By the time Ysabet reached the south road, someone had bought all the useful pottery.
A woman was loading it into a handcart beside the auction platform. Two good water pans sat on top, their rims protected with rags. Ysabet watched them go with an interest that the woman plainly misunderstood.
“Mine,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Paid.”
“I’m admiring your judgment.”
The woman put a hand over the nearest pan and wheeled the cart away.
Ysabet should have followed her back into town. The road was already losing its last daylight, and her wet boots had dried into shapes that no longer seemed intended for feet. But Darr, the auctioneer, was holding up a box of mixed tools. There might be a decent awl among them.
She moved toward the platform.
The sale occupied an empty caravan standing ground, bounded on one side by a ditch and on the other by the disused south tollhouse. Lamps hung from two carts. Their flames leaned north, carrying the smells of lamp oil, hot chestnuts, and the marsh exposed by a falling tide.
Darr had a voice that made a cracked washstand sound like an opportunity to change one’s life. He sold the tools, a wool blanket described as having considerable warmth left, and a brazier with one missing leg.
Then the clicking began.
Ysabet turned.
A boy beside the tollhouse was pushing a thin stick through a hole in a fish crate. He pushed, waited, pushed again. Each time, something inside answered with a dry little tick.
“Leave it,” Ysabet said.
The boy pulled the stick out and held it behind his back.
“He said I could.”
“Who?”
He pointed at a broad man sitting on a folded tarpaulin. One cheek was weathered red; the other was partly covered by a bandage. A rough sack and a pair of new-looking iron tongs lay beside him.
“Showing it’s alive,” the man said. “People want to know.”
“I believe you.”
She crouched beside the crate. A broken slat had been tied back into place with wire. The hole was just large enough to admit two of her fingers. She kept them outside.
“Does it bite?”
“Anything bites.”
Something shifted against the wood. Warm air brushed the back of her hand.
She waited until her eyes adjusted.
At first she could make out only a fold of dull gray skin and one little foot, its toes spread against the crate. Another foot appeared beside it. They belonged to different arrangements of joints. Deeper in the straw, an amber eye opened.
Ysabet moved slightly to keep the lamp out of it.
The eye followed her.
“Where did you find it?”
“North cut. Landslide opened an old store chamber.”
“Alone?”
“In that.”
He pointed toward the platform. Two men were lifting a narrow iron chest onto the boards. Its lid was cracked diagonally, the edges of the break furred with rust. Inside it, white mineral deposits lay around a hollow no longer occupied.
The creature’s eye closed.
“What else was in there?”
“I dig things out. I don’t take histories.”
Darr tapped the chest with his knuckle. “Recovered military reliquary. Original fittings. A fine piece for a hall, a collection, perhaps a gentleman’s study.”
“It’s split,” someone called.
“You can see inside without opening it. Consider the convenience.”
The buyers laughed. Ysabet turned back to the crate.
The little foot was moving. It drew a scrap of straw toward something on the floor, then reached out again. A beetle lay upside down beneath the hole, its legs curled against its body. One wing case was broken.
The creature arranged a second piece of straw alongside it.
Ysabet looked for the movement of mandibles. There was none. When a gust caught the first scrap, the little foot reached past the beetle to pull it back.
“What does it eat?”
“Wouldn’t care to tell you.”
“Because you don’t know?”
The salvager shifted on his tarpaulin. “It chewed a hole in a tin. I gave it offal after that. Didn’t touch it. You want it, you’re buying your own trouble.”
Above them, Darr was counting bids on the chest. Ysabet glanced toward the buyers. A man in a dark traveling coat had stepped clear of the lamp cart. He wore no visible ornament. His gloves looked softer than any leather she had ever owned.
He raised one finger.
“Forty,” Darr said.
Nobody answered.
The man was watching the crate.
Ysabet felt the salvager’s attention shift between them. Then Darr brought his little hammer down, and two porters lifted the reliquary off the platform. The man spoke quietly to one of them and went toward a covered wagon. He had neither bid on the animal nor asked to see it.
The sudden heat came through the crate’s slats hard enough to touch Ysabet’s face.
Inside, the six feet drew close beneath the folds.
She sat back on her heels.
“Is it ill?” she asked.
“You’ll be the tamer.”
She had forgotten the brass license pinned inside her open coat. Most people noticed it when they wanted something.
Darr came down from the platform and looked at the crate.
“Last creature,” he said. “Shall we have it up?”
“Keep it level,” Ysabet told him.
He gave her a quick measuring glance. “Of course.”
The salvager rose with a grunt and carried the crate onto the boards. Ysabet went with him. She could feel the road gravel inside one boot, moving under her heel.
Darr stood beside the lot.
“An unusual specimen, recovered alive. No known breeding history. No guarantee for work, companionship, or the table.”
“What’s left?” a carter called.
“A wide field of discovery.”
“Give it to the tamer.”
The laughter was friendly enough. That made it easier to hear the tick from inside.
“Twenty silver is the owner’s price,” Darr said. “Crate included. Shall we start there?”
Silence.
Someone said they could buy two sound goats for that.
“Then I recommend the goats,” the salvager said.
Darr leaned down and murmured to him. The man shook his head.
Ysabet kept her eyes on the hole in the crate. A foot appeared, then withdrew when someone moved across the lamp.
“Show it,” said the carter.
“The light disturbs it,” the salvager replied.
“Disturbs us paying for something we can’t see.”
Darr asked for the tongs.
Ysabet stepped onto the platform before he could take them.
“Open the lid. Keep your lamp back.”
The salvager regarded her for a moment. Then he worked a peg loose from the top of the crate. Ysabet stood between the opening and the nearest flame.
The smell was dry straw beneath old fish. The animal lay low, a loose sack of skin gathered around six legs, two of them longer than the others. A flap of hide hung over its single visible eye. When Darr lifted the lid farther, its mouth opened sideways.
There were teeth in places Ysabet had not expected teeth.
The carter swore. Another buyer laughed once and walked away.
“Well,” Darr said. “There it is.”
The animal shifted its body over the beetle.
Ysabet lowered the lid until it rested above the gap, leaving the eye in shadow.
“Eighteen,” she said.
The salvager shook his head.
“Cash. Here.”
“Twenty.”
“There isn’t another offer.”
“Then I’ll keep it. Collector’s man may come back.”
She looked toward the covered wagon. The chest was being strapped beneath its canopy. The man in the dark coat had disappeared inside.
“Will you feed it?”
The salvager picked up the peg. “If I knew what it ate.”
Darr rubbed his nose. He wanted his evening finished.
Ysabet reached into her coat. For a moment her fingertips rested on the little hard case beside the money.
She had other needles. Iron ones, cheap enough to lose. They caught at thick thread and rusted if she put them away damp.
She took out the case.
“Eighteen and this.”
Darr accepted it from her and opened the lid. His eyebrows rose.
“Harness needle. Silver. Old work.”
“Yes.”
He tested its point against his thumbnail. “Two easily. More if you found—”
He stopped. Ysabet was holding out the silver.
The salvager examined the needle before he nodded.
Coins changed hands. Darr counted them twice. Ysabet stood beside the crate with her right fingers curled against her coat. Her mother had used that needle to repair a bridle the night before she died. A useless fact at this particular moment. It came anyway, with the smell of heated wax.
“Muzzle?” the salvager asked. He lifted a loop of wire from the tarpaulin.
“Keep it.”
“Suit yourself.”
Darr put the money into the man’s hand. The needle case followed. The empty place inside Ysabet’s coat seemed much larger than either object had been.
“Receipt,” she said.
The auctioneer tore a strip from his sale book and wrote on it. She waited until he added the date and his mark, then folded it into her purse.
When she lifted the crate, she nearly raised it above her waist. It was astonishingly light. The animal shifted, trying to brace itself, and she lowered it at once.
“Sorry,” she said.
Nobody answered except the carter, who had stayed to watch.
“What’s it good for?”
Ysabet settled the crate against her left hip. “I’ll find out.”
She carried it off the platform and onto the road. The lamps were being taken down. Somewhere behind her, Darr called for whoever had bought the brazier to come and get it.
The creature clicked.
It was a hollow, uncertain sound. Rain sometimes struck the kettle beneath her broken gutter that way, one drop landing long after the shower had ended.
“Pip,” she said, testing it.
The crate made no sound.
She adjusted her grip. Through a gap between the boards she could see the straw and one small foot holding it steady around the beetle.
“All right, Pip. Let’s get you out of this box.”
There was still a mile of road to the baths. Ysabet started walking.