Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [47]
Bec was right about Mina and maybe the brandy, but not Batty Dol. “Batty’ll tell everyone, starting with your mother.”
“Not if we tell her it’s a surprise. She’ll stay quiet for a day, then she’ll forget.”
“Not ‘we.’”
“Then I’ll tell. I’ll tell Poppa everything—about the old man and his treasure, and how you set him up out at the red-walled ruins instead of smashing bricks. And how you went to the Broken Mast and what goes on there and that you’re planning to run out on him and Momma and me.”
“You’d be telling lies, Bec. The fish—” He started to say the fish would get him while he slept, but he knew too much for those old threats.
The boy stuck out his tongue before Cauvin thought up a new threat.
“It’s your word against mine, an’ I can tell a better lie than you can tell the truth. But I won’t, if you take me with you. Please, Cauvin. Please? I won’t make any trouble; I swear it. I’ll swear anything you ask. Just take me out to the red-walled ruins? Let me meet the old man who gave you the box? Momma never lets me do anything exciting.”
Cauvin weighed the trouble the boy would be against the froggin’ trouble his tales could make at the stoneyard. Bec could tell a damned lie better than Cauvin could tell the froggin’ truth. And if the geezer were still alive, then the boy could tote and fetch for him while Cauvin smashed bricks out of the wall. It wasn’t as if a few coins, even a few gold coins, meant he didn’t have to work for his living. “All right. You can come—”
The boy whooped. Cauvin quieted him with an upraised finger.
“You can come if Mina and Grabar agree. I’m not stealing you out there, and you froggin’ remember what they said this morning. If either one of them says no, you’re staying here, and it’s not my fault. You understand that, Bec: It’s not my froggin’ fault, so you keep quiet with your froggin’ lies.”
Unfazed by Cauvin’s conditions, Bec declared, “You leave Momma and Poppa to me!” before he leapt at his foster brother’s waist—half hug, half wrestle, all enthusiasm.
It was no contest, or it shouldn’t have been, but Cauvin let the boy back him across the loft. He remembered himself at Bec’s age: alone on the streets, ripe for the Hands to pluck. Bec wouldn’t have gotten caught by the Hands; he was too clever, too charming. He’d have found his way into one of the houses that kept their children close.
Cauvin wrapped his hands beneath Bec’s armpits and hoisted him up into the rafters. He could feel the boy’s scrawny ribs beneath his palms. A little effort—or even an accident—and those bones would break like kindling sticks. Mina worried about her son, and rightly so. Without the love and strength of his family, Bec wouldn’t make it through a hard winter. He wasn’t built for hard times.
Cauvin lowered Bec to the floor again. “Now—get out of here! Sure as shite, it’s hours past midnight and you’ve got work to do tomorrow! Get back to your own froggin’ bed and for gods’ sake don’t get froggin’ caught!”
The boy was all smiles and confidences as he disappeared down the loft ladder. Cauvin kept an ear out for sounds of trouble, but there was only silence. He blew out the lamp and crawled into his nest of straw and cloth, expecting to lie there, wide-awake, until dawn. But sleep caught Cauvin from behind, and the next thing he knew one of the roosters had crowed, and the loft was filled with gray dawnlight.
An ice scum had formed overnight in the trough. Cauvin broke it with his fist. He shook like a wet dog while he washed the night from his face and mouth. Old Hazard Eprazian up at the Well, they told stories about Sanctuary before the Hand seized it, when there was a mage’s guild south of the palace. There were so many hazard-mages at the guild and they were so powerful that Sanctuary’s winters were warm.
Ice never thickened on open water, and snow never fell.
Cauvin believed those tales about as much as he believed Batty Dol’s tales about her dead husband sitting