As best Cauvin could figure, the new owners of Meerash’s shop were selling protection and enforcing it with a gang of thugs, three of whom emerged onto the street as Cauvin watched. The trio were all of a type, the same type as Cauvin himself: brawny young men with big hands and thick skulls. He sized them up reflexively: He could take any one in a fair fight, any two with a stave from the barrel he was sitting on, but if all three took exception, he’d froggin’ have to run.
Cauvin glanced at the cart. Soldt had been giving him sword lessons for almost a year now, but he’d feel most comfortable with a steel-head mallet leaning against his thigh. He thought about retrieving it; that would mean leaving his spyhole. Maybe it was sheep-shite stupid to set himself up in a tight corner the way he was, but there could be no doubt that it would be doubly stupid to call attention to his froggin’ self rattling around in Flower’s cart, so Cauvin stayed put.
He kept his eye on the trio. Two of them bore a jagged tattoo, like sideways lightning or the oncoming profile of a hawk in flight, on their left forearms. The third probably had a similar tattoo, but his shirt was long-sleeved. Cauvin knew the tattoo as the mark of the Kintairs, an old ’Tweener gang he’d tangled with a few times before crossing paths with the Torch.
In those days the Kintairs—the name was a shortening of sikkintair, the dragons of Ils the Thunderer—had answered to Saluzi, a onetime sea captain and full-time troublemaker. Cauvin hadn’t seen Saluzi since he’d started spying on Meerash’s shop. If he’d had to guess, he’d say Saluzi had met the same fate as Meerash because, shite for sure, Saluzi hadn’t taken over Meerash’s little shop. Unlikely as snow in summer, the shop had been taken over by a woman and the Kintairs were taking their orders from her.
Her name was Cassata; at least that was the name she used here in the ‘Tween. Her dress was slovenly—draped and hitched around her until it was impossible to decipher the shape of the woman beneath. She wore a foreign sort of headdress with flaps that squared her face and fell across her shoulders like ragged, striped braids. The headdress covered all her hair except for a careless, mud-brown forelock. A bloody wen the size of a froggin’ walnut swelled on her jaw to complete her portrait. Beauty wasn’t everything, but women who looked like Cassata were more apt to beg for a living than give orders to thugs, leaving Cauvin to suspect that Cassata couldn’t possibly be the woman she seemed to be.
And then there was the knot …
Cauvin could have duplicated that knot with his eyes closed: When the Hand taught an orphan a lesson, even a sheep-shite stupid orphan learned it down to his froggin’ toenails and never forgot it, either. The Dyareelan priest who had taught Cauvin how to tie that knot was dead; Cauvin had watched the aptly named Strangle die. And all but a very, very few of the other orphans who’d learned that particular lesson were dead, too, but one of them …
Froggin’ gods, one of the surviving orphans had been Leorin and Leorin had been Cauvin’s wife for a few short hours last autumn, for the few hours it took to betray him to what remained of the Hand hiding out in the tunnels beneath Sanctuary.
Cauvin had escaped from the Hand a second time that night and Leorin had escaped the Irrune wrath he’d called down upon his captors. He’d hoped—because, though he couldn’t forgive his erstwhile wife, his heart still ached when he thought about her—that she’d have the sense to live her life far from Sanctuary. Far from him.
His wife had been beautiful—golden, curling hair, honey-hazel eyes, curves and grace—but she was about the same height as Cassata and had the same habit of twisting a bit of string between her fingers as she talked. The wisdom of his inherited memories said habits mattered more than appearances.
Appearances didn’t matter to the Hand—or, rather, appearance didn’t matter unless it was useful. A beautiful Leorin had been useful when no one knew who she worshipped. With that secret unmasked, beauty had become a liability—a beautiful Leorin could never have returned to Sanctuary.
The only questions worth asking were, Who had sent his wife back to Sanctuary? And why?
Cauvin had half a mind to walk right into the froggin’ shop and ask her. He hadn’t given in to that half … so far.
The trio concluded their business with Cassata and walked away from the shop, two headed off together and one headed toward Cauvin. He scooted silently over to the mule and had her walking when the Kintair thug came abreast of him. The two men gave each other the once-over and kept going.
Cauvin led Flower past Meerash’s shop. The mule was between him and the open door, and he was careful not to look into the shadows, but she’d see him—remember him—if she looked out, if she was Leorin … his wife. Cauvin told himself that he was, in his own way, warning Leorin—warning her that he knew who she was and that she needed to pack up and leave Sanctuary, this time for good.
The problem was, Leorin hadn’t gotten the message the last time Cauvin had led Flower past her shop, or the time before that; and Arizak wanted answers, results. Frog all, Cauvin didn’t want to stand in front of the Irrune chief and admit that he knew who had tied the knot around Meerash’s neck, where she was, and what she was to him. He didn’t want to say anything to anyone until he could say that Leorin was gone.
The mule and Cauvin rounded a corner and headed back to the Wideway. With each step Cauvin cursed the luck that had brought Leorin back to Sanctuary while the one man he trusted completely was out hunting wizards. Frog all, he cursed the luck that had left him with a dead man’s memories, but not the wit to use them; and the sheep-shite luck that had brought him to birth in Sanctuary in the first place.
Widowmaker
C. J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher
“Sail ho!” the cry was, and Capt. Jarez Camargen of the Widowmaker climbed to the masthead himself with his best glass, sweeping the dawn sea.
A day and night of treacherous shifts and tricks, and now, with the wind off the starboard quarter, the Widowmaker’s best sailing point, there she was, their chase, the Yenized ship Fortunate, sail above the horizon.
“Ho, Cap’n!” came from his lieutenant, below. “No longer quite as Fortunate, eh?”
Camargen grinned, a wicked and wolfish sort of grin. Widowmaker was, to put it in the very best light, a pirate. Her prey had run her every trick in a thick old book, and here they were again, out of the isles and onto the southern coast.
They were a Yenized polacre xebec themselves, the Widowmaker —at least Yenized-built, before they’d taken her in the Isles. Capt. Camargen had liked the look of her: long, low-waisted, a pretty set to her lateen sails fore and aft, her bastard mizzen, which gave her power, and quick, oh, much better in his able hands than in the hands of the fool that had left her largely unmanned and anchored off Keina’s Head. Her former captain had been taking on water on that island when they’d seen black smoke billowing up from the harbor and their sweet xebec standing out to sea under all sail. The Happy Isle, she’d been, under a fool; but Widowmaker she’d become, and she had a nose for treasure—had a sure, keen nose, these days, wizard-guided, since they’d met up with old Hada Korgun and his grievance, and used him for a weathervane.