Official punishments were many and varied, none of them very appealing. Which’s the point, I s’pose. A thief could be transported to work in someone’s fields, could be sent to work as a general dogsbody for the Guard, could be left in gaol, could get lashes—it all depended on the judge. That was for the first time you got caught. After that, the punishments were harsher.

But he wouldn’t think about that until after he’d been caught for the first time. If he was. If he was clever, fast, smart—he might never be. Why not? I bin keepin’ from gettin’ caught ’till now, an’ I’m just a young’un. Ye’d think I’d just get smarter as I get bigger.

There would be a lot of learning time, though, a great many menial chores as well, and he couldn’t expect to share in the profits even his own hauls brought in for a while. That didn’t matter; life here would be a paradise compared with what his life had been like at the tavern. In fact, he didn’t much care if all he did was wash the stuff the others brought in for the next year! It wouldn’t be any harder than working at the tavern, and he’d be full and warm all the time, with a bed like he’d never had before and clothing that wasn’t more hole than fabric.

He lay in the darkness contemplating his future until he heard someone stirring, heard the shutters of another bed open, and the pad of feet on the floor. He turned on his side and saw a flicker of light through the cracks in the shutters of his cubby. He pushed them open cautiously, and looked out.

“Heyla, ‘nother lark, eh?” Raf said genially. “Come gimme ’and, then.”

Skif hopped out and shut the cubby doors behind him. Raf was bent over the fire under the wash cauldron, coaxing a flame from the banked coals. “Take yon tallow dip, take a light from here, an’ light them lamps,” he ordered, jerking his head at a tallow dip on the otherwise clean table behind him, barely visible in the dim and flickering light from the hand-sized fire. Skif picked it up, lit it at Raf’s little fire, and went around the walls to relight the lamps he vaguely recalled hanging there. There were a lot of oil lamps—four!—and all of them were cobbler’s lamps with globes of water-filled glass around the flame to magnify the light, the most expensive kind of oil lamp there was. Skif was impressed; he hadn’t paid any attention before, other than to note absently that although this room didn’t have any windows there was plenty of illumination. It was interesting; Bazie didn’t spend money on luxuries, but in places where it counted—the good soap for the laundry, for instance, and the lighting, and decent fuel for the fireplace under the wash boiler, Bazie got the best.

When he was done, he blew out the tallow dip and put it with the others in a broken cup above the firebox. By this time the shutters of another cubby, one just above Skif’s, had been pushed open by a foot, and Deek’s tousled head poked out.