“We’re out. Says so on the door. Don’t change the subject. He’s not, I take it, a member of that annoying guild.”
Bezul raised a brow It him; he shook his head. He didn’t know what guild she was talking about, but he shite’n sure wasn’t a member.
“Thought not. He’s far too young. They have all those rules. As if that necklace shouldn’t be evidence enough.”
“What … rules?” he whispered, before he could shut his fool mouth. It was a dream she offered, not reality. He’d just wanted to exchange the damned necklace for a blanket.
“You must put in your time with a master—”
“Meaning you have to pay someone who’s paying huge sums to the guild for the privilege of being slave labor for at least five years.”
Pay for the right to make things? He shook his head. “Impossible.” Not even if he had the money.
“There must be some way around it. Look at this, Bezul. He’s done his time. How long, child? How long have you worked with Harnet?”
His eyes went funny, his head light. He hadn’t heard Grandfather’s name in over five years. Had learned not even to think it. Secrecy, Kadithe. It’s our only chance.
“S-since I was four … five ..” He couldn’t remember the first time he’d sat next to his grandfather, high on a stool, a tiny mallet clutched in his hand. “Something like.”
“There. You see?”
“And where is he? Harnet’s been gone for five years and more. Is he a paying master, boy?”
He shrugged. Shook his head.
“But he’s still alive.” His wife persisted.
Bile rose in his throat. Fear such he hadn’t known for many long years. He began to shake, tried again for the door, and found himself ensnared in her arms.
“Please,” he whispered, in the hoarse voice that was all he had left these days, “please, may I just have the blanket. It—” He choked and got the words out, owing these people who spoke fondly of Harnet Mur at least that much. “It’s for my grandfather.”
She set him back on his chair. “Why didn’t you just say so? Pride is a shortcut to hell, child.” She picked up a slate and began writing. “Blanket. Shirt. What else?”
“You’ll trade then?”
“Wasting time, young man. What else?”
Bezul nodded and slipped out the door, evidently counting the deal closed—or in the hands of a master.
“P-pissing pot?” he whispered, his face hot as ever it could get, and she added it to her list with only a hint of a twitch to her kind mouth. One by slow one, he added those small items they’d done without for so long, waiting for her to stop him, unable to believe the necklace could possibly be worth as much as she was allowing. When he asked, hesitantly, for an iron skillet and she agreed, he began to suspect charity, and closed his mouth, firmly, resenting the position she’d put him in, wondering what her angle must be.
“So,” she said, scanning the list. “Fair enough, though if you’d used anything better than agates in it, I’d owe you. Think you can carry all this at once?”
“Safer if I made more than one trip.”
Safer was not lost on her. Bezul’s shop was in the Shambles, opposite the Maze. Safe was a concept she well understood.
“I’ll get Ammen or Jopze to deliver it. Where do you live?”
“I’ll come back,” he said firmly. No way he was leading these people to home.
Again, that gentle smile that saw through him. “Good enough. I’ll get it ready”
As she left, Bezul returned, carrying something in his hand. It was a spool. A spool of fine, copper wire.
“You know what to do with this?” he asked, and Kadithe, unable to take his eyes from that treasure, nodded. “I want you to take it. Make beautiful things. Bring them here to me. I don’t want you or that grandfather of yours wanting. Ever. You need something, you come and ask. We’ll work it out. Understand?”
Understand? He understood nothing except that he’d betrayed Grandfather’s trust. And yet, as the numbness in his mind eased, somehow … some god must be smiling on him, because it was just possible that it would all work out for the best.
Still not altogether certain he wasn’t dreaming, he gathered up the beautiful wire, stammered something he hoped was thanks, and escaped.
He was home before he remembered the two bundles lying beside the doorway of Bezul’s Exchange.
The rocky reef had one high point about the size of a ship’s boat when the tide was in, one rock a man could sit on that was above the fetch of the waves with a south wind driving. So Camargen sat, sodden down to his boots. A man could freeze, in such a wind, even under the burning late-summer sun.
Flotsam went by from time to time, washing past the reef, and he had snagged a few boards, but nothing yet of a size. Cordage had washed up, a kind of a garland on the seaward side, and it was gray and rotten, as Camargen’s clothes were grayed and aged and his sword and dirk were rusted. He was not aged. He was sunburned. His hands, ripped bloody from the reef rocks when he had washed up, were still young hands, and his jaw had only the ordinary stubble of beard.
Sorcerers. Sorcerers, sorcery, and magic flung about, insubstantial and unseeable until it hit a ship and the wood rotted in an instant. He was through with sorcery, had no future use for the whole sorcerous breed—but then, he had no future at all, so far as he could see, alternately freezing and baking on this cursed rock, the outlines of which he knew down to a nicety, low tide and high. Today there was a dead fish floating in the garland of cable, if he wanted to get that desperate for moisture and food. He was not a fastidious man, but he was not yet at his limits. A piece of the Widowmaker or the Fortunate big enough to carry him to shore might yet come along—shore was just hazily visible on the horizon as a line of surf, so close he sometimes thought he might swim it. But where there was shipwreck, there were scavengers and predators, and sharks figured in his hesitation. Being a blue-water sailor bred and born, he was not that good a swimmer, and the fear of sharks and suchlike monsters being well-engrained, he stayed put.
So he watched planks go by, and snagged another one before it escaped, wood almost gone to punk from rot. While he was off his rock and soaking his feet, he hauled the rotten cordage a little higher on his diminished shore, seeing it as a means to tie the whole together. He would make a raft, if enough bits and pieces bumped up against his little refuge.
Of his crew, or the Fortunate’s, no sight nor sign, not unless one counted a scrap of cloth or two.
A barrel went by, a mostly empty beef-barrel, it might be, but too far to reach, damn it all. He watched it go.
Then his eye shifted to another thing, a small boat, a scrap of sail, hazy in the distance, inshore of the reef. He watched it. He took off his coat and waved it like a banner. And that boat tacked and came closer, working up the wind, a long, slow process.
There were fishing villages hereabouts. And that was what he saw, as the boat came closer, a small, single-sailed fishing boat, not even a two-man vessel, clumsy and broad of beam, lumbering this way and that as it came.
He stood waiting, finally, as it nosed gingerly up to his perch, riding cautiously where there was water enough to keep its keel off the rock. An old man managed it.
“Cast me a line!” Camargen said, an order—it was habit, and he tried to mend his ways. He saw he’d startled the old man, who sat with his hand on the tiller and his sail swinging back and forth, slack, and the boat just too far to reach. The old man mumbled something unintelligible in the rush and suck of water, then stood up and flung him the line.