Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [42]
She tugged again. The coins spilled between his fingers.
“One day—one morning, that’s all. I swear it. I’ll go to the red-walled ruins—”
“And if the froggin’ pud’s alive—what then? Mother’s blood, Cauvin—listen to me: If I don’t run away tonight, I won’t have the strength to run in the morning. I swear that.”
“You’ll have the strength,” Cauvin assured her. “It’s just one night—one last froggin’ night in Sanctuary. Summer’s over. Autumn, too. I felt it in the air this afternoon. There’ll be froggin’ frost on everything by morning. Everything, including the old man.” He hugged her close, but there was a stiffness in Leorin’s spine that hadn’t been there before. “One night, love. What’s one more night after all the others?”
There was only one law in Sanctuary: Stay out of the past, and they’d both broken it. They were even, but the price was high.
Cauvin hugged Leorin tighter than she wanted to be held and caressed her wavy golden hair. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s too late.” Leorin wrestled free. She collected coins from the mattress and the floor. “Visit your old man. Buy him parchment and ink. We’re never getting out of Sanctuary, Cauv. Never.”
Leorin stuffed the box pieces into the sack, then dribbled the coins atop it. She wrapped the bulging cloth and string around Cauvin’s hands like manacles. There were tears in her eyes. Cauvin couldn’t be sure—there was so much he didn’t remember—but he didn’t think he’d ever seen Leorin cry before, at least not when she was awake.
“We’ll go,” he assured her. He would have given her a hug, but he could not untangle the cloth.
“It’s too late.”
“It can’t be. It’s just one more night.”
“One too many. One week too many. One month, one year. Mother’s blood, it’s always been too late. Go, Cauvin. Go, now.”
“One night, Leorin. Even if the geezer’s not froggin’ dead, I’ll make arrangements, find someone else to dig his grave.”
Leorin shoved him toward the door. “You’re blind, Cauvin. You always were. You’re strong because you can’t see what’s there.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow night. We’ll find another—”
“Come if you want, or not. It was a dream. Now I’m awake, and it’s gone.”
“I don’t—”
“Just go, Cauvin.”
He was powerless to fight her, powerless to remain in the room to comfort her.
The air was past chilly when Cauvin left the Unicorn. The fog had been transformed into ice crystals that glistened in torchlight. The yard dog barked once as he came through the gate, then slunk away before Cauvin got the bar down. It wouldn’t come when Cauvin whistled; it just hunkered in the shadows, whining.
Who would have thought that he—froggin’ nobody Cauvin—could have more gold and silver than he could measure and be miserable, too?
Chapter Five
Five piles of four coins or four piles of five coins, either way they added up to more soldats than Cauvin had called his own before. And froggin’ bright silver soldats, as shiny as gold by the light of the little clay lamp he’d set on the floor beside his pallet. They must have been sealed tight in the wooden box since they’d been struck. There wasn’t a mark on them, not even a speck of black tarnish. The emperor’s profile was sharp, and Cauvin could have read the man’s name in the ring of letters around his portrait, if his name had been Cauvin.
The stoneyard didn’t encourage payment in bright, uncut coins. Grabar couldn’t give them to Mina because the honest merchants on Pyrtanis Street wouldn’t take them, and the rest insisted on exchanging them for face value—which was a froggin’ bad joke. So when an Ender paid in bright silver, Grabar hied himself down to his changer in the Shambles—an honest man, they hoped, who’d barter anything on the counter of his cavernous shop. For a price, Bezul would convert bright soldats or shaboozh into purses of Sanctuary’s greasy, clipped coins that turned black the day they were minted.
But the treasure in the Torch’s box went beyond silver.