Difficult as it was to believe, customers kept coming in, all night long. The benches and tables were never empty until just before closing; Skif and Maisie never had a moment to rest. He’d tried once to reckon up how much money—in the tiniest of coins, the pennybit—Kalchan took in of a night. There were four pennybits to a penny; beer was two a mug, bread and stew were three for a plate. Just by way of comparison, a mug of good, clean water from something other than a pump in dubious proximity to a privy cost two pennybits (but it wouldn’t get you drunk—and a mug of sweet spring water was three) and a bun like the one that Deek had bought him this afternoon was a full penny. So you could have something wholesome, though not much of it, for the same price as a full meal in the Hollybush. Evidently, bad as it was, there were enough people who felt they were getting value for their money to keep coming. The two fireside benches sat four each, and the four tables accommodated six eaters. Unless they planned a night to get drunk, the tables cleared pretty quickly. Skif figured that there were probably a couple hundred customers in here over the course of a day.

That was where Skif’s grasp of numbers broke down—but he reckoned that the Hollybush brought in a couple hundred pennies in a night, and maybe a third of that during the day. Uncle Londer obviously had a good thing going here. His costs were low, buying cheap as he did, and the hire of his help was even lower. Maisie was a half-wit; Uncle Londer paid some relative of hers for her services. Whatever he paid, it wasn’t much, and she never saw any of it; all she got was food and a place to sleep. Skif’s labor was free, of course, and he seldom ate here. And the cook—

Well, he didn’t know what the cook got. He never saw her getting paid, but she stayed, so she must have been getting something. It couldn’t have been that much; even he could cook better than she did.

Maybe the attraction for her was the unlimited supply of beer. He never saw her without a mug somewhere nearby, and she had the yellowish color of someone who was drinking herself to death, although her shuffling footsteps were steady and she never seemed drunk.

The upshot was, this place was mostly profit for Londer, that much was for sure. Skif wasn’t going to feel at all guilty about vanishing in a moon. Uncle Londer could just find himself another boy or do without.