“Rethwellan” was one word. “Vatean” was another. The first was a country somewhere outside of Valdemar; the second he recognized as a merchant—a very wealthy merchant—and a friend of the great Lord Orthallen. Skif still filched food from Lord Orthallen on a regular basis; he’d gone back to it in the wake of the fire, after his three moons had run out. It was hard to go back to the roof road, and the liftin’ lay didn’t pay enough for him to have a room, buy drinks to loosen tongues, and eat, too. So all this winter past, he’d lifted silks and fenced them, lived in a little box of a garret room tucked into the side of the chimney of a bakehouse—wonderfully warm through the rest of the winter, that was—and went back to mingling with the servants in Lord Orthallen’s household to get his food. Only now he knew far, far more. Now he knew how to slip in and out of the household, knew how to conceal more and what to conceal. He knew what delicacies to filch and trade for entire meals of more mundane foodstuffs. That, perhaps, was the best dodge.

With educated eyes, he soon learned how to get into and out of the storage rooms without being caught. The easiest way was to bribe one of the delivery boys to let him take what had been ordered to Lord Orthallen’s manse. Now these days he no longer bothered to disguise himself as a page. While the cook or the butler was tallying what had come in on his pony cart, he would carry foodstuffs into the storage room and leave a window unlocked. Then he would come back once the frantic work of preparing a meal had begun, slip in, help himself to whatever he wanted, and slip out again. He wasn’t buying a lot of food anymore.

When the bakehouse room became unendurable in late spring, he packed up his few possessions and found his new room over a stable that supplied goats and donkeys for delivery carts. Cheap enough, with windows on both sides, it caught a good breeze that kept it cool during the day while he was sleeping. The animals went out each day at dawn—when he got back from his work—and came back at sunset, by which time he was ready to leave. The goats and donkeys took their pungent smells and noise with them, and by the time he had finished eating and was ready to sleep, there was nothing but the sound of the single stableboy cleaning pens and very little smell. It was a good arrangement all around, and if his landlord never asked what he did all night, well, he never asked why on nights of moon-dark a certain string of remarkably quiet donkeys with leather wrapped around their hooves went out when he did and arrived back by dawn.