Fable (Fable #1)(64)
I reached up, touching the fraying edge of unrolled white silk, dotted with tiny yellow flowers, curling my fingers into my fist when I realized how dirty my hand looked next to it.
Footsteps trailed toward us, and Auster leaned on the counter with both elbows, waiting. The man rounded the corner, stopping short when he saw Willa, but his eyes widened when he caught sight of Paj. The scarf around his neck was tied into a neat bow, his white mustache curled up at both ends with wax.
“What do you think you’re doing here?” His thick accent unraveled the end of each word.
“I thought you’d be happy to see me, Leo.” Paj smiled.
He huffed. “My customers will not be happy when word gets around that a bunch of urchins were in my shop.”
“If you remember, it was an urchin who saved your ass back in Bastian. You wouldn’t have this fancy shop if it weren’t for me,” Paj said, tipping his head back to empty his glass.
Leo went to the window, pulling the lace curtains closed before he pulled a pipe and a small round tin from his apron. We watched in silence as he filled the chamber with crushed mullein leaves, and he lit them, puffing until the white smoke was pouring from his lips.
“Isn’t it dangerous to wear that?” Auster looked at the ring on Leo’s middle finger. It was a merchant’s ring, set with carnelian. I looked around the shop again, confused. If he was a sailmaker, why was he running a tailor shop?
“Worried about me? I’m touched.” Leo spread his fingers before him, eyeing the stone, and when I looked closer, I saw the seal of Bastian imprinted into the silver. So, he was a sailmaker, but he hadn’t been given a merchant’s ring by the guild in Ceros.
“We need a set of sails,” Auster said simply.
Leo’s mustache twitched. “I’m not supposed to make sails. You know that.”
“That doesn’t mean you won’t.”
His eyes squinted. “Why not go to one of the sail lofts on the other side of the city?”
Paj refilled his glass. “We did. They won’t do it.”
“So, you’ve found a bit of trouble.” Leo chuckled to himself.
“What do you care? Will you do it or not?”
“That depends on how much coin you’ll give me to make risking my neck worth it.”
“Eight hundred coppers,” I said flatly.
Willa looked at me with a stern reproach.
But we were beyond negotiation. We were desperate, and there was no point in acting like we weren’t. “We don’t have time to barter. We need sails and we need them now.”
Leo looked over us, thinking. “What kind of ship?”
“A double-mast lorcha,” Auster answered. “It should take you no time.“
“This wouldn’t be the lorcha that had its sails slashed two days ago, would it?” A twinkle lit in Leo’s eye.
Willa glared at him. “How fast can you have them done?”
I watched him think. If he was caught making sails without a merchant’s ring from the Ceros Sailmakers Guild, he was as good as dead. And he wasn’t hurting for coin if he worked in North Fyg. If he did it, it was because he wanted to. Not because he needed anything from us.
“Two days.” He smiled, the pipe clenched in his white teeth.
“And how are you going to make them in two days?” Paj cocked his head to one side. The light coming through the window shadowed his face, painting his skin ink-black.
Leo shrugged. “I have people.”
“Well, they better know how to keep their mouths shut.” I untied both leather purses from my hips and tossed them to him. “There’s two hundred. You’ll get another two when the sails are finished, and the last four when they’re strung up.”
“Deal.”
Willa took a step closer to him. “You don’t deliver, and I don’t need to tell you what we’ll do to you.”
His smile faltered a little. “I said I’d do it.”
Paj stood, setting down his empty glass. “I think we can call it even, then.”
Leo nodded, opening the door. “It’s about time.”
We filed back out into the street, the weight of the coin now missing from my belt, and Paj and Willa walked ahead of us as Auster and I followed.
“What did Paj do for him?” I asked, speaking low so only Auster could hear me.
He checked to see if Paj was listening before he answered, “Paj crewed a ship out of Bastian before we came to the Narrows. Their trade route ended in Ceros, and he smuggled Leo into the cargo when he needed to disappear.”
“Disappear from Bastian?”
He nodded.
“So, he was a sailmaker in Bastian.”
“Not just any sailmaker. He was Holland’s sailmaker.”
I stopped midstride, gaping at him. Holland was the same trader Willa said had it out for Zola. The same trader whose coin controlled the gem trade.
“He fell out of her good graces. It was leave Bastian without a trace, or meet whatever end Holland had planned for him,” Auster said. “He paid Paj sixty coppers to get him on the ship to Ceros. It was more money than we’d ever seen, so he did it. But no trader or merchant would touch him when he came to the Narrows, so he set up shop as a tailor.”
That’s what Auster meant when he said that Leo wasn’t supposed to exist. He’d found a desperate kid to hide him in the belly of a cargo ship and ran. As far as anyone in Ceros knew, he was just a tailor.