Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [48]
Grabar was already up and keeping warm by squaring stone. No bitter water for him on mornings like this. If the stoneyard’s master washed between now and spring, he’d do it from buckets his wife heated at her hearth or down at the public baths in the Tween. He chuckled when a shivering Cauvin joined him beside a heap of unsquared stone.
“Cold enough for you yet, lad?”
Cauvin ignored the gibe. Let Grabar have his memories of mild winters; he remembered the Hands and the pits. For ten years he’d never washed except in the rain. Shivering was a small enough price to pay to feel clean every morning.
“Thought I’d go out to the red-walled ruins this morning—” He’d almost said back out to the red-walled ruins. “I’ll smash out the bricks I didn’t get yesterday—unless you’ve got plans for Flower and the cart?”
“You take the mule and the cart and go about yesterday’s business. That’ll be fine. I’m not going to be making deliveries across the Processional ’til that damned Dragon leaves town. No deliveries, no business, no money neither. You run into some merchant who wants you to do a day’s work for him, that’ll be fine, too.”
Cauvin didn’t mention Bec. He was counting on Mina to crush the boy’s dreams. But Bec was grinning ear to ear when Cauvin came into the kitchen, and Mina was packing a basket with food.
Froggin’ truth to tell, the boy came in useful throughout that morning, though not at the forge. Swift was the closest Cauvin came to a friend on Pyrtanis Street. They were a lot alike—wary young men who got by on hard work rather than cleverness—though Swift hadn’t fallen into the Hands’ grip. Swift held three of the Torch’s soldats between fingers that were half again as thick as Cauvin’s. He set them gently in one pan of a swing scale and dribbled pellets of iron into the other pan until both pans were level beside each other.
“Where’d you say you got these?” Swift asked, swirling the pellets back into a sack.”
“I didn’t. How many padpols?”
Swift scowled. “If they’re as pure as they look, there’s as much silver in each of them as there is in one of Arizak’s shaboozh. Course, I’d have to melt them and measure them again to know if they’re that pure.”
“Go ahead, but give me an advance—how about twenty padpols?” It was a generous exchange, though merely fair if Swift were right about the coins’ purity.
Swift was a fair man and a friend. He gave Cauvin twenty-five padpols with a promise of more once he’d melted and measured the purified soldats. They sealed their bargain with a handshake, and Cauvin left Swift’s forge with a fistful of gritty coins thumping against his thigh and Bec yanking on his sleeve.
“You should’ve held out for more. If he was willing to give you twenty-five he’d’ve been willing to give you thirty.”
“You sound like your mother,” Cauvin groused, and freed himself. The boy was probably right, but haggling left a bad taste in Cauvin’s mouth. His clearest memories of the woman he’d truly called Mother were of her haggling wine from barman upon barman. He’d had a strong back, even then, and often found himself cleaning stables or pushing barrels while she drank.
Bec proved his usefulness in merely finding the scriptorium where Mina bought the stoneyard’s parchment. The shop was logically tucked behind a tanner’s yard deep in the Tween, but Cauvin never would have found it on his own. There were grades of parchment, grades of quills, and grades of ink as well; and none of them were meaningful to a man who smashed and squared stone for his livelihood. Bec told a charming tale about practicing his letters and writing a perfect copy of some old Imperial poem for his beloved mother’s birthday and got the best of everything at dirt-cheap prices. They left the scriptorium with a ribbon-tied roll of parchment the same pale, creamy color of Leorin’s cheeks, four “perfect” quills (that looked no froggin’ different from feathers their roosters shed