Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [39]
Possibilities and calculations narrowed Leorin’s eyes. She looked like a cat pretending not to notice the mouse that had wandered into her pouncing range. As well as he knew her, Cauvin couldn’t move fast enough to keep her from seizing the box and giving it a shake. The clinking rattle of coins brought a new smile to her face.
Clutching the box tight, she unwound from the stool. “There better be enough in here to buy off the Stick.”
Leorin led the way up the stairs past the day-or-night rooms and up again to the dormers where she rented a chamber little larger than a cot and three clothes baskets. It had a door, though, and a string latch that could be drawn up and knotted around the bolt. A determined intruder could get in, no trouble at all—just slice the string and pull it through. But honest folk would knock or go away altogether and—sure as sheep-shite on market day—most folk were honest most of the time.
Cauvin lit the oil lamp with a taper he’d carried up from the taproom while Leorin secured the door. He was stirring the embers in her tiny charcoal brazier, hoping to find a live one, when her arms circled him from behind. With their bodies close together there was no need for a brazier, nor even a lamp, though he liked to see his lover’s face when her eyes were closed and her mouth was open, searching for his.
It was time, he thought. His fortunes had changed today. There were coins in the carved box and more to follow. Grabar had sworn that the stoneyard would become his and Mina had made peace with his favorite stew on a night when they usually made do with beans, bread, and fatback.
After two years of waiting, of clenching his jaw until his teeth hurt, it was froggin’ sure time.
Cauvin freed a breast from its bodice and, caressing it, lifted his beloved off her feet. He took the short step toward her cot and was astonished beyond words when Leorin wriggled free.
“Open it. Open it now. I want to see what’s inside.”
Just then the coins inside of Molin Torchholder’s carved box were not the top thoughts in Cauvin’s mind. He reached for Leorin, and though his arms were long enough to span the walls of her dormer, she eluded him. For a heartbeat, Cauvin’s fingers formed into fists.
“I can’t,” he whispered.
“Use this,” Leorin replied, offering him a whiplike bit of metal as long as a rat’s tail and supple as a green-willow branch.
Cauvin had no notion where she’d hidden it, though he was froggin’ sure that she had pulled it out of her garments. The Hands had taught sheep-shite fools like him to kill with their fists, but they taught other things to other children. Leorin had told him some of the lessons the Hands had taught her; she’d never mentioned the sharp little tail. He was careful as he took it from her. Its tip was sharp enough to pierce flesh, and it might well be envenomed. Without a froggin’ word Cauvin stabbed it into the wall.
He retrieved it, though, a little bit later when he’d found the catch—at least he thought he had. A swirling loop of scrollwork had shifted ever so slightly when Cauvin had nudged it with his thumb. If he could get the sharp end of the tail wedged beneath the carving, something useful might happen. Or it might not. The scrollwork was carved from a separate piece of wood, but it wasn’t the catch, and when he pushed a little too hard, it snapped, bounced once on the floor, and vanished beneath the cot.
“Damn the froggin’ gods.”
“Let me try,” Leorin demanded, and took the box from Cauvin’s hands.
She shook it and pinched it and shook it some more before hurling it onto the mattress. Patience had never been Leorin’s game. Cauvin could be patient when he needed to be, when he needed time for his wits to work.
“The old pud wants me to froggin’ buy parchment and quills for him,” he said, as if in listening to himself he might learn something he didn’t already know—which sometimes happened. “That’s why he told me about the Broken Mast, the password, and the sheep-shite box. So, I’m froggin’ supposed to use what’s in the froggin’ box to