“Good! Plenty of time to get it done. I’m not looking for anything specific, so Rattle should be able to find a suitable book with relative ease. Speaking of Rattle,” Belamy said, glancing inside the kitchen, “it smells like he’s just about got your dinner ready. Will you be taking your dinner by the fire or in your room?”
“The fire, I guess,” Skate said, sitting in front of the crackling flames. After being in the stale cold air of the basement laboratory, the warmth was a great comfort. Besides, she wanted to ask one of her questions before she went to bed, and that was not going to happen if she went and barricaded herself in her room.
Belamy nodded and took his seat behind his desk. He pulled his large book closer to him and began reading silently as Rattle floated into the room carrying a bowl of fresh hot soup. It offered the bowl to Skate and bounced happily back into the kitchen. The soup smelled inviting, but it was too hot to eat, so she set it on the floor to cool.
Skate stared into the fire. Find the best thing he’s got and then get him for all he’s worth by taking it away. Yes, she was sure there was something special in that room. She thought of what else might be very valuable, a single object she could take and escape with when the time came.
The statuette that had been above the fireplace when she’d first tried to steal from Belamy had not been put back in its place. Could that have some high value she did not know about? There were also the ten red gemstones Belamy had told her not to touch that first night; she had not seen those again either. Both of these objects—the statuette and the jewelry box, wherever they were—could very well be the type of thing she would need to find and escape with when the time came to cut and run. They were both small and presumably lightweight, so escape would not be a problem; and they seemed to be so valuable that Belamy, who kept very expensive books within easy reach of his guest, deemed it prudent to relocate them to a safer, undisclosed location. Behind a locked door in a basement behind a trick bookcase, maybe.
Skate took up her soup, which had cooled some, though she still needed to blow the steam off the top in order to make it safe to eat. When she tilted the bowl upward, the warm brothy water was at just the right temperature; she could taste every bit of it, and the heat was pleasant and soothing to a throat sore from the cold. Rattle really was a good cook.
After a few small gulps, Skate lowered the bowl again, not wanting to make herself sick by eating too much at once. The Ink’s food was okay when you could get it while it was warm, and for members in good standing, it was readily available most of the time. When Skate had first joined, she had been ravenous and had gorged herself far too quickly on the meat offered to her. The stomach pain and the hideous expectation of being sick for the next few hours had taught her never to make that mistake again.
Skate wiped her mouth with her perpetually dirty sleeve. She thought the fire was lacking, so she took a sizable log from the ever-full rack of wood and tossed it on top of the other logs. It landed with a heavy thunk and sent a few embers spraying out, spiraling like flecks of dust in the wind and landing safely in the old stone fireplace, nowhere near the precious books or the soft rug Skate stood upon.
As she watched the small flames lick the sides of their new meal, her mind drifted to a night that had been in many ways like this one.
It had been a cold night near the middle of winter, and there had been snow on the ground then, too. It had still been falling from the sky in small packets, flakes swirling and crashing into one another on their way to the welcoming earth below. She remembered falling asleep looking at it through the smudged window of the room that had been her family’s home.
They had been in the slums, a part of town even worse than the docks, both then and now. They lived on a plot with ten other families, most of whom had no more than a tent and the ragged clothes on their back to try to make it through the night. Every morning after a night like this, the first children up went peeking into tents to see who had survived and who had not, taking the departed family’s best things for themselves before announcing the passing to the group at large. It was a matter of survival; nobody wanted anyone to pass in the night, but if it happened, all the better for your own family.
Her mom and dad had managed to get a rudimentary shack built before winter, complete with that one dirty window. They had even secured a ratty old mattress to serve as a family bed. Her parents had been talking quietly to each other as she drifted off. She could not hear what they were saying and did not care to try. She was warm from the cold under the thick blanket, and they had managed to have a hot meal a few hours earlier.
It was later that the fire came. A couple of men from nearby families tried to start a bonfire in the plot of land, in a suitably open area where the flames should have stayed far clear of the tents and sheds and sleeping bags. They were successful, and the warmth of the red flames was a great comfort for this disaffected and despondent crew. There would not have been any problems had a drunken argument not resulted in someone jostling the fire, sending a stray log rolling to one of the tents.
Skate was asleep for the inciting incident; she pieced together what had happened the day after, when she heard some of her neighbors talking in hushed tones.
“Poor dear,” she overheard an old crone whisper to a neighbor, “to lose her parents that way.”
Throughout the day, Skate could add a chorus of alternately sympathetic and callous remarks:
“—can’t take her in, of course, can barely feed me own, can I?”
“—rescued her but then rushed in to find the mother. No one
saw—”
“Anybody call dibs on her parents’ stuff yet?”
“It all burned up, stupid.”
“—better that she had passed as well than to suffer so…”
Skate heard these things but felt nothing. She had been numb since waking up in the snow, her father telling her to stay there and wait. He had been a rough-looking man, a sailor by trade, though unable to find work for most of the year because of an old injury. In the cold, he could barely walk.
He tried that night to move, hobbling away from her into an inferno. It was then she had noticed that the world was burning. The orange and red flames climbed impossibly high into the night, and she might have even called them pretty in a different situation. However, there and then, they meant death.
She never saw her father again; nor did her mother ever surface from the firestorm.
And so, over the next few days, Skate sat there. She never moved, just stared at the spot her home had been, hearing but not listening to the chatter around her as the world passed by. She believed that last voice, that there was little point in trying to survive now that she was without home or kin. If she had living relatives elsewhere, she knew nothing of them. She was alone, and the world was careless.
Then Haman appeared. He sat next to her without introduction. He was in training, still, as a wizard. He bore the insignia of an apprentice on his breast. He did not say anything for a long while, and Skate did not care, for what use had she for any comfort a stranger might offer?
When he did speak, his voice was somber. Reverent. “There is no loss without mourning, and mourning is no small thing. But your mourning is useless without a life to sustain it.” It was then that he turned to her and spoke directly. “Do you wish to go on?” The question had been simple, but it felt like hours before she nodded.