Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [175]
He thought he’d put an end to conversation by asking, “Does Soldt send a lot a of men here?”
Galya laughed as she said: “Not at all, Cauvin. You’re the first. The Sweet Mother knows what he was thinking. Now, put on those breeches. They might be short; and I’m not sending a man out with his knees showing.”
She left the room, and Cauvin did as he’d been told. Far from being too short, the finely woven breeches were long enough to tuck into the tops of his boots. Cauvin thought himself quite improved until he caught sight of Galya scowling.
“It’s a start, but starting’s never enough, is it? You’ll be wanting new boots—I can’t help you there—but you’re wanting that hair neatened more. Who’s been cutting it for you, lad? Not Nerisis on the Wideway?”
“I cut it myself, when it gets in my eyes.”
“Take off that shirt and sit,” Galya ordered, and went to the shelves. She returned with a set of shears. “If you don’t tell, I won’t either.”
Cauvin grimaced. He didn’t care that there was a law against women cutting men’s hair. What worried him was sharp metal close to his head but not in his hands. He flinched each time the blades ground against each other. Clumps of hair as long as his thumb lay in his lap and on the floor. Shorter wisps clung to his skin. They itched mercilessly and worse after Galya flicked at them with a rag.
“Go, jump in the tub and scrub yourself off.”
He met Galya’s eyes and realized she was serious.
“I’ve raised two sons to manhood, lad, and buried their fathers along the way.”
“But—”
“Go on with you. I’ll stay in here folding linen.”
After exchanging his boots and belt for a knot of soapweed, Cauvin carefully closed the drying room door on the laundress, stripped, and climbed into the laundry tub.
There was a bathhouse in the Tween, not far from the stoneyard. For three padpols a man could scrub himself with soapweed, then rinse down beneath a hand-cranked waterwheel. The cost went down to two padpols if he took a turn or two cranking the wheel before he soaped up. If he forked over ten padpols, he could stand neck deep in a steaming pool next to anyone else who’d paid for the privilege—provided he was male. Women had their own bathhouses, run by the Sisters of Eshi and absolutely forbidden to men.
Come winter, Grabar would pay for the pool a couple times a week; he said it was cheaper than an apothecary’s powder for his aching joints and just as soothing. Cauvin’s first few winters on Pyrtanis Street, he’d gone to the bathhouse with his foster father, even earned a few padpols cranking the wheel. But once Bec was old enough to walk that had changed. Bec went with his father, and Cauvin kept himself clean at the stoneyard trough.
It had been years since he’d sunk himself into water—even the shallow, lukewarm water of a tub filled with unfinished laundry. He’d forgotten how good it felt to be clean everywhere at once and lingered until his fingertips were wrinkled like raisins. By then gray clouds had spread across the last patch of blue sky over the Inn of Six Ravens. Cauvin wrapped a strip of linen around his waist and returned to the drying room carrying his new clothes.
“We’re headed for a storm,” he explained. “I’d better wear my own clothes out of here. I wouldn’t want to ruin these.”
“Is that the way you ask if I’ve got a woolen cloak stashed away?”
“No—”
Before Cauvin could finish, Galya offered him folded layers of wool.
“I can’t afford that,” he whispered, though it was likely that Galya knew how much money he was carrying—he’d left Mioklas’s cloth-bound payment looped around his belt and laid across the box.
“And I’m not selling it. The man who last wore it, didn’t take it with him when he left the Ravens. I told you, lad, what guests leave, comes to me.”
Cauvin set the shirt and breeches down. He shook out the cloak. It wasn’t new; close up he could see several places where the cloth had been rewoven. There was a generous hood attached to the collar and a leather martingale