There was a moment of silence, and then the market square exploded with laughter. Cormo growled low in his throat, flushing dark with embarrassment. He stamped his hooves fretfully, hating to be the butt of the joke, but did nothing else. Kellen guessed there was nothing he could do aside from stand there and take it. For all that Idalia said that Merryvale didn't have guards the way Armethalieh did, he guessed the village must have some way to keep the peace, and a lot of the folks in the crowd, human and Centaur both, looked big and strong enough to make even Cormo think twice about any bullyragging he might want to get up to.
Haneida laughed until she doubled over, clutching at her staff for support. 'Oh, my!' she gasped, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes. 'Cormo doing honest work for once! It was worth living this long to see that!' She hobbled stiffly over to the Centaur and stared up at him. 'Who knows, young man? Perhaps you will grow to like it. And you'll find it a sight easier to be given a honey-loaf warm from the oven than to skulk around my window trying to steal them from the cooling racks!'
Cormo stared down at her, his face blank with surprise. 'You'll pay me?' he said in shock.
Haneida reached up with her staff and rapped him smartly on the shoulder. 'Pay? Who said anything about paying you, my young scallywag? You've been paid, in the coin of healing. But when a friend does me a kindness, I do a friend a kindness in return. Besides, it's hungry work, making that long trip from my cottage down to the market and back, and I don't intend to see you go hungry for it. Now. I'll see you in three days, at sunrise, at my front door. Don't be late. And be clean!'
'Yes, ma'am,' Cormo said, as meekly as Kellen had ever heard him speak. Haneida turned away and regarded the crowd. 'I suppose none of you have homes and dinners of your own to go to?' she said tartly. Waving away all offers of assistance, she began to make her way slowly back the way she had come.
The crowd, sensing that the show was over, began to slowly break up and disperse. Cormo, too—at a nod from Idalia—took the opportunity to make his escape, though as he edged his way through the crowd and out through the Merryvale gates, he kept darting bemused looks over his shoulder at the retreating figure of Haneida, until her slight stooped figure was lost in the crowd.
'He's not altogether bad,' Master Eliron said quietly, for Idalia's and Kellen's ears alone, 'but like so many, he will try whatever he can get away with.'
Idalia shrugged; now that she had discharged her price, Cormo was no longer her problem. 'I'd hate to try to get away with something while Haneida was watching me, Master Eliron. And with the whole village knowing that he is under an obligation, it should be no great difficulty to see that he stays honest… for a year and a day at least. After that, who knows? Maybe he'll figure out that working for his keep is actually easier than the course of theft and bullying he's been following.'
'Only the greatest of Mages can see the future,' Master Eliron agreed solemnly, 'and the future is not always so very cooperative as even they might wish. But come. I have spent a long day in my stillroom and herbarium, and will be glad of a chance to stretch my legs—and you have said your brother wishes to see something of our village.'
'We've come to do some trading as well, before winter sets in,' Idalia said. 'But that can wait for tomorrow. Most of all—and I think, first of all—I've promised Kellen a proper hot bath.'
Master Eliron laughed. 'And so you shall have one, both of you. Merana, take our guests' packs to the house, and tell the cook we will be two more for dinner. Come, Kellen. I can show you at least a bit of Merryvale on the way to your bath.'
HALF an hour later Kellen was soaking up to his neck in the first hot bath he'd had since… well, he really couldn't really remember when, since he wasn't sure he could really count hasty dips in the laundry tub back in Armethalieh, and it felt wonderful. He didn't even care that it was a communal bath, and that he was sharing it with Master Eliron and several of the other men of Merryvale, while Idalia basked in similar accommodations on the woman's side of the bathhouse.
He was up to his neck in a large steaming copper-sheathed wooden tub, and he didn't care if he never left it. The hot water was easing aches and pains he hadn't even realized were there until they were gone.
This was the last—and hottest, and largest—of the three tubs in the Merryvale bathhouse, the one you got into when you were clean. The first, a small, tepid, and rather murky tub, was just for rinsing off the worst of the muck and clay: that one you stood up in and scrubbed with a soft brush while pouring water over yourself from a dipper while an attendant topped up a second—fresh—tub with hot water. Kellen had to admit that after a morning spent packing clay and tar into the side of an oak tree, followed by a long cross-country hike, it had been a necessary step.
The second tub was warmer, and big enough to sit down in. That was where you scrubbed yourself clean with soap. While the soap wasn't the dainty colored and perfumed hard-milled stuff he'd been used to in the City, it was also a far cry from the tallowy blocks of harsh yellow stuff he'd gotten used to using at Idalia's. While it still smelled rather more like tallow than flowers, at least it didn't turn his skin red and raw.
Once Kellen was thoroughly clean, the attendant—since it was Kellen's first time at the bathhouse, he'd been assigned a personal guide— conducted him through to the main room of the men's side, where he climbed a short ladder into the enormous wooden vat they called the 'soaking pool.' The water was kept constantly hot by a bed of coals beneath it—with new coals brought as the old embers died—and constantly full with new infusions of water. At this time of day there weren't too many people here, but Master Eliron told him that sometimes there were so many people waiting that the attendants had to come and turn people out after half an hour.
'Especially in winter, when it seems as if the bathhouse is the only place in Merryvale that is really warm, especially to these old bones,' the Healer said with a sigh. 'But you won't have experienced one of our upland winters yet, will you?'
