Things settled down after that, for a few days. Anne wasn’t the only one who’d been hurt at Slaughterhouse Narrow, and everyone needed time to rest and heal. There was grief for Nik the Knife, but he wasn’t the first friend these men had lost, and they knew he wouldn’t be the last. Pawl the tailor and his boy came by again, with a cart this time, and everyone collected their fine new clothes. With that and regular trips to Ernst the barber up on Trader’s Row, I had the lot of them looking like proper Pious Men now. That was good.
We had taken back the two boardinghouses in addition to the Tanner’s Arms, and money was starting to come in. I had fresh supplies brought into the Tanner’s, food and beer and brandy, and Will the Wencher was keeping good on his promise. When Godsday came around again and he presented me with his accounts, I had to admit that he had done what he said he would do. He had taken six marks, not five, and turned a good profit on them. A quarter of that profit was his, then.
I heard confessions in the morning, and that afternoon I made Will a partner in the Chandler’s Narrow house. Anne hadn’t come to say confession that morning, but I knew she had been up to Will’s place every day since the battle at Slaughterhouse Narrow, and she looked the better for it. I was pleased, to see her happy.
All was well, except one thing.
I had told Old Kurt that I would bring Billy the Boy to him, and I hadn’t done that.
Billy seemed happy enough, and he and Hari had found a friendship somewhere. Whether it had been born that night when Billy had floated over Hari’s dying body and done whatever it was that he had done, or whether it was rooted in the extra treats that Hari produced for him in the kitchen I didn’t know, but then I daresay it didn’t matter either. It was good to see and I didn’t like to take it away from either of them, but I knew the thing had to be done.
The day after Godsday, Anne and I took Billy the Boy through the stable yard and along the alleys to the path beside the river. Anne was still limping from the blow she had taken at Slaughterhouse Narrow and I had suggested that she didn’t need to come, but to her mind I was wrong about that.
That made the going slow, but we walked to the Wheels anyway with Billy the Boy between us. We might have looked like a family, if Anne had been wearing a kirtle under her cloak and not the men’s britches and shirt and coat that she insisted on. I looked down at Billy and thought that perhaps it would be no bad thing, to have a family. Not with Bloody Anne, though; I knew that could never happen and truth be told, I wouldn’t have wanted it to. We were friends, and that was all. My thoughts wandered to Ailsa, and I thought perhaps that might be a different matter.
That was a fool’s thinking and no mistake. Working for the crown sickened me enough, without starting to think about a Queen’s Man in that way. That was out of the question, I knew, yet I seemed to keep doing it. I turned my attention to the alley that led up to Old Kurt’s door. There was a fresh rat nailed to the door, I noticed, not more than a few hours old by the look of it.
“He’s in, then,” I said, nodding to the rat.
“Aye,” Anne said.
I knocked on the door and called out the words.
“Wisdom sought is wisdom bought, and I have coin to pay.”
Old Kurt opened the door and grinned at us.
“Tomas Piety and the fine lady,” he said, “and this young gentleman too!”
Billy the Boy looked at Old Kurt, his face expressionless. After a moment he turned and looked up at me.
“I’ll be staying here,” he announced.
I blinked at him. That was the same way he had decided in his mind that Ailsa would be staying at the Tanner’s Arms. He had been right about that, but this might be a different matter. It wasn’t something I had intended to bring up so soon or quite so abruptly as that.
“I said I’d have a look at him,” Old Kurt said. “No more than that, Tomas.”
“The lad needs teaching,” I said, “and he’s keen to get started, that’s all. You know how boys are when they get an idea in their heads. Can we come inside?”
Kurt nodded and led us through to his dusty parlor where the sword of a king hung over the fireplace. So he said, anyway. Billy sat down on a low stool in front of the cold grate and drew his knees up to his chin. He looked at home there.
“Hmm,” Kurt said, looking down at the lad.
“We proved he’s not a witch,” I said, although to my mind we had proved nothing of the sort, “but he’s something. Touched by the goddess, aye, but Our Lady doesn’t heal men. Apparently Billy does, and that must mean he’s got the cunning in him.”
“Perhaps he has,” Kurt admitted. He sat down and looked at Bloody Anne. “What does the fine lady say?”
“She says she’ll stab you if you call her that again,” Anne growled. “My name’s Bloody Anne.”
Kurt snorted but made no more of it.
“Well and good,” he said. “And what do you say, Bloody Anne?”
She took a breath and shook her head. This didn’t sit well with her, I knew that, but she knew what needed to be done.
“Teach him,” she said.
“This is no house of magicians,” Kurt said. “He won’t learn no philosophy from me, nor mathematics beyond his ’rithmetic. I don’t scry the stars like they do in Dannsburg, nor summon up demons and make pacts with them neither. That’s high magic, and I don’t do that.”
I doubted that the magicians in Dannsburg did that either, but then I wouldn’t know. I nodded and held my peace about that.
“What can you teach him, Old Kurt?”
Kurt snorted again and waved at the fireplace. There was a sharp crack, and the coals in the grate caught and burned with an acrid smoke that his chimney did a poor job of removing. Anne hissed and took a step back, her hands going to her daggers.
“Easy, Bloody Anne,” I cautioned her. “This is what we’re here for.”
“I can teach him the cunning, if he has the wits and the will to learn,” Kurt said. “Cunning is about real things in the real world, not stars and demons and debating high ideas. Sorcery, the magicians call that. Low magic. They look down their noses at it as being beneath them. Maybe it is, with all their money. A man as rich as a magician has servants to lay his fire for him, but a cunning man don’t so he makes his life easier the best way he can. A cunning man can set fires and quench them, mend hurts and cause them. A cunning man can tell you things you’ve forgotten you knew, and divine what tomorrow might bring.”
“What do you think, Billy?” I asked the lad. “Do you want to learn from Old Kurt here?”
Billy glanced at the fire and it abruptly went out, the last of the smoke curling slowly into the room.
“I’ll be staying here,” he said again, and it seemed his mind was set on it.
I nodded and looked at Kurt. He had a frown on his face and was staring hard at Billy. It occurred to me that perhaps it hadn’t been Kurt who had put the fire out. The old man cleared his throat like he was about to say something, perhaps change his mind, and I didn’t want that.
“You’ll want paying,” I said.
“I will,” Kurt agreed, and maybe it was talk of money that swayed him in the end. “A silver mark a week, for my time and his keep. Not a copper less, and I won’t dicker on this. If I’m teaching the lad I’ll have little time for anything else, and why should I be short of pocket? A mark a week, Piety, and I’ll take six weeks up front or you can fuck off.”
That was a lot of money, but I had it. The price wasn’t something anyone else needed to know about, which meant I could draw on my hidden coin for it and no one would be the wiser. I nodded.
“All right,” I said. “But you keep this between us, Old Kurt. The Pious Men know Billy is coming to learn from you, but the price has to be kept a secret and it has to stay that way. Does that sound fair?”
Kurt nodded.
“That’s fair,” he said.
He stood and spat in his palm, and I spat in mine and we shook hands on it, the old way. I dug in my pouch and took out six silver marks and gave them to him. He nodded again, and it was done.
That was how Billy the Boy started on the path to become a magician.