Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [177]
Gusty winds were clearing the streets of Sanctuary. Half the shops and stalls had pulled their shutters, and the rest would be closed soon. Three decades after the first great storms tore through the city, the people of Sanctuary recognized a bad storm while it was still on the water. Nobody, though, not even the best of Sanctuary’s priests, regardless of their devotion, could accurately predict how bad “bad” would be. Cauvin went to the nearly empty Wideway to make his own prediction.
Every ship in the harbor was bobbing to its own rhythm. If there were oarsmen chained on board the Ilsigi galley, they were wishing their mothers had never screwed their fathers. The open waves were rough and whitecapped but they were breaking well below the wharf, and the tide was coming on high. Storms were worst on an incoming tide. The sky to the south and west was a horizon-to-horizon expanse of dirty, seething gray, but it was darkest to the south, while the wind blew mostly from the west. The worst storms were darkest on the east, and their winds came straight up from the south.
Cauvin’s prediction, with gusty winds lifting his new cloak aloft, was that “bad” would be miserable, but short of disastrous. He returned to the dilemma he’d dodged all day: go to the ruins or avoid them. The Torch had hired Soldt—that seemed a reasonable conclusion after meeting Galya. Soldt would take good care of the man who’d hired him. Cauvin could go to the Unicorn, maybe spend the whole night there. If they were going to leave with the first tide after the storm, then surely it was time to jump the broom with Leorin.
How much of the doubts eating his mind were true suspicion and how much the growth of willful frustration? Shite for sure, caution had been the right choice, but he wanted Leorin so much it hurt each time he left the Unicorn. Leorin wanted him just as bad, though she didn’t sleep alone in a drafty loft. The only reason the two of them hadn’t had each other in the pits was lack of opportunity. In a general way, the Hand encouraged screwing; the Mother of Chaos loved nothing better than newborn blood. The girls got better treatment, usually, until they delivered, and the lads got what lads had always wanted.
The worst fights in the pits had nothing to do with the Hand.
Leorin, though, had that Imperial beauty. No beardless kisses for her. The Hand fought amongst themselves for the privilege of taking Leorin to their beds. The wonder wasn’t that she was different from other women, the wonder was that Leorin had any use for men at all. Tonight all that would change. He and Leorin would make their vows, with or without a broom lying on the floor in front of them, and while the gale broke around them, they’d start a new life together.
Cauvin headed west down the Wideway, wind swirling the dark cloak around him as though he were Soldt, the duelist, the assassin.
Chapter Fifteen
Rain began as Cauvin entered the Maze, pebble-sized drops that stung bare skin and left craters in the muck when they hit the streets. Growing up beside the sea, Cauvin knew the worst was yet to come. He ran along the Serpentine and reached the Unicorn’s doorway a heartbeat before the sky ripped open with deafening thunder and sheets of rain as dark as night.
The Unicorn’s signboard had been lowered and its door pulled shut against the weather, but the tavern was open for business. There were empty tables along the walls, but Cauvin ignored them. Even if he’d visited the place more often, he had the wrong attitude for a shadowed table, an east-side attitude, a Pyrtanis Street attitude, where men sweated when they worked. The Vulgar Unicorn regulars were rogues and schemers for whom breaking a sweat was the greatest sin of all. They might give Cauvin a glance as he came through the door, but not a second—he wasn’t rich enough to rob, nor tough enough to recruit.
But this night was different. Despite rain drumming the walls, Cauvin heard the commons fall quiet around him and watched heads turn his way.