“Tellis isn’t ever here when the wagon comes. You notice that?” Beryal held the door to the shop for Cerryl.
“He is the master scrivener.”
“He would be the master of more than that.” Beryal shook her head, then started to close the door. “But he never will be. Those with coins keep them close.”
Benthann pushed by them and through the door, not even looking at her mother or Cerryl, and ran down the street to catch the wagon, a smaller waste box in her hands.
“Then there be some who think that the waste wagon waits for them.” Beryal grinned and closed the door before she turned back toward the kitchen.
Cerryl used the cleaning rag to wipe off the sides and the rim of the waste bin, before easing it back into place. He seated himself at the copy desk and started to clean the quill he had abandoned when he had heard the wagon bells.
Benthann glanced in the workroom door. “You could have called me.”
“I didn’t hear the wagon until it was almost here, and the big bin was full.” He looked up, but Benthann hadn’t stayed to hear what he said. He shrugged to himself, realizing he probably wouldn’t ever understand the young woman. Then, there were a lot of things he didn’t understand, undercurrents that kept tugging at him—like Tellis’s gloom when he mentioned his consort. He wanted to know more but dared not ask. There was so much he dared not ask.
After he finished sharpening the nib, he smoothed the vellum and dipped the pen into the ink. Tellis was right; he needed to make good progress on the Herbes book, boring as it might be.
He frowned as he recalled Tellis’s words—something copied that could not leave the mages’ tower. Did that mean that the books that really said something about how to handle the chaos forces always remained guarded by the mages? If that were so, how could he ever learn? Except by experimenting, and that was clearly dangerous.
He forced his eyes to the book on the copy stand and began to replicate the letters on the new vellum.
. . . if the leaves be brown, and dried, and powdered, then they may be used as to purge the bowels . . . save that never more than a thimble be used for a full-grown man . . . and never be offered to a child or anyone of less than four stones . . .
Another face appeared in the doorway from the front room.
“Cerryl, I be off to the market,” announced Beryal. “Benthann left for darkness knows where a time back. There’s a pair of coppers on the table in the common room, should Shanandra ever bring the herbs she promised. Two coppers for the lot, no more. You understand?”
“How big a lot? And what?”
“Ah . . . some brains you have, unlike my daughter. Enough to fill the basket by the table without crushing the leaves. There should be sage and tarragon, fennel . . . Dried, they should be, but not so dry as to powder if put under your thumb.” Beryal nodded, then left.
Cerryl cleaned the nib gently, afraid that the ink might have congealed or built up, then redipped the pen and tried a line on the practice palimpsest. “Good.”
His eyes went back to the copy stand and the Herbes book there.
XLI
IN THE DIM light of predawn, Cerryl carried the chamber pot through the rear gateway and out to the sewer catch. He set the pot on the white-dusted stones, opened the stone lid, and, in a quick motion, lifted the pot and emptied it, holding his breath as the fetid fumes swirled up before he could close the lid. Sometimes the fumes were overpowering, and at times there seemed to be none at all.
He carried the pot back into the courtyard, where he half filled it with water, which he swished around to rinse away any of the residue. Then he went back to the sewer dump and emptied the pot again. He sniffed the pot gingerly. It smelled clean enough to return to his room.
He turned in the direction of a scraping sound from the alley, near where it joined the way of the lesser artisans. Kotwin the potter was closing his own sewer dump, chamber pot in hand.
The faint and acrid smell of stove coal drifted into the alleyway as Cerryl turned. He smiled then, after closing the gate behind him, and stepped into the courtyard and back to his room, where the bucket of wash water he had already drawn waited.
With a quick glance at the closed door and shutters, he looked at the water in the bucket, concentrating on it, and on his vision of chaos fire in the shape of a poker into the bucket.
Hsssttt . . . The steam rose from the bucket, and Cerryl smiled. Warm water was much better than the ice-chill liquid from the pump. He pulled off the ragged handed-down nightshirt and stretched.
A chill mistlike sense filled the small room, and there was the feeling of being inspected somehow, but a cold inspection, as though he were a side of beef or a gutted river trout. He forced himself to finish washing and dressing as methodically as normal, somehow knowing that reacting to the unseen inspection would only make his situation in Fairhaven worse, and hoping that the unseen observer had not caught his little use of chaos.