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They told him his mother was a hustler and his father was a thickster; dense as workman’s tea, they said, and without a drop of self-awareness to keep his stupidity in check.
Taako learned creativity and the fluidity of language from such insults. They were ubiquitous in his childhood: he remembered his father in a bad mood, while he thought Taako was asleep, describing his absent mother as a drunk and a floozy and a coward. After a tipple with dinner, Aunty would occasionally mutter that Taako’s father couldn’t hold onto a coin if it had been nailed to his forehead. She said he had never realised the squiggly bits of paper were the same things that fell out of his mouth. She prayed to the Lady of the Malt that Taako wasn’t really that chicken-brained boy’s son. But it was the two simple slurs – the hustler and the thickster – that stuck with Taako over the years, because he related to them the most. He aspired to his parents’ example wherever possible.
Aunty wasn’t really Taako’s aunt, but his mother’s. Her sister, Taako’s grandmother, had been an adventurer by trade. She’d come home to New Elfington with a purse-full of mercenary’s gold, and proudly pregnant by (in her own words) an entire tavern of attentive gentlemen in Neverwinter. She planned to have the baby and then raise her as her protégé, but Taako’s mother was a snivelling, sickly girl with bowed legs, who wheezed when she ran. It was clear she would never follow her mother adventuring. Instead, she had a gift for predicting misfortune with an accuracy that would have been useful if she used it for anything other than spite. She could tell you when your luck would go bad, that was certain, but only revealed her precognition when she thought you really deserved what was coming.
The adventurer’s daughter had grown into a buck-toothed, bug-eyed elf who ran an astrology shop in the city centre. The shop was cheap and cheerful, and brought some semblance of riches for her mother, since the mercenary’s gold had dried up many years earlier. None of the good luck she predicated for her customers ever came true, but bad luck did not sell, and she was very good at equivocation. Then she took a shine to a useless, big-eared wanderer with holes in the knees of his trousers who happened to be stopping at the local pub, and invited him to live with her above the astrology shop.
Taako had soon followed, as children are wont to do when their father can’t read the instructions on his prophylactic potion, and he came into the world squalling and bug-eyed as the elf who bore him. Two years later his mother walked out.
Why she’d left was one of the only questions that did not quite fit. Everything else about his family suited the rest of the portrait, but not this. Taako’s mother might have been a con artist with a crystal ball, but she still cared for her aunt and particularly for her mother, who over these last few years had sickened with a lingering curse from one of her bygone adventures. She had cheerfully nursed her ailing mother as the adventurer’s muscles wasted to strings and the adventurer’s wit faded to sighs and groans. The adventurer who should have had an elfin lifetime ahead of her was dying far too young, so why had her daughter run away before the end?
Maybe she had some secret shame she was running from. Maybe it was because her useless boyfriend was driving the astrology shop into the ground with his financial mismanagement. But Taako’s mother had never been reticent about her own vices (nor anyone else’s), and the mismanagement hadn’t started in earnest until after she had gone.
There was something else: Aunty said she’d been odd, the day or two before she left. She closed the shop early. When Aunty popped by one night, she found the fire unlit and her niece staring into the cradle, rocking it over and over, her mouth a pursed line and her eyes blank as if in a trance. Even when roused, half of what she said made no sense; that she had dreamed of an ocean of black tar, with shapes moving beneath the surface; and a world of ash; “and the baby, ah! The baby!” she told Aunty. “I want to un-know his fate.” By lunchtime the next day she was gone, taking her best walking shoes but leaving her dog-eared tarot cards behind.
Taako’s father did his best on his own. He wasn’t a shit dad, but he was shit at just about everything else. Even as a child, watching from behind the beaded curtain of sheep’s knuckles that his mother had strung up in the shop, Taako had realised his father was an idiot. When the creditors finally caught up with him, he left his son with Aunty and skipped town.
“I’ll be back when I sort this mess out,” was the last thing he said, but Taako already knew his father well enough to know he couldn’t sort his arse from ears. Taako heard that a few years later he got caught up in a fake ambergris scam. He was taken out by hired goons from the perfumer’s guild, in an alley somewhere, in a town whose name Taako quickly forgot.
Taako was happier at Aunty’s home. She took Taako in when he was about seven years old (Dad always said Taako’s birthday had been the happiest day of his life, but he could never remember the date). By this time his grandmother had died, and Aunty’s own children (and ex-husband) were off somewhere seeking their fortunes and spiritual enlightenment. Aunty was tall even for an elf, round and cuddly all over, and restless as her adventurer sister. Always moving, bustling around the kitchen or mending the house or out wandering the woods. She seemed glad for the company, and for something to keep her occupied. For the first time in his life Taako had clothes that fit him, suppers that weren’t canned or fried, and an adult who could answer his questions about the world without looking around shiftily and trying to redirect his attention to picture-books.
They were living off Aunty’s ex-husband’s alimony payments, which was enough for an elf-woman to live comfortably on her own but not so much with a growing child in tow. So she taught Taako to sew, and make himself new clothes from the hand-me-downs her own children had left around the house. She taught him how to forage as well as how to cook; mushrooms and herbs from the forest, fish and mudbugs from the river. She taught him to haggle, to counter the tricks merchants used to cut themselves a better deal. And she put a little money aside each week, “For your education,” she said. “Those wizardly trade-schools, they’re worth the cost, but the cost ain’t small.”
“I’m too stupid for school,” Taako said. “Just like Dad.”
“Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t, but cooking and magic have their own intelligence,” Aunty told him firmly. “You’re not going to be a hustler like your mother, or a failure like your father, or an adventurer like my sister. And Lady-of-Malt-forbid you’ll be a divorcee with no prospects, like me. You’re going to do better, Taako.”
(And of course, he let her down on every point, though legally he’d never gotten divorced from Sazed).
When Taako was eleven, Aunty choked to death on a piece of meat, from a stew that Taako had cooked for her. He tried to thump her on the back, but she was too tall for him to reach. And just like that, he had run out of relatives who cared.
Aunty’s two children and their husbands came back for the funeral and stayed to sort out Aunty’s effects. They needed Taako’s bedroom and Aunty’s study for their own children, and the spare bedroom for themselves, so he was moved into the sleep-out in the garden.
“Aren’t you lucky?” Aunty’s daughter said. “You can have a room all to yourself. Our kids have to share.”
There was no heating in the sleep-out. The mattress on the bed sunk in the middle and gave him a back-ache. There was a gap under the door through which mice frequently got inside. At night he had to cross the grass in his bare feet to get to the wash-house off the main building. There were also innumerable chores to do now that two families were living in the house, and everyone was expected to do their share, but somehow it seemed like Taako’s share was always a lot bigger than everyone else’s.
Despite all the work, he was no longer allowed to use the sewing machine, because it was expensive and he might break it. This was a problem because the height that had blessed his grandmother and Aunty was now beginning to manifest (he wished it had come a year earlier; maybe then he’d have been tall enough to thump Aunty on the back). He wasn’t going to let out the cuffs of his trousers if he couldn’t sew a new hem. He’d rather wear capris than end up with holes in his pants like Dad, thanks very much.
Taako thought about leaving. He asked Aunty’s daughter for the money that Aunty had put aside for the wizard trade-school. But Aunty’s daughter said there was no money; or if there was, it had gone to the costs of feeding and housing Taako under their roof.
“That money was for my education,” Taako said, and on the other side of the room Aunty’s son laughed himself hoarse.
He started hiding out in the library at closing time and sleeping there, because it was warmer, and there was at least some peace from his cousins (his second cousins, technically, because Lady-of-Malt knew he might as well put some distance between them). He would go back to the house for two meals a day, and then one, and then just whatever he could scrounge from the cupboards when no one was looking. Eventually he packed up the clothes that still fit him and walked out, just like his hustler mother and his thick-as-a-stump father before him.
He thought about taking the silverware with him, but he didn’t want Aunty’s children to have any reason to follow him.
All the same, he had inherited everything he needed from his family. Not gold or arcane secrets, but all the skills that would keep him alive through the many years to come. How to cheat, how to fool people, how to cut his losses and run, and if worst came to worst how to play dumb.