. Just an idle wondering. What are you, like some of them Bardek merchants, rolling your dice with either hand? They get their good time out of both cheeks and fur that way.”
Sarcyn stared straight at her.
“Old woman, you go too far.”
Gwenca flinched back. While Sarcyn finished dressing, she crouched in a chair and fingered her amulet.
When he left the Bilge, Sarcyn walked upriver, keeping off the main streets whenever possible. Although to avoid attention he was staying at an inn in another poor section of town, he refused to lodge anywhere near the Bilge, which held too many painful memories for him. His mother had been an expensive whore in a house much like Gwenca’s. On some whim she’d actually borne two children out of her many pregnancies, Sarcyn and his younger sister, Evy. She alternately spoiled and ignored them until she was strangled by a drunken sailor when Sarcyn was seven and Evy three. The brothel keeper kicked them out into the streets, where they lived as beggars for months, sleeping under wagons or in broken ale barrels, scrounging what coppers they could and fighting to keep the bigger boys from stealing their food.
Then one day a well-dressed merchant stopped to give them a copper and asked them why they were begging. When Sarcyn told him, he gave them a couple more, and that day their bellies were full for the first time in months. Naturally, Sarcyn began to keep an eye out for this generous fellow. Every time he saw Alastyr, the merchant would give him more coins and stop to talk with the lads, too. Even though Sarcyn was a prematurely wise gutter rat, slowly Alastyr won his confidence. When the merchant offered to let the children come live with him, they wept in gratitude.
For some time Alastyr treated them kindly but distantly. They had nice clothes, warm beds, and all the food they wanted, but they rarely saw their benefactor. When he looked back on how happy he was then, Sarcyn felt only disgust for the innocent little fool he’d been. One night Alastyr came to his bedchamber, first coaxed him with promises and caresses, then coldly raped him. He remembered lying curled up on the bed afterward and weeping with both pain and shame. Although he thought of running away, there was nowhere to go but the cold and filth of the streets. Night after night he endured the merchant’s lust, his one consolation being that Alastyr had no interest in his sister. Somehow he wanted to spare Evy the shame.
But once they moved to Bardek to live, Alastyr turned his attention to the girl as well, especially after Sarcyn reached puberty and became less interesting, at least in bed. The year Sarcyn’s voice changed, Alastyr began using him for dark dweomer-workings, such as forcing him to scry under the master’s control or mesmerizing him so thoroughly that he had no idea of what he’d done in the trances. Alastyr did offer repayment for using him in this particular way: lessons in the dark dweomer itself. Evy he taught nothing. When she reached puberty, Alastyr sold her to a brothel.
Without even his sister left from his old life, Sarcyn devoted himself to the dark dweomer—it was all he had. Not, of course, that he phrased it that way to himself. In his mind he’d endured the first stages of a harsh apprenticeship in order to prove himself worthy of the dark power. And so he was still bound to Alastyr, even though Sarcyn hated him so much that at times he dreamed of killing him in long, detailed dreams. It was worth putting up with the master to gain the knowledge—he told himself that constantly.