I pour the grain from the sack to a grain pot, put some of the gold coins recovered from Calmorien's warehouse into a concealed compartment behind one of the wall stones underneath the bench, eat a few more bites of bread, and look around restlessly. I should take a nap, so I am fresh for tonight's dirty work, but it hasn't been that long since I woke and I just don't feel like trying to sleep. I need more herbs before I can start a new batch of brew. Jet told me to lie low, not wander around every market square and backstreet herb seller in Elftown, so that's out. Getting the grain was enough for today.

I pour myself a mug of my latest ale. It's not one of my better batches. Tastes like dirt and vermin. I know from experience that if you drink enough of it, the taste will stop mattering so much. That's hardly a great hawker's call. Ugh. This stuff is bile. Maybe I should try fruit instead of gruit. We'll see what the market has to offer in a few days.

After half a mug, I start to feel the tingling of ale-pleasure relaxing me. I always feel more at home here in the Lydia than in my other room. It occurs to me that, with two residences, I might well be among the richest elves in Elftown. Most families have only one place, and often it is one crowded room for sleeping and eating and every other aspect of home life. I really do have it good. Especially considering I spent much of my life as one of the homeless, a street rat scavenging for food during the day and a bit of shelter from the rains at night. When Nana Romina and I found each other, I was sleeping in a hole under a shabby tenement not too far from here.

That reminds me. I told Alvar about the hole quite a while ago and gave him permission to live there until he found something better. He thanked me the next day and said he was going to stay there. I think maybe I'll go take a look. It's not too far away, in a relatively deserted area. What could happen, right? Maybe I will find something there that will reveal how Alvar got mixed up with Calmorien. Probably not. But it's worth a shot and there is nothing else I feel like doing. It would be interesting to see the old sleep spot, anyway.

Half a mug of bile and I am feeling sentimental.

* * *

I make sure the back alley is deserted before I slip sideways between the two buildings. The gap between the tenements is only a cubit wide, and it is tighter now than when I was a starving young elfling. Seen from the front, the buildings are side by side, walls touching. The building on the left though, was not originally as long as the one on the right. Sometime later, an addition was added on to the rear of the shorter building, but not as wide as the original construction. The new construction created a narrow gap between the two buildings, accessible only from the alley.

I had shimmied into the unused, refuse-filled space one night on my wanderings, hoping for a little shelter from the rain. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that two cubits of the space were covered by the roof of the house on the left. As the rain fell, I made a little wall of debris to keep the rainwater from pouring under my feet and soaking me. 

Over the next few months, I dug out a hole going under the house on the left, making a hill in the gap between the buildings so the rainwater poured away from my little lair. Eventually, I had a relatively comfortable cave under the tenement, walled on one side by the stone foundation of the original structure. For a long time when I was a street rat, this was my home, my fort, my hideout. I left in the late morning mists and I came back after dark in the rain and no one knew I was here.

I climb sideways up the rubble pile until I reach the hole in the sheltered spot under the eave. I drop into the hole, sliding down the short slope. The light filters in behind me to the chamber running several cubits along the wall. At the other end is a bed of sorts, a pile of rags and bits of sacking jumbled together like a gull's nest. Alvar has dug a small side tunnel next to the bed. Escape route? There is a pile of bones, mostly fish bones and rat bones.

But it is the foundation wall which draws my attention. Someone had carefully cleaned the wall and painted on it. Not colors and lines and patterned designs like the humans are said to favor in their houses, but a picture. Four elves, dancing in a meadow under the bright stars and smiling moon, with dark firs and tall peaks rising in the background. The lines are soft, the colors deep, and the scene strangely surreal. 

I have never seen anything like this. Art is forbidden in Elftown.

"Damn, Alvar," I mutter.