Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [15]
The Hand would find him easy enough, if they were truly back in Sanctuary and looking. They’d taken too many orphans. When Arizak and his Irrune warriors stormed the palace, the Bloody Hand wound up making martyrs of themselves in battle and of the orphans afterward, making sure that the Mother of Chaos got every froggin’ drop of blood they’d ever promised her. Better death at the edge of a knife than an angry Mother of Chaos.
It was pure frog-swallowing luck that Cauvin hadn’t gotten himself sacrificed with the rest of the orphans the night after the palace fell. Before the fighting had stopped, he’d been prodded into a bare room to face the men who’d beaten the Hand. When a gray-haired man with an Imperial accent had asked him what it had been like to live in the pits for a decade, he’d told them the gods-all-be-damned truth about the killing and the cruelty and hiding in the gray to keep himself from becoming the enemy he both hated and feared.
Honesty had gotten him bolted up alone in a windowless room. He’d been sheep-shite terrified that She’d find him that very night, but the Hand had kept Her busy drinking blood in the pits so She’d missed him, like She’d missed Jess, Pendy, and everyone else whose answers had convinced the gray-haired man—Lord Torchholder, according to Grabar; he hadn’t given his name to a sheep-shite orphan—to lock them up alone, like Cauvin.
Of course, the Mother of Chaos had froggin’ sure gotten Jess and Pendy in Her own good time, and She’d gotten them through their dreams. Cauvin had felt safer because he didn’t dream. He’d have prayed that he never dreamt again, if he’d believed that any god in Sanctuary gave a froggin’ damn about him. The gods of Sanctuary froggin’ sure didn’t give a damn to anyone who didn’t lay down a padpol or two when he prayed. Better yet, a silver shaboozh.
Froggin’ gods, froggin’ priests, and froggin’ town.
Maybe it was time to leave. There wasn’t anything binding Cauvin to the stoneyard. Whatever Grabar had paid to get him out of that room in the palace, he’d more than sweated off the debt, and now that Grabar and Mina had a son of their own—a real son, not a bought son like him—it was froggin’ sure that he wasn’t going to inherit the yard, no matter how many times Grabar said otherwise. Grabar would be moldering at the bottom of a grave when the time came for inheriting, and Mina wasn’t going to give Cauvin anything she could keep for her flesh-and-blood son.
Leorin never missed an opportunity to remind Cauvin of Mina’s hostility.
Leorin.
He and Leorin had been paired up for-froggin’-ever. A few years older than Cauvin, Leorin had taught him the tricks of life on the streets after his mother died. When their luck had run out and the Hand had claimed them both, they stuck together in the pits. They weren’t separated until a year or so before the Irrune came to Sanctuary. Cauvin had thought Leorin had died after a night with the Hand the orphans called the Whip.
Froggin’ sure, death was the best that could happen to anyone after a night with the Whip.
Froggin’ sure Cauvin hadn’t seen Leorin after the Whip had her, and froggin’ sure the Irrune hadn’t dragged her before Lord Torchholder. Probably just as well. There was no guessing what Leorin would have told the Torch if he’d asked her the same froggin’ questions he’d asked Cauvin. Leorin