Cauvin entered a low-ceiling room heated by a brazier smoking in a sandbox atop one of the barrels. The room was cluttered with crates and barrels that might contain the Broken Mast’s stock of brandy. Captain Sinjon—a bald, gray-bearded man—sat behind a checkered table that had been cleared of its counters. A brass lamp of unfamiliar design cast shadowy light on the captain’s lean, weathered face and an intricately, but obscurely, carved and painted box.
When Cauvin had closed the door, Captain Sinjon asked to see the token. The room was considerably warmer than the commons or the streets had been. Cauvin felt himself beginning to sweat before he stood the little ship in the center of one of the black squares.
The captain examined the jade by lamplight. “How’d you come by this?”
There was only one chair in the chamber, and Sinjon was sitting in it, which left Cauvin standing and feeling awkward. He nudged one of the crates with his boot and, judging it solid, sat down on the corner.
“I got it from an old man with the instructions to tell you that there was blood on the moon last night.”
From his crate-corner perch, Cauvin could meet the captain’s stare directly, which quickly proved a mistake. The man didn’t blink. One eye—his left—bore straight on, like a snake’s, while the other wandered slowly: up, down, inward, outward. Cauvin had seen more than his share of strange sights, but Sinjon’s roving eye made him anxious. He had a predictable response to anxiety.
“My old man,” he snarled angrily, “says you’re supposed to give me a froggin’ box. That froggin’ box.”
After an overly long hesitation, the captain sighed. He folded his hands over the carved box and pushed it toward Cauvin without releasing it.
“Just today I’d begun to hope it was mine to keep … and open. Considering who he was … what he was, Lord Torchholder understood the sea. So long as he was up in the palace, the captains could be sure of a fair hearing for their grievances—no telling what’s to happen now. The Irrune—they’d never seen the sea, didn’t have a porking word for it in their jabber. Most of the Rankans, they weren’t much better than that stinking silty port of theirs. The Ilsigi—now they understand the sea. You can sail an Ilsig ship through any water, any weather, but as She rules, you’ll pay and pay forever for the privilege. The Ilsigi—they understand gold and silver best of all. The Torch, he knew that, so when Her folk came to Sanctuary, he saw the advantage straightaway.”
Captain Sinjon said a word—a name, perhaps—in a language that Cauvin had never heard before. It sounded like “bey-sib” or “bey-sah”; or maybe it was two different words. The captain must have seen the confusion on his face.
“You’re too young,” he said. “You couldn’t remember, even if you wanted to—and who wants to remember nowadays, eh? Better tuck your head under your wing. No one here saw them coming—a fleet as big as the harbor, and it sailed in all unannounced carrying the hope of the Empire: the bey-sah herself, her court and all they’d need to sustain them until Mother Bey made rights of the home they’d left behind. Bow down, She says; sail away to the north and east, She says. Sail away and wait, for there’s nothing She can do to right the wrongs with the righteous bey-sah still about and apt to suffer. So the bey-sah shipped out with her court, north and east, came to Sanctuary, and waited.”
The captain stroked his beard. His left eye stared at a point past Cauvin’s shoulder while the right wandered a while before he sighed, and said:
“A life in exile’s too long and twice as bitter—that’s what my mother told me. They never belonged here, never meant to stay past the first tide home. She was a sailor, born on her ship—died there, too, if the Mother was willing. The sea’s the same for every sailor; they got on all right with Sanctuary’s sailors. Not like the court. There was blood in the street every night—gods’ blood and worse—until the ships started coming again.
“My own eyes were open then. I saw them myself. Big and graceful. They sailed closer to the wind than any ship before or since, but they shipped oars, too. Old Lord Torchholder, he never set foot on a bey-sib ship that I saw, but he took one look at ’em and knew what they were meant for. When pirates from Scavengers Island took to harrying our ships, he sent those ships after them. When the tide went out, it took the pirates with it. When it came back in, Scavengers Island was Inception Island—because Sanctuary was going to grow greater than Ranke or Ilsig together—”
“That’ll be the froggin’ day,” Cauvin interrupted, though the captain’s tale held his attention. The only mother-goddess he knew was Dyareela, and no one ever spoke of Her with the reverence in Sinjon’s voice.
Cauvin knew the hell he’d lived through, but folk who’d survived the Troubles didn’t talk much about what had gone before. Ashamed, he figured, because he’d smashed apart too many wellbuilt walls not to realize that there must have been a time when Sanctuary wasn’t a froggin’ wreck of a city. He wanted to know what had happened—no froggin’ good reason, except the same sheep-shite curiosity that got him whipped in the pits and kept him coming back for Bec’s gods-all-be-damned tales about the stoneyard chickens.
Captain Sinjon leaned forward. “You hear,” he whispered, “if you hear anything at all—that it was the sack of Ranke that did in Sanctuary’s hopes. Even Old Lord Torchholder, he can’t see past his great Empire, his great city, but nothing born on land can rule the sea, my friend. Sacrifice—that’s the only way the sea can understand. ’Twas pride—lubber’s pride—that laid Sanctuary low. Tell me, my friend, tell me the sea-god’s name!”
Startled by the shouted demand, Cauvin nearly unbalanced himself. “How in froggin’ hell should I know? Do I look like a sheep-shite priest?”
The captain sat back, nodding smugly, as if Cauvin’s blurted answer had settled everything. “You live cheek by jowl with the sea, but do you worship? No, of course not. Temples aplenty alongside the whorehouse. Two for the sky and the storm, two for women, and others for the land, wine, and lesser things, but for the sea, only the little altars to Larlerosh in the well of every ship. You can catch fish with Larlerosh. You can run grain up and down the coast, timber and even stone—”
Cauvin’s ears pricked at the mention of stone.
“But rule the sea with Larlerosh? Not from the back of a boat!” Sinjon pounded the checked table with his fist. The Torch’s token and his box both jumped and landed on different-colored squares.
“After the usurper fell in the Beysib Empire and her influence was purged from the land, my mother’s ships took the bey-sah and her people home; took Mother Bey with them. No sooner was the fleet gone when the sea and sky together turned black. We prayed, but Mother Bey was gone, and there was none to take Her place. We suffered winds so strong they’d lift a man clean off his feet and tides that carried ships to the very gates of the palace. Five storms like that we suffered in ten years and when they ended, Sanctuary was wracked and alone on the edge of the sea.
“Oh, I’ve got me a cog or two that’ll carry grain and such out to Inception—but it’s Ilsigi ships that keep the pirates away, not ours. And the bey-sib? Even if I had me one of my mother’s sleek ships, I wouldn’t know how to sail it, or where. It’s all lost, lad—lost forever, and not all Lord Torchholder’s gold will bring it back again. Damned shame. We paddle the shores now, like children, never out of sight of the shore. And we shun the seas where we once sailed like men.”
Sinjon stared across the table, both eyes together and watching something that wasn’t in the room with them. Then he blinked—only not with his froggin’ eyelids, but with something clear and shiny that flicked out of the inside corner of his eyes.
“Shipri’s tits!” Cauvin shouted. He was on his feet before he knew he was moving. “You—You’re—!”
Word failed Cauvin because the only words he knew to describe what he’d seen were too crude, too insulting to say to any man’s face without starting a brawl. Indeed, he’d never actually seen anyone blink without moving their eyelids.
“You’re a froggin’ fish,” he sputtered, settling on the word Mina used to describe the invaders who’d ruled and left Sanctuary before she’d been old enough to remember anything, because Mina truly did try not to curse. By what Cauvin had heard, the fish-folk were worse than the froggin’ Dyareelans, which was—for him, anyway—froggin’ hard to imagine.
Captain Sinjon hadn’t exactly denied his race. He’d spoken of his mother and her departed kin; the phrases swam in Cauvin’s freshest memories.
“B-B-But they left. They all left … didn’t they? Packed up and went home as if they’d never been?”
There were some on Pyrtanis Street who swore they hadn’t—that the fish were just froggin’ stories made up to frighten children when tales of the froggin’ Hand weren’t enough. Sheep-shite Batty Dol—she swore the fish were real, that she’d seen their froggin’ staring eyes for herself and stood on the Wideway with her children beside her to watch them sail away for good … But, frog all, Batty Dol talked to the ghosts every night and swore up and down that the dead could come back to life. A man had to be froggin’ moontouched if he believed Batty Dol.
Then Sinjon blinked again, and said, “The ones who came, left. And the ones who’d been born here with clan rights through their mothers and fathers. But not the others, not the ones born to the bey-sib and Sanctuary. It wasn’t a matter for questions. I wouldn’t have gone; I’d visited the land—maybe—I could have passed. I knew the language, then”—the captain made noises that froggin’ might have been words—“and I have the look. But the Beysib Empire’s no place for a man without a clan to back him. The Torch made me an offer. He thought the trade would continue—Damned shame,” the captain said, and blinked again, as if he were holding back tears.
The remains of Mina’s mutton stew heaved in Cauvin’s gut. Gods-all-be-damned knew that the Hands with their worship of pain, blood, and chaos were worse than the fish. The fish stared … and their women did things with snakes. They had snakes between their legs, so did their men—according to Batty Dol, who said a man-fish could see where he pissed and what he fucked. If he believed Batty Dol …
Cauvin found it getting harder not to believe Batty Dol.
Damn your froggin’ eyes to froggin’ hell, Cauvin sent a heartfelt curse toward the old man in the redwall henhouse.
“Gimme the froggin’ box and let me out of here.” He held out his hand.
“You’re too young,” the captain countered, his hands still resting on the box. “You don’t know what it means to watch your dreams disappear.”
“Gods damn your dreams—there was blood on the froggin’ moon last night. That box belonged to the Torch, now he says it belongs to me.”
Sinjon slowly lifted his hand from the box, leaving it where Cauvin could reach it without moving closer. The carvings were all leaves and froggin’ serpents with forked tongues and fangs. Cauvin guessed that the box had probably been carved by one of Sinjon’s mother’s snake-y, staring relatives and realized, a few heartbeats later, that there was no obvious way to open it—although he could hear, as he turned it this way and that, sounds that could easily be coins sliding against one another.
“Where’s the froggin’ clasp? The froggin’ key?”
The captain shrugged. “You’ll have to break it—unless Lord Torchholder taught you the trick?”
Tricks. Suddenly Cauvin imagined a welter of tricks—poisoned needles, deadly insects … froggin’ snakes—that opening the box improperly might release. To froggin’ hell with the old man’s quills and parchment. On the spot, Cauvin decided that he’d take the box, unopened, to Molin Torchholder. The old man could open it himself. Froggin’ bad cess, if it killed him—at least it wouldn’t kill Cauvin.
And if the old man died before dawn?
Fleetingly, Cauvin considered marching down the Hill, through a breach—He stopped cold before his imagination took him all the way back to the ruined estate.
If the old man died, then he’d prop the box against a wall and heave stones at it until it cracked apart.
“Did he?” Sinjon asked while Cauvin tossed imaginary stones.
“He froggin’ sure told me not to froggin’ open it in front of witnesses.” Cauvin forced himself to meet the captain’s eyes but, of course, he couldn’t break the older man’s stare. “It’s too shiny to carry at night; attract too much attention. Give me a scrap of cloth to wrap around it?”
Sinjon cocked a thumb toward a pile of rags in a corner. “Two padpols.”
Cauvin had bright soldats and an uncut shaboozh, fresh from the palace mint and not yet tarnished, in a pouch tied to his belt. He could bite off a corner of the shaboozh and still have enough silver for a feast at the Unicorn, but the notion of buying rags offended him. He snatched a piece of tight-woven, reddish cloth that looked large enough to tie around the box. “The Torch would’ve wanted his box kept safe for free.”
Trailing a knotted, filthy cord, the cloth proved to be a verminchewed sack, and though the box was larger than any individual hole, Cauvin wasn’t about to test the sack’s strength by slinging it over his shoulder. He loosened his shirt instead and tucked the stiff cloth against his gut.
“I’m leaving. I better not have any froggin’ trouble getting out,” Cauvin said with his hand on the latch.
Sinjon watched Cauvin. His left eye was wandering again, but they both stared. The effect was unnerving.
“He must have been desperate,” the captain said, still staring.
“Who?”
“The Torch, boy—Lord Torchholder—if he’s made you his heir.”
“I’m not his froggin’, sheep-shite heir. I’m just collecting a debt.”
The captain shook his head the same way Mina did when she thought he was too sheep-shite stupid to understand her insults. It was a look that got under Cauvin’s skin in an instant.
He lifted the latch, and snarled, “Have a froggin’ good life,” as he opened the door.
Sinjon said something that Cauvin’s ears couldn’t untangle. He didn’t want a second hearing. Anst, the ghost, was waiting at the top of the stairs—out of earshot, if he’d been there the whole time. And if he hadn’t? Well, Cauvin didn’t give a froggin’ damn. The Torch’s box was safe inside his shirt, and he could take any one-handed ghost who disagreed.
The fog had gotten heavier while Cauvin was inside the Broken Mast, the blackfish stench, too. He still didn’t know what a hagfish looked like, but he imagined they stared. The air on the Processional was almost clean-smelling by the time Cauvin reached the street called Lizard’s Way, which was the best—though far from the only—path into the warren known to one and all as the Maze. The Maze had its own smells, stronger and older than dead fish.
Cauvin didn’t know the Maze well. As a child he’d lived with his mother on the Hill until she ran afoul of the Hand, for what, he’d never known. Maybe for nothing. The Hand didn’t need a reason to make a sacrifice out of someone, and the Hillers were too poor, too weary to fight back.
Moments of flames, screams, and sheer horror exploded in Cauvin’s mind when he thought of the last time he’d seen his mother, like bumping a sore he’d had so long he’d forgotten it was there, forgotten how froggin’ much it could still hurt. She’d been stripped of her clothes and tied to a post on the Promise of Heaven before the Hand bled her out by stripping away her skin—
Cauvin hadn’t loved his mother, not the way Bec loved Mina—all trust and devotion. She hadn’t loved him, either, but it could have been froggin’ worse. Everything except the pits could have been froggin’ worse. He didn’t truly remember her death. Just as the Hand put their knives to her face, some man Cauvin had never seen before spun him around and conked him cold. When he thought about her dying, Cauvin filled in the empty moments with the sights and sounds of the uncounted sacrifices he witnessed later.
When Cauvin had come back to consciousness, he’d been in a dark, sweat-smelling room with a naked, snoring man pressed up against him. He had lit out of there like a greased cat. He knew what went on in rooms like that. Whenever she got angry with him, Cauvin’s mother had threatened to sell him to dark, sweaty men who collected unruly, sheep-shite boys. He’d run to the Maze …
After all the years, Cauvin still couldn’t decide if he’d made the biggest mistake of his sheep-shite life that night. Not that it mattered. The Hand followed him into the Maze. They caught him in an alley more than a month—caught Leorin, too—less than a year after they’d caught his mother. The years of his childhood were blurred in Cauvin’s head—he couldn’t have been more than eight when they’d ended.
A whole froggin’ lifetime had passed since then, and the Maze changed every storm or season. Unless he were there every day, a man stuck to the Serpentine, the oldest and widest of the quarter’s streets.
Cauvin passed a knot of Irrune betting shells-and-nuts with a smooth-talking Mazer. Waste of time on both sides: the Maze-rat wouldn’t let the Irrune win; the Irrune wouldn’t pay if they lost. In the right-side shadows, someone puked his guts. Another sheep-shite drunk was doing the same across the Unicorn’s threshold. Cauvin stepped over the mess.
Inside, the Unicorn was brighter than the Broken Mast had been and untainted by the sweet-rotting tang of krrf. Newcomers—including Cauvin when he’d begun meeting Leorin here—expected a darker, far-more-menacing lair but, as Leorin had explained, the Unicorn wasn’t a place where solitary patrons came to swill themselves into a stupor. Drunks were rare, brawls, rarer, because the Vulgar Unicorn truly was a covered market where services were bought and sold, no different than the stone in Grabar’s froggin’ yard.
Most of the light came from an old wheel—once part of a wagon or a froggin’ ship, Cauvin couldn’t tell which through the soot—suspended from the massive center beam. The wheel supported a half score of oil lamps, each of them hooded with polished copper to cast the light downward. The rest of the light came from clay lamps centered on most tables.
If he wanted to, a man could find a shadow deep enough to hide him and a few friends in the corners or beneath the stairs, but most patrons preferred to keep an eye on their closest drinking companions. Or, they saw no reason to pay extra for shadows. Whoever owned the Unicorn these days—and it wasn’t the lean, surly Stick who minded the coin box whenever Cauvin dropped in—had decreed that the drinks cost more at the tucked-away tables. Never one to pay a padpol more than necessary, Cauvin found himself a stool at one of the long tables beneath the wheel. The Torch’s box pinched Cauvin’s gut when he leaned forward. He set it, still wrapped in Sinjon’s ratty cloth, on the table between his elbows.
His nearest neighbor was an arm’s length away: a greasy-haired fellow who drank with his eyes closed. Farther along on the other side, a quartet of men younger than Cauvin were arguing about the Dragon, his father, and the Irrune in general. It was the same froggin’ bitterness Cauvin could hear anywhere on Pyrtanis Street, and he ignored it until one of them mentioned Molin Torchholder’s murder.
—“Shalpa’s cloak—it was the Dragon who did it,” another voice insisted. “The froggin’ Dragon or someone close to him.”
Cauvin didn’t try to connect the voice with a face. He might be sheep-shite stupid, but he knew better to look where he listened.
“Or a score of others,” a third, slightly softer and soberer, voice suggested. “That Torch—he’s been collecting enemies since Grandpa was a pup. Enemies, secrets, and gold. My pa says it’s a froggin’ wonder no one got him before this.”
“’Cause the Torch’s a frog-rotting sorcerer, that’s why,” the quartet’s fourth and loudest voice weighed in.
“He’s a froggin’ priest!”
“Of a froggin’ dead god,” Loudmouth added. “And he’d’ve died, too, right with the Stormbringer, if he wasn’t a frog-rotting sorcerer. He says the Torch’s been sucking souls for years. About time somebody got rid of him.”
“Someone paid by Ilsig,” the soft-voiced man suggested.
“No …” two men chorused, and Cauvin, in silence, was inclined to agree—not merely because the Torch wasn’t dead, but because if there was one thing the Wrigglies of Sanctuary could take pride in it was that their ancestors had refused to remain slaves and prisoners of the Ilsigi kings. Froggin’ sure the Ilsigi kings were on the rise. It was their armies, and not the Rankan emperor’s, that broke the backs of the Nisibisi, the northern witches. And it was their warships that kept the sea-lanes clear between Sanctuary and Inception Island. But a royal assassin stalking the Torch near Pyrtanis Street? A royal assassin with an Imperial knife? That was froggin’ impossible.
Cauvin had no sooner reached his judgment than he began to have doubts. If King Sepheris the Fourth of Ilsig had offered him a chest of golden royals to kill the Torch—not that Cauvin would have taken the money—but wouldn’t it have made sense to kill the froggin’ geezer with an Imperial knife, a knife that wouldn’t ever be associated with an Ilsigi assassin or with a Wrigglie, either …?
The Torch had admitted he had enemies, but that was all. The froggin’ geezer hadn’t said a word about the man who’d attacked him, the man he’d killed. Of course, Cauvin hadn’t actually asked any questions. He’d thought about it. Sitting in the common room at the Vulgar Unicorn, Cauvin clearly remembered questions forming, but each time the froggin’ geezer opened his mouth first and Cauvin’s questions—questions that needed answering—went unasked.
He’d have to do better tomorrow … somehow.
As if a sheep-shite stupid stone-smasher could outwit the froggin’ Hero of Sanctuary!
“You’ve come at a bad time—”
Cauvin leapt off the stool, fists at the ready, startling the woman who’d startled him. “Mimise! Sorry,” he sputtered, realizing his mistake. Every head in the room had turned toward them. Cauvin felt like a froggin’ fool and wished the floor would melt beneath his feet.
Mimise closed her eyes with a sigh. “Reenie’s already gone upstairs.”
“For the night?”
Whatever the Vulgar Unicorn had been in the past—and it had been around longer than even Lord Molin Torchholder—these days it was more than a tavern. The wenches who wandered among the tables were freelancers who bought every drink before they served it and picked up extra soldats and shaboozh in upstairs rooms.
Mimise wrinkled her nose. “Don’t think so. Except for his silver, he wasn’t her type. Want I should send a boy up to scratch her door?”
Cauvin shook his head. “I’ll take a chance and wait.”
“Gotta drink, if you’re planning to wait.”
“Which is better tonight, the wine or the ale?”
“Wouldn’t touch the wine ’til the Stick taps a new barrel.”
“Get me a mug of ale, then.” He scooped the silver coin out of his boot.
Mimise dug a fistful of blackened padpols from the crack between her less-than-plump breasts. She took Cauvin’s uncut coin and offered him five irregularly shaped bits in exchange. Three of Mimise’s padpols were larger than the others. They could have been split once, but not twice.
Cauvin grimaced. “You’re rooking me.”
He took the padpols Mimise offered and kept his hand out for more. She laid three more of the smaller bits in his hand. Cauvin dug his fingernail into each padpol. None crumbled—meaning they were at least metal, not charred bone or pottery. He slapped them onto the table.
“A full mug,” he reminded Mimise’s back.
Leorin herself brought Cauvin an overflowing pewter tankard. With the scent of another man hanging heavily around her, Leorin kissed Cauvin chastely on the forehead. Her golden hair fell loose about her face; her cheeks were flushed; and the bodice of her gown was twisted around her waist.
“I wasn’t expecting you until Anensday.” She spun onto the stool on the opposite side of the table.
Cauvin patted the rag-covered box. “I’ve had some luck.”
“What kind?” Leorin attacked the knotted cords without further invitation. “What’s inside?”
“Not here.” Cauvin pulled the still-tied cords out of her hands. “Let’s go upstairs.”
Leorin pouted—not the seductive pout she flashed at paying customers, but a sharp-eyed scowl. “Can’t. That bastard shorted me. He promised me three shaboozh, then tried to give me soldats instead—as if I wouldn’t know the difference!” She stared into the distance. Cauvin then pulled into a faint, but satisfied smile; Cauvin could feel the air grow cold behind him. “He won’t be climbing anyone’s stairs anytime soon.” He wouldn’t have asked what his beloved had done, even had she given him the chance. “That doesn’t help me with the Stick. I’ve got room rent to pay. Nothing’s free tonight, love, not even for you.” She stroked Cauvin’s hands, then caught sight of the padpols on the table. “You can’t call a box of them luck, Cauv.”
“That’s not my luck, love.” He peeled back the cloth just enough to give her a peek at the carved wood. A pawnbroker would offer a few decent shaboozh for the box once Cauvin got the coins out—assuming he didn’t have to break it open. “I met a man today. I think he’s going to change my life.”
“How much did he give you?”
“I’ll tell you that when we’re alone upstairs.”
Cauvin couldn’t answer that until he opened the box, and he wouldn’t do that with strangers around. He trusted Leorin utterly, but no one else in the taproom. Instead, he told her where he’d gotten the box.
“The Broken Mast!” she exclaimed. “That’s a bugger’s haven! You never—You didn’t, did you?”
“Not froggin’ close,” Cauvin assured her. Never mind what the infamous vulgar unicorn was doing to itself on the weatherworn signboard above the front door—Leorin would have nothing to do with men who shunned women. “I collected a debt for an old pud outside the walls, that’s all. There’s bound to be something left off after the quills and parchment. And this is just the beginning. The old pud’s got more stashed away; he’s said as much. He won’t begrudge me; wouldn’t dare. He’s old and he’s dying—got a froggin’ evil wound atop his leg. I’m all he’s got.”
Leorin sat back. Gods knew how she’d come by it, but Leorin had all the fragile Imperial beauty Mina lacked. Her eyes were the color of warm, golden honey. Her complexion glowed like the finest porcelain, even beneath the Unicorn’s froggin’ soot-covered wheel. Her hands were delicate, her waist, willowy, and her breasts were perfect. When Leorin swept across the taproom, a bouquet of beer mugs clutched in her hands, conversations had been known to stop between words. She could have commanded the best rooms, the highest prices on the Street of Red Lanterns—she might even have found a Land’s End sparker who’d marry her—but Leorin had lived inside the palace, the same as Cauvin. She chose the sort of freedom that couldn’t be found behind walls—the kind of freedom—and risks—that the Unicorn offered night after night.
She chose Cauvin, too, because he’d been there, and her memories couldn’t frighten him. The nights he stayed with his beloved in her cramped upstairs room weren’t filled with passion; they were filled with tears and shudders while his arms protected her from the horrors in her memory.
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 buy his froggin’ parchment and quills. But he didn’t give me a key, and he didn’t tell me a froggin’ trick for opening it—”
Or had he?
… Visit the Broken Mast, get the box, push the leaves apart …
Cauvin snatched the box and brought it closer to the lamp. In addition to the broken scrollwork there were clusters of leaves on what he’d taken for the box’s bottom. He prodded them gingerly, in various combinations. On the fourth try the box sprang apart. There were pieces of wood falling to the floor, coins bouncing everywhere, and a sharp pain at the root of Cauvin’s right forefinger. He stood transfixed, watching a bead of blood well up from his flesh.
“Ki-thus, I must return home—to the land of my mothers. My people need me; and I need you.”
The woman who spoke in Cauvin’s mind was a soft, tiny creature—no taller than Bec—wearing a snug gown that widened her hips threefold and bared a woman’s ample breasts. For a moment, there was nothing in Cauvin’s mind save those breasts, then he managed to look at her face. Fortunately, he’d seen a fish before, else he might have dropped to his knees when the glistening membrane flicked across her eyes.
“And that is precisely the reason I cannot sail with you, Shu-sea. We could be together while we dwelt in Sanctuary, but nowhere else. We were each born with obligations we cannot avoid—and now those obligations are calling us, both of us and at the same time. You must return to your Empire and I to mine.”
The man who held the woman’s hands between his own had bright gold hair and guileless eyes.
Cauvin blinked. He looked past the embracing couple and recognized—barely—the angles of the palace roofs. The man, his memory told him—though Cauvin couldn’t understand how it could be his memory—was Prince Kadakithis, last of Sanctuary’s Imperial governors, who’d left Sanctuary for Ranke seven years after its sack in the faint, futile hope of saving the Empire from anarchy—
Seven years! In his own life Cauvin had listened to old Bilibot and the charlatan-hazard Eprazian tell the tales of the Rankan Empire’s collapse and how the Kitty-Kat prince had vanished one day, never to be seen again, but the details—where the prince had gone or when or why—None of that was part of Cauvin’s memory.
And what, exactly, was “anarchy”?
Suddenly—as if the pair had heard Cauvin asking his sheep-shite questions—they unwound and looked his way. The woman—her name was Shupansea and she was the ruler-in-exile of the fish people—ran toward him, rouged breasts bouncing. She embraced him. Cauvin felt the surprising strength in her arms and smelled her perfume, familiar in memory though he’d never smelled its like before.
“Lord Molin—Thank you for coming so quickly. Can you speak sense to him?”
Cauvin gasped. He wasn’t himself; he’d become Lord Molin Torchholder, or a few of his memories.
“What’s wrong?” the prince asked.
“It’s too late,” Molin replied.
Or Cauvin replied; or it didn’t matter because the words all flowed out of memories that had been old and meaningless long before Cauvin had gotten his froggin’ self born.
“What’s too late?” the woman asked.
Cauvin felt a sense of relief as strong as his anxiety had been a moment earlier. Molin had always gotten along well with the Beysa. She understood expediency better than her naive husband ever would or could. If she’d been a man, not a fish, he—Molin, not Cauvin—would have backed her all the way to the Imperial throne in Ranke.
“A messenger just arrived from the capital. Your cousin was deposed five days after he was made emperor. He did not survive.”
There was more in the scroll the golden prince took from his hands. Molin had already read it through. Cauvin recalled the details: a battle in the streets around the Imperial Palace, a new emperor proclaimed—the third since the year began, a ten-year-old boy hacked apart for the crime of being his father’s last surviving son.
Cauvin had his froggin’ answer. He’d learned the meaning of anarchy—it was just a sparker word for his own childhood and adolescence.
“Go with your wife, my prince, or stay here in this gods-forsaken city, but set aside all thoughts of returning to Ranke. Your presence there will not bring peace. The capital has gone mad. The mob will hail you one day and tear you apart the next.”
“Ki-thus, come with me. My people will welcome you—”
“Your people need their Beysa; they do not need a foreigner as her consort.”
The prince wasn’t the fool people thought he was. He was merely a man who’d been born at the wrong time—a man of grace and wit and justice trapped in a moment when those admirable qualities were worthless.
“I must return to Ranke. That is where I belong, no matter what fate awaits me there.”
Molin—Cauvin—watched the tide change in the Beysa’s glistening eyes.
“What of our children, Ki-thus? Our daughters? What will become of them?”
The prince’s face became a mask that could not hide his anguish as he said the little girls would be safer far away in the Beysib Empire than they’d ever be in Sanctuary.
The two should never have jumped the broom together, Cauvin judged, and in the echo of memories not his own, the old man—Molin Torchholder—agreed.
“Cauvin! Cauvin! What’s wrong with you!”
Cauvin looked into the eyes of Prince Kadakithis, who’d left Sanctuary but never arrived in Ranke—
No, he wasn’t looking at a prince’s face, he was looking at Leorin, who could have passed for the prince. Or his daughter? No. No. The years were wrong. Kadakithis had vanished more than thirty years ago. His daughters would be Mina’s age, not Leorin’s, and decades gone from Sanctuary. Still, the resemblance—
“Sweet Sabellia.”
“Since when do you swear by Imperial gods?” Leorin demanded.
Cauvin shuddered from his feet all the way to the top of his head. A ghost had touched his soul—that’s what Batty Dol would say. And this time, maybe she’d be right. The ghost of the old pud he’d left in roofless ruins outside the walls? The ghost of Prince Kadakithis? Or the ghost of his daughter?
Whatever it had been—Whatever had possessed Cauvin’s life for a moment and stirred its memories into his, it was gone. He was alone with Leorin in a room above the Vulgar Unicorn.
“Look at these!” She held her cupped hands where Cauvin could not help but see them and the shiny coins they contained. “Look at them! Not a mark on them. There’s fifteen silver soldats—I don’t even recognize the face on the—and a gold coronation! A coronation, Cauvin—Look at it! Have you ever seen a coin so big and bright? And more tumbled under the bed!”
Leorin emptied her hands into his and dropped immediately to her knees. Cauvin couldn’t explain what had happened to him, but coins—uncut and as shiny as the day they’d come from the mint—needed no explanation.
“I can’t take these to a scribe asking for quills and parchment.” Cauvin’s mind stumbled from one consequence to the next. “He’ll say one soldat’s as good as another and rob me blind. I’ll have to go to a changer first. With one soldat. I’ll get a better price for one good soldat than twenty—”
Clutching more coins in her hands, Leorin looked up from the floor. “Forget the old pud! We’re rich, Cauvin. Rich enough to leave Sanctuary and start over somewhere else. Mother’s blood, let’s leave! There’s a merchant downstairs; he’s leaving for Ilsig city tomorrow morning. We could travel with him. Oh, Cauvin.” She spilled the coins onto her bed before wrapping her arms around Cauvin. “Please, love, please? Let’s run away from Sanctuary before it’s too late. Come. Let’s go downstairs and talk to him. Right now. There’s nothing keeping us here. Grabar’s no more to you than the Stick is to me.”
Leorin tugged Cauvin’s sleeve. He took one step toward the door and became unmovable. “I left an old man alone outside the froggin’ walls. Easy money says he’s dead by morning—I’ve never seen anyone as old and frail as him. I’ve got to see to him, Leorin. I’ve got to know that he’s dead, if he’s dead, and bury him, if he is. I can’t leave him to rot. I’m done with that. My—” Cauvin’s stomach sank. The old geezer was right: “My sheep-shite conscience won’t let me.”
“Sheep-shite is right. What’s one more, Cauv? Do you think almighty Ils is keeping count after what you’ve done? What we did? You can buy a new conscience when we get to Ilsig city. Cauv—”
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?