Two copper shaves a hide doesn’t buy much, but it buys a loaf of bread. It buys a fishhook. It buys three apples. So shoot two cats, that’s supper. Cat-catching won’t win you any friends, but it might keep you from starving. So here came two of the grubbiest-looking teenaged pricks you’d ever see with sacks on their backs, rag-wrapped sandals, and two cheap but nasty-looking crossbows. I’d barely worked out who or what they were before they’d both fired bolts.
One bolt chinked on stone and made a spark, but the other took a ginger long-hair through the ribs. All the cats ran but the blind one, who tried to flee but hit a wall, then made false starts in two directions before he just crouched against the wall and shivered. One of the cat-shooting turdlets scooped up and sacked the ginger, while the other hawked and spat, reloading his bow with a rusty bolt he pulled out of his pocket. The blind cat just sat there, staring in this direction and that with wide, useless yellow-green eyes. Most people just looked away, though a couple of shyte kids hooted at the fun. The turdlet with the bow took aim.
“Wait,” I said, and gods bless me, I got in between him and the cat.
“Wha, ye knap?” he said, the flower of Holtish charm.
“I’ll give you two shaves if you don’t shoot Bully Boy.”
“Sure,” he said, “sure,” lowering his bow. I had the unworthy suspicion he intended to shoot it after he got his money, but I couldn’t stand on morals—I had no intention of giving him two shaves. Not the sort he meant, anyway.
When I got close to him, I drew a small but very sharp nip-knife from my belt and, quick as a snake, ran its edge up one of his hairy cheeks and down the other, meanwhile slapping his bow down to clatter on the ground. I trip-kicked the other one—the Low School makes expert trippers, blinders, and knockers-down of all its fledglings—and as he fell with a Faw! I sprinted at the cat. I grabbed it up by its nape and ran hard as it paddled its back legs in the air.
“My cat!” the ginger-shooter yelled at my back. “That Galtie prigger stole my cat and abused me!”
I really don’t know where the chainsdam came from, but I was still a bit drunk from the Drum, and there she was, big, quick, and hard, and me with my hand too full of cat to do anything about her. I saw myself in her steel breastplate, green-eyed and o-mouthed, a squirming blind alley cat in my left hand, and she snapped a manacle on my right wrist before I was fully aware what she was about. She couldn’t see my tattoo by daylight, but we weren’t in daylight long.
* * *
“Guild, eh?” the clerk-justice said in the wobbly candlelight of the gaol. Crutches leaned against the wall behind him.
“Yes, sir.”
“The sirs won’t help you any more than your Guild will, blacktongue. You know what they say about caught thieves, aye?”
“I’m not a thief.”
“Yes, and I’ll just put the tip in, we know how these things go. What do your masters in the Guild say about caught thieves, boy? Something about branches?”
“Pruned branches feed the tree.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“So what am I charged with? I didn’t steal anything.”
“Man says it’s his cat.”
“I touched it first, doesn’t that make it my cat?”
“That’s as the law says.”
“So can I go?”
“It’s like you could if you hadn’t pulled a knife on the squire, and I say squire with a deep sense of irony.”
“You’re too smart for this work.”
“I could say as much to you, cat-grabber, purse-nipper. Prank. Do you deny tripping the one and abusing the other with a knife?”
“Not a big knife.”
“Why do it?”
“Cat’s blind. It wasn’t sporting.”
“Heh. Sporting. There’s a word you normally only hear out of rich mouths. You rich, cat-pincher?”
“Do I look it?”
“You look worn and dirty, I grant, but hardly run before the boar. Your split-toed thieving boots are decently made, and that is not a poor man’s blade on your belt.”
“Then I am rich. I have a hundred gold lions and a thousand silver owlets waiting on my ship in the Hot Sea. I’m going to go find a mermaid with a taste for old plums and a fortune in black pearls up her squinny and send her back to you.”
“Mermaids don’t have squinnies. T’s’what makes ’em a parable for life. Warm and welcoming for the first half, then it gets cold and hard and smells bad. But thank you for not being boring. You know how sick I get of hearing, ‘Spare me, Justice, I am innocent, I swear by the gods’? I had decided to hang the next squire told me he was innocent, especially if he was.”
“Can I keep the cat?”
“Cook him and eat him for all I care. Chainsdam!”
The woman who arrested me stepped forward, the blind cat docile in her fist, a half dozen candles dancing in the darkness reflected by her armor.
“Give him back his love child. Then welcome them both to cell three west.”
They didn’t even bother taking my knives off me.
9
Fiddle and Famine
I sat in the grime and puddled muck of my cell, mulling my chances to find the Spanth again before she set off. They were decent, if I could get out of here. For all that she was trying to be indistinct, that raven knight stood out—for her accent, for her taste in wine, even just for her bearing. When you met her, you felt you’d met someone who mattered. Someone whose thumb would one day rest on the scale.
Me? I was just another Galt in a Holtish gaol. I watched the cat pick his way in the general direction of the high, barred window letting in the last of the sunlight. He felt his path from one dry bit of stone to another. Our cellmate stared over his gathered knees at the far wall, drunk as a pickled fish, bony in that old-man way, like he’s easing into his coming skeletonhood.
“Cats are much better at being blind than we are. It’s the whiskers,” I said.
My cellmate burped and rubbed at his thinly veiled sternum with a knotted fist, still staring wallward.
“No offense meant if you’re blind, of course,” brought another burp, this one long and whooshy. “Not that I think you are,” I said.
He had longish fingernails that looked every bit as sturdy as they were dirty, vying with his teeth and eye-whites for most yellow bits of him.
“You’re not in gaol for talking a man to death, are you?” I said.
He produced three fingers and waggled them at me in a way that could only have seemed lewder had he used two. He continued to watch the wall as if it might fall on him if he ceased his vigil.
I also looked at the wall. It was not the first gaol-wall I had seen. The graffiti here was remarkably cosmopolitan, nearly as varied as what you would find in a port city like Pigdenay. Most of it was scrawled or carved in the Holtish I’m using now, of course, but my native Galtish was also well represented. I saw nearly a paragraph of Unthern with its crammed-together, sentence-long words, and a few choice remarks in prancing Ispanthian, best spoken with a mouthful of garlic and hot chilis. Ispanthia and Unther were neighbors of Holt, so it was not surprising that travelers from either land, one east, one west, had run afoul of the chainsmen of the lovely town of Cadoth.