The look Skif wore on his face must have been funny, since Beel smiled thinly. “I can’t tell you why, Skif, but I hope that you can at least trust the priest if you can’t trust your cousin. My father… is not as clever as he thinks he is. Someone is angry, angry at him, and angry at Kalchan. I think, unless he can be persuaded to curb his anger, that he is going to act this afternoon. You have nothing to do with all this, and you do not deserve to be caught in the middle.”

And with those astonishing words, Beel turned and left, as he always did, as if nothing out of the ordinary had ever transpired between them.

After a moment, Skif shook off his astonishment and slowly left the building. Once out in the sunlight, he decided that whatever Beel was hinting at didn’t really matter, because he had no notion of going back to the tavern during the day anyway. He was going to meet Deek, and get his first lessons in the fine art of thievery!

Deek wasn’t lurking anywhere on the way to the building where Bazie’s “laundry” was, but Skif remembered the way back to Bazie’s, including the secret passages, perfectly. He suspected that this was his first test, and when he rapped on the door in an approximation of Deek’s knock, it was Deek himself who opened it with a grin.

“I tol’ ye ’e’d ’member!” Deek crowed, drawing Skif inside.

“An’ I agreed wi’ ye,” Bazie said agreeably. “If ’e hadn’, ’e wouldn’ be much use, would’e?”

There was new laundry festooning the ceiling today—stockings and socks. Only Lyle was with Bazie and Deek; the third boy was nowhere to be seen.

“‘J’eet yet?” asked Lyle, as Deek drew him inside. At Skif’s head shake, the other boy wordlessly gestured at the table, where half of a decent cottage loaf of brown bread waited, with some butter and a knife. Beside it was a pot of tea and mugs. Buttered bread, half eaten, sat on a wooden plate next to Bazie. All in all, it was the sort of luncheon that wouldn’t disgrace the table of a retiring spinster of small means.

Not that Skif cared what it looked like—he’d been invited to eat, and eat he surely would. He fell on the food, cutting two nice thick slices of bread and buttered them generously, pouring himself a mug of tea. Bazie watched him with an oddly benevolent look on his face.