Somehow, without having a plan, they’d gotten in, snatched the right things, and gotten out within moments. For one thing, they had gone straight to the kitchen as the best bet. Taking money was out of the question; they didn’t know where the till was. There was no time to search for valuable property left behind in the confusion. Without discussion, they had gone for what they needed, where they knew they would find something worth taking.

The kitchen.

Like the rest of the inn, it was deserted—when the chief cook left, everyone else had taken the excuse to run out, too. There must have been a big delivery not long before, since the kitchen was full of unwrapped and partially unwrapped parcels of food.

It was like being turned loose in the best market in town. Skif had grabbed a wrapped block of butter, a cone of sugar, and a ham, and a handful of the brown paper the stuff had come wrapped in. Deek had gone for a whole big dry-cured hard sausage, a string of smaller ones, and half a wheel of cheese. Then out the back and over the wall they went, into an alley that was full of smoke and hid them beautifully. As soon as they were in the smoke, Skif and Deek pulled out the string bags they always brought with them just in case something in the nature of foodstuffs presented itself. Quickly wrapping up the articles in paper under cover of the smoke, they stuffed their booty into the bags, then came running out of the smoke into the crowd, coughing and wheezing far more than was necessary, acting like innocents who’d gone shopping for their mums and been caught in the alley. No one paid them any mind—they were all too busy ogling the fire and the bucket brigade or craning their necks to see if the fire brigade had gotten to the burning inn yet. Skif and Deek had strolled homeward openly, carrying enough food to last them all for weeks. All of it luxury stuff, too—not the sort of thing they got to taste more than once in a while. They had eggs a lot, since they were pretty cheap, with just about anyone who had a bit of space keeping pigeons or chickens, even in the city. Bread was at every meal; bread was the staple of even the poorest diets.

Roots like tatties and neeps were cheap enough, too, and cabbage, and onions—even old Kalchan had those at the inn. Dried pease and beans made a good soup, and Kalchan had those, too, though more often than not they were moldy.