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“Your apprentice,” the man snarled, “Is a little thief.”
Gustaw was shoved towards his master by a truly painful grip on his ear, and he felt his master’s hard hands being laid on his shoulders, too strong for him to even think of squirming away.
Past the faint haze of too much small beer, Gustaw thought that he should probably start being very afraid now.
“He steal from you?” Master Dyzdek asked. The guard huffs a laugh, pulling out the purse that he’d taken off of Gustaw’s belt, earlier that evening.
“He’s been stealing from someone, ‘less you pay him in silver. Maybe you’ll want to check your own coffers.”
He tossed the purse over, and it landed in one of Dyzdek’s large hands. Gustaw curled away from the sudden movement, and felt like he was about to piss himself when Dyzdek looked inside the purse. He knew his master would recognize his own silver, his own purse, although it was a bit lighter, now. Gustaw had hoped to never see Dyzdek again, to never have to see the man realize he’d stolen from him, but here he was now. God damn too-curious guards.
“Ah yeah, this’s mine,” Dyzdek said, and took out two coins, handing them over to the guard. “Thanks for bringing ‘im back in one piece, master…?”
“Oh, it’s just Hearn.” The guard said, tucking the coins away. He grinned nastily down at Gustaw, who scowled back.
“I believe a master’s got a right to give his own boys a lesson, anyhow. Give him the buckle end, yeah?”
Master Dyzdek didn’t reply, and the guard walked off, contented with his two silver for ruining all of Gustaw’s hopes. Dyzdek pulled Gustaw inside by the shoulders, and closed the door behind them with a final, awful thud.
Gustaw stared hatefully at the floor as Master Dyzdek tossed the purse onto the counter.
“What in the fuck was you thinking, boy?” he asked. Gustaw flinched at the rage in his voice, and maybe actually did piss a little. Just a little. Just because when his father had been this angry, at least he hadn’t had hands the size of Gustaw’s own head to hit him with.
“Were you carrying that purse around alone? And don’t think I can’t smell the tavern on you, either. Anyone could’ve slit your throat for that coin. Dead, is that what you were trying to be? Or were you just not thinking?”
Gustaw's shoulders were up by his ears, now, and he was horrified to feel the hot pricking of tears starting at his eyes, but he was angry, too. Maybe he’d been angry for too long, or maybe it was the small beer talking. Or, maybe his dead da and the masters at the orphanage and the captain of the Passant and fucking Hearn and master Dyzdek were all fucking right, and he was stupid, because his head snapped up and he snarled,
“I can tell when someone wants to cut my throat! I slipped away when they tried! I would’ve been fine if it wasn’t for that fucking nosy pig-swill—”
He’d more than earned the slap, and flinched away when he saw it coming. Hells, the masters at the orphanage would’ve caned him till be was bloody for the insolence alone.
But the hit didn’t land. Master Dyzdek’s giant hand gripped his chin firmly, but not hard enough to bruise; there was no cruelty to it. And he bent down so that his face was level with Gustaw's.
“And if they’d come after you when you was in your cups? Hearn caught you. You could have died, boy.”
By the time he’d been in his cups, Gustaw had been half-hoping for a murderer, really. Having his throat slit outright would’ve been less painful than being dragged back to the butcher’s shop and an angry master. To his immense horror, he felt tears start to drip down his face. His da would’ve mocked him for that, would’ve dug in and made it hurt, but Master Dyzdek just let his face go, letting him wipe at the tears like a sniveling child in peace. He waited for the slipping sound of leather on cloth, the clink of Dyzdek’s belt.
Give him the buckle end, yeah?
That had been his da’s favorite threat. He’d followed through with it often enough, and Gustaw thought that meant he shouldn’t have been afraid of it any more. He still was, though. The thought of being beat like that again made him feel small and sick inside, and that was making the fucking lump in his throat worse, and he was crying harder. Fuck, he was never drinking this much beer again, he couldn’t even control himself.
Dyzdek sighed, and laid one of those too-large hands on his shoulder.
“Ah, boy. Won’t solve it this way.” He said, as Gustaw hiccuped around a painful sob. “Come on. We’ll get you sobered up, hey?”
Getting sobered up did not, as Gustaw half-feared, involve being stripped naked and sluiced down with freezing water, as he’d seen happen to apprentices after festivals and feast days. Instead, he was handed the water in a deep tankard, and a plate of food to go with it.
Dyzdek gave him a chair close to the fire. He hadn’t exactly been chilled, but the warmth and the crackling were both comforting. He drank the water and ate the food, sullenly grateful for the reprieve.
“So,” Dyzdek said. “When I count the coin I’ve left, how much is gonna be missing?”
Gustaw closed his eyes and shook his head.
“I wasn’t counting,” he said. And then, because all the temper and most of the fear had leached away already, “I’m sorry. I didn’t—I didn’t steal it to piss it away on small beer.”
He winced as he said it. It didn’t make a difference, and he knew that. He’d stolen it. And he’d tried to run away. Dyzdek could have him up in front of a judge for either offense, and he probably would, as soon as he’d taken his own satisfaction out of Gustaw’s hide, anyway.
“Nah, you’re not the kind.” Dyzdek said, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. He’d been drinking a mug of his own—also cold water, not small beer, which was a bit confusing—and he set it down in a decisive way, leaning forward in his seat. He didn’t get up, though, which was all that kept Gustaw from trying to bolt. There was a prickling unpleasantness under his skin that was getting worse the more the fog of the small beer left him. “I’m betting you had a plan, and it didn’t go the way you wanted, and since then you’ve been figuring that since your plan didn’t work out, it wouldn’t be worth trying to make anything work out, hey?”
Gustaw did not like how accurate that assessment was.
“I wanted to buy into the Passant,” he admitted, and immediately regretted saying it.
“The high seas, hey?” Dyzdek said, without any hint of the mockery that Gustaw was expecting. “Alright. And the captain said no?”
He’d said that he had no use for knobby-kneed idiots still wet behind the ears, actually, but Gustaw wasn’t about to repeat that. He wiped his face and nodded.
Dyzdek sighed.
“If you wanted your apprenticeship to be sold to a ship,” he said, “You could’ve told me.”
Gustaw shook his head, not sure how to explain that he hadn’t wanted to be sold off again, traded from one place to another like so much baggage. He’d wanted to strike out on his own, a free man.
“You still want that?” his master asked, damnably kind.
“It wasn’t the sea,” Gustaw said. “I just wanted—just the Passant.”
For a moment, Dyzdek looked like he was going to ask why, and there wasn’t a way that Gustaw could see clear to answer him that didn’t end with him being laughed at for a child. Refusing to answer would probably be what finally started the beating, though, and Gustaw was tired enough that he just wanted it to be over so he could go and lick his wounded pride in peace.
But Dyzdek only nodded, slow, like maybe he didn’t understand, but he was willing to keep not understanding in peace. The simple motion made Gustaw feel like he might start blubbering again, and he shoved the tears down nastily. It was bad enough he’d whined like a weanling brat when he was drunk out of his mind. It would be intolerable if he started while he was sober. He still had to sniff long and hard to keep the tears from coming, though, and he felt his face flush red. He wasn’t able to look Dyzdek in the eye anymore. He just wanted this day to be over.
“Right, then. The shop’s closed tomorrow for the festival, so we’ll go over the accounts then. Get cleaned up, and get some sleep.”
Dyzdek stood, and he patted Gustaw on the shoulder, still gentle. “It’ll seem better in the morning.”
--
Gustaw laid in bed shortly after. It was his usual stuffed cot in an upper room of the butcher’s shop, near enough the chimney to stay warm, with enough blankets to bundle in deep and block out any drafts. He had a candle, though he didn’t usually burn it. He wasn’t sure if Gustaw would be willing to grant him more than the one if it burned out—the fact he had it at all was something he’d initially assumed was an oversight on the big man’s part.
His unbruised hide was starting to make him wonder, though.
He’d assumed the man was lazy, careless, maybe a little stupid. Because Gustaw hadn’t been a good apprentice, and Dyzdek had never so much as slapped him. The orphanage masters, and his father before them, had said they beat him out of care, for his own good, to shape him into the person they wanted him to be. That was just what adults did, and Dyzdek hadn’t. Gustaw had figured he just didn’t care enough.
It would have been easier to beat Gustaw bloody and toss him back into the street than it was to feed him, talk to him, let him sober up. It would have been easier still to take back his silver and tell Hearn to carry Gustaw off as a thief to be hung, and go take in a better charity apprentice from the orphanage.
Instead, Dyzdek had taken more trouble than he’d needed, and Gustaw was going to sleep unhurt. He’d said they’d settle accounts in the morning, which meant he wouldn’t be unhurt for long, but maybe he’d be able to keep from shaming himself with more crying, at least. His pillow was growing steadily wetter under his cheek as it was, and he used the blanket to muffle his intermittent sobs, hating himself for each one.
--
Gustaw woke to the sounds of jangling street troubadours duelling in the street outside, each trying to sing their chosen ballad a little louder than the other. He had enough time to think that it was his day off today, and anticipate spending some of the gift-coppers Dyzdek gave him each week on sweet treats from the street vendors, before he remembered. The news of the Passant docking, and everything that had followed.
He felt over-tired and sick at heart, and suddenly wanted nothing at all more than he wanted to get the beating over with. He got up and got dressed, barely taking a second to splash his face before he descended the ladder into the shop.
They were closed for the feast-day, and he found Dyzdek making porridge and thick, fatty bacon in the back kitchen. He looked up as Gustaw came in, and gestured for him to sit at the table. The black-bound account book was on the table, as was the coffer and the pouch of stolen money. Gustaw’s skin crawled as he sat, his elbow nearly touching the cash box. Dyzdek set a bowl in front of him, rich, heavy food that Gustaw knew he wouldn’t be able to stomach until this was over, but it was still hard to make himself speak.
“Could we—could we do the accounts now?” he asked, and Dyzdek raised an eyebrow at him, sure, but he just shoved his own bowl to the side and pushed his chair closer to Gustaw’s so he could open the accounts book in front of them both.
“Alright, so this column here is what’s called gross profits,” he said, pointing to a long line of numbers written out in black ink, then moving his finger to a column in red ink. “And this here, this is expenses. We don’t do our own slaughtering, so buying the carcasses is an expense. The shop, I own, but we pay taxes on it, so I set aside a healthy portion of profits each month to have ready when the season comes around. We have to eat, so that’s another expense. There’s the laundress’s fee, too. It’s best to set the money aside before you need it, instead of scrambling for it afterwards.”
He looks up at this point, and Gustaw nods, stomach roiling worse than before.
“Right, so I’ve got notes of what we’ll need for expenses by the year-end, and the cash box is for that. It should have thirty gold in it, but we know it’s less, now, and we’ll need to know the difference so we can make it up.”
As Gustaw is handed the money pouch and told to count it, he thinks that he’s got the shape of things. There’s a number of coins that he spent and can’t return, so maybe that’s the number of strikes he’ll have to take. Or maybe double the number, for stealing in the first place. But there’s a nearly comforting groundedness to it. It won’t be like the bad days with his da. Hopefully it won’t be like the orphanage masters, either, who’d liked to set a count and then keep adding strikes when he moved or swore or cried out from the pain.
“Eat while you count, boy,” Dyzdek said, taking his own advice and picking up his bowl. “You’re still growing and you need it.”
Gustaw did. His stomach was calmed enough now to handle the food, though he has to eat it slowly. He’s still shaky on his counting, but Dyzdek doesn’t hit him when he has to start the count over twice, or imply that he’s trying to delay his punishment. Eventually, though, he got the count down.
“Thirty-five coppers short,” he announced, finally.
“So, a little less than two gold,” Dyzdek translates. “God in heaven, boy, I don’t know how you were standing last night. Right. So, let’s move over to the recurring expenses. What can we cut to make up for the lack?”
“We can cut my meals,” Gustaw said, not without some regret. He’s been getting fed a lot here, though, so losing a meal or two a day isn’t the worst that could happen. Instead of nodding along, though, Dyzdek looks at him like he’s gone mad.
“No,” he said. “No. We can make our meals a little cheaper, but we’re both gonna be eating.”
That’s confusing as hell, but alright.
“Um,” Gustaw says, poring over the expense column again. “We can’t give up taxes. Or buying the carcasses. Could we buy the carcasses cheaper, too?”
“We can,” Dyzdek said. “We can buy rabbit and partridge from the outer walls hunters, and sell it on as stew meat. We’ll be selling a little cheaper, too—never lie about your stock, boy—but it’ll still help. I don’t usually, because it’s more work to cut up the smaller carcasses, but that can be your job for the next few weeks.”
Gustaw nods. It doesn’t sound fun, precisely, but it’s not backbreaking.
“How much has that made up?” he asked.
“It’s a good start,” Dyzdek said. “hard to tell in advance, but let’s say that’ll make up twenty coppers.”
Fifteen coppers left, and there was only one other thing on the list.
“Laundry?” Gustaw found himself asking.
“We can do our own laundry for this month,” Dyzdek said. “Do you know how?”
“That’s women’s work,” Gustaw said, indignant. He’s been thinking of just not getting the laundry done for a month—he’s had to go longer before, with his da.
“I’ve done laundry plenty of times,” Dyzdek said mildly, and Gustaw flinched. No one likes being told they’re womanish, and he was already in trouble—
“It’s work, the same as any other, and there’s never any shame in doing work that needs to be done. Alright?”
Gustaw nodded quickly.
“Right, so I’ll teach you that, and we’ll both wash our own clothes for a bit. That’ll be more work and time, but it’ll see the accounts back where they should be by month’s-end. Now, we gotta talk about your wages.”
Gustaw didn’t flinch, but he nodded, and got up from the table, bracing his hands on it. Da had usually stripped his clothes off him first, but the orphanage masters usually hadn’t, and doing it himself is more humiliation than Gustaw is willing to invite on himself.
Dyzdek gave him an odd look, but instead of taking off his belt or ordering Gustaw to fetch a birch—or just starting in with his fists--he turned back to the account books, his voice mild as anything as he said:
“After this month when we’re back on an even keel again, I’ll start paying you. It won’t be the full value of the work you do, but it’ll be enough that you’ll be able to save a bit, or go out with friends, and generally not be trapped in the shop for lack of ability to go elsewhere. Say, two coppers a week?”
Gustaw, who was still dealing with the revelation that ‘wages’ is not a cruel euphemism, thought that two coppers a week sounds like unimaginable riches, and started nodding, but Dyzdek shook his head.
“Nah, boy, you never take the first number you’re offered. Give me a number back, a little higher.”
Being told to argue felt like a trap.
“Three coppers a week?” he asked.
“Little higher,” Dyzdek said.
“Five?”
“Three and a half, and that’s final,” Dyzdek said, and then clapped Gustaw on the shoulder, something so far from a hit that Gustaw can’t even flinch at it. “That’s a good lad. You learn fast, don’t you?”
and then,
“You alright, boy?”
Gustaw was still standing, his hands braced on the table. He didn’t need to do that, apparently. Why’s it so hard to move, then? Why are his legs trembling, his back itching like it’s covered in slow-healing cuts? Why is Dyzdek staring at him? The attention was making it worse. Gustaw could handle this by himself, figure out a way to tuck it back down where he doesn’t have to think about it; but instead, he found himself saying, and none too politely—too loud, too harsh—
“Is that it?”
Dyzdek raised his eyebrows, but he nodded. No sign of anger. No sign of being ready to get up and finally put his apprentice back in his proper place.
“That’s it,” he said, and Gustaw couldn’t take it. He was suddenly so angry, a burgeoning, awful fury that made him taste blood and hear his own heartbeat in his ears, the same anger he’d felt since he was small, but he can’t force it back down. His da had always beat it out of him when he showed it, and the orphanage masters had done the same, and Dyzdek won’t, and Gustaw can’t—he can’t—he—
He found himself lunging for Dyzdek, yelling something that made his throat feel raw as badly-butchered meat, hitting and spitting and struggling with every hard-earned bit of viciousness he had. Dyzdek stood up to meet it all, towering over him, and Gustaw was still present enough to be scared, but not enough to make himself stop. Dyzdek’s hands around his wrists were massive, implacable, and Gustaw couldn’t get out of his grip. He hissed and kicked and tried to bite, and found himself pressed hard into Dyzdek’s chest, one of those massive hands splayed warm over his temple while the other held both of his wrists. Not squeezing, not bruising, but so solid that Gustaw could struggle and fight and do no damage at all. He wasn’t even sure what he was screaming, but the words were getting choked off and broken, interrupted by awful, shaming sobs. He could feel the cloth of Dyzdek’s shirt getting soaked under his weeping face, and the shame of it was trying to make him furious all over again, but his energy for rage was waning quickly. As the pounding in his ears receded, he could finally hear what Dyzdek was saying to him.
“Shh, boy. It’s alright, let it out. It’s alright.”
Gustaw clung to the man’s shirt, and wept himself dry.
--
After all that, doing laundry wasn’t nearly the source of shame it might have been. It was hard work, as it turned out, and made the muscles in his back and arms burn, but it got easier after a while. When they were finally able to afford the laundress’s services again, Gustaw saw the laundry off with an entirely new sense of gratitude.
Even before the money was made up, Dyzdek returned the coin box to its usual shelf. Like it was safe there. Like he trusted Gustaw to not touch it again. Seeing it sparked a deep, uncomfortable feeling in Gustaw’s chest. He found himself looking at it, just to turn the feeling over and over again, while it was still fresh. Dyzdek trusted him, he thought. Couldn’t help thinking, every time he was left to a task with a clap on the shoulder, every time he was sent out to pick something up from the market. Dyzdek trusted him. In spite of everything.
It was starting to make Gustaw think that he could extend a little trust, then, too.