"Mercedes Lackey - It Takes A Thief" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

fill the half-barrel in the kitchenтАФone bucket at a time. He stumbled on the
rutted, frozen dirt of the courtyard; his boots, stuffed with straw for extra
warmth, were far too big for him. He didn't care; better too big than too
small.
Leastwise they don' pinch.
Now Skif went out into the common room to ready it for the first customers,
lighting the fire there with a brand from the kitchen fire, arranging bits of
wood on either side of the hearth to dry, taking the benches down off the
tables, and the shutters off the windows. The oiled paper in the windows
didn't
do a great deal to keep out the cold, but with snow in the street outside,
there
was some light getting in this morning, so it was just as well that oiled
paper
hindered more than it helped in that direction. Skif would never want to see
what the common room looked like in the full light of the sun,
As horrible as the food and drink here in the Hollybush were, there were two
customers waiting for Skif to open the door. He knew them both by sight; two
men
who would down a minimum of six mugs of foul beer and choke down a slice of
stale, burned bread with a scraping of nameless fat before shambling off
somewhere, not to be seen until the next morning. Presumably, they had jobs
somewhere and this was their breakfast.
They slumped down on the benches nearest the door, and Skif yelled for Maisie,
the fourth member of Uncle Londer's tavern staff. As usual, she emerged from
her
own cubby of a blocked-up stair that once led to the second floor (which,
unlike
Skif's, had a flap of patched canvas for a door) followed by Kalchan. As
usual,
she said nothing, only scuttled into the kitchen for the customer's beer and
bread, her face set in a perpetual mask of fear. Kalchan hitched at his trews
and grinned, showing yellowed teeth, and followed her into the kitchen.
Skif shuddered. As awful as his position was here, Maisie's was worse.
This was a tavern, not an inn, and the kitchen and common room were all there
was of the place. The tenement rooms upstairs, although they belonged to Uncle
Londer, were not available for overnight guests, but were rented by the month.
There was a separate entrance to the rooms, via a rickety staircase in the
courtyard. This limited the tenants' access to the inn and the fuel and food
kept there. Uncle fully expected his tenants to pilfer anything they could lay
their hands on, and they responded to his trust by doing so at every possible
opportunity. Not that there were many opportunities; Kalchan saw to that.
Now Skif was free to leave at last for the lessons that every child was
required
by Valdemar law to have until he was able to read, write, and cipher. Not even
Uncle Londer had been able to find a way to keep Skif from those lessons, much
as he would have liked to.
Skif didn't wait around for permission from Kalchan to leave, or his cousin
would find something else for him to do and make him late. If he was late,
he'd