I explained that we were heading north and hoped to buy food and water. I gestured at the Attolian, and he pulled a coin from his purse and gave it to me to hold up as a sign of our commercial intentions. After wary consideration, the shepherd pointed us toward the farm and said that his brother, Hemke, might let us use the well.

Reaching the farm buildings, we stood in the yard, formed by the main house and its various dilapidated outbuildings. We held our hands away from our bodies, the Attolian’s far from his sword, and waited until a man stepped from a slanting ramshackle goat shed and roughly asked what we wanted. We waved back toward the shepherd and said he’d told us to seek out Hemke if we wanted to use the well.

“I am Hemke,” said the farmer, “but the well’s not deep. It only provides for us.”

“We can pay,” I said, holding out the coin the Attolian had given me.

Grudgingly Hemke, still not coming any closer, agreed we could take a single skin full of water. “There’s little to spare,” he said, “and we can’t drink a coin. You can go east and find water at the emperor’s road.”

We couldn’t do that, and with so little water we’d be in trouble even if we made it to the hills. We had no way to know how long it might take to find a stream carrying fresh water.

The Attolian meanwhile had turned to look at an unused hearth at one corner of the yard. “Ask if we can offer him something more useful than a coin.”

“You think he maybe needs a letter written?” I asked, skeptical.

“Maybe he has pots that need tinning.”

“Do you know how to do that?” The Attolian had given the slaves most of the money when he’d divided up the slavers’ possessions, but he’d kept the bag of tin coins from the mines. I certainly didn’t know what to do with them.

The Attolian nodded. “My friend was the son of the village tinsmith. My father wouldn’t let me apprentice there, he wouldn’t hear of it, but I learned a fair bit in spite of that.”

That was an interesting tidbit about my Attolian. I’d thought soldiers were born to be soldiers.

“Tell him I can re-tin his pots so they can be cooked in, but no guarantees on how pretty they will be.”

I explained to the farmer what the Attolian was offering and asked if he had any pots in need of new tin. The farmer was just saying no when a woman’s muffled shout came from inside the farmhouse.

There was a heated exchange between indoors and outdoors that ended with Hemke throwing up his hands and agreeing that we could have a meal and as much water as we could carry if we could re-tin their largest baking pan. “You’ll have to make her happy,” warned Hemke. I could guess that wouldn’t be easy.

“I’ll need lye,” said the Attolian to me, “and some tallow or beeswax. And fireplace tongs.”

Hemke had already headed back into the goat shed, flapping a hand in introduction over his shoulder as he went. We hesitantly poked our heads around the corner of the low stone building to find the matriarch of the family in the doorway there. Some years older than Hemke, his mother or perhaps an aunt, she was gray haired and whip thin, with the wrinkles brought both by age and by hard work in the sun. She gave us the once-over.

“You can do this, tin a baking pan?” I asked the Attolian under my breath.

“So, so, so,” said the Attolian. He sounded entirely confident, but I noticed his hands anxiously rubbing together as he spoke. The old woman noticed, too, and rolled her eyes before she invited us into the kitchen to gather up the pan and the material the Attolian would need.

“Vedra will bring the lye and the tallow. How much lye?”

“We’ll need to soak the pan in it. Half as much lye in the water as if we were making soap,” said the Attolian.

The woman nodded. “Eat first,” she said, and we gratefully fell on some bread and cheese while she and the woman she called Vedra found a container large enough to hold the baking pan—a monster of a pan. As wide across as the length of my arm, it probably weighed more than my master’s cashbox when it was brimming with coin.

The Attolian handled it easily. Carrying it and the ceramic bath the old woman found to soak it in, he went out to the hearth and set up his tin shop. Vedra followed with a jar of powdered lye and a lump of beeswax. She was a grown woman, but clearly under the thumb of the matriarch, who we later learned was mother to her and her brothers—one of whom was Hemke and the other of whom was out with the goats.

The Attolian filled the ceramic bath and measured the powdered lye into it, stirring with a wooden stick before he set the baking pan to soak. Then he started a fire in the brick hearth and put a long-handled pot of beeswax to heat on its flat stone top. The hearth bricks had once been covered in plaster, but most of that now lay in flakes in the dirt below, and the stone top was cracked right across. The disrepair didn’t seem to interfere with its function, though. Where the heat leaked up through the crack, the Attolian set the wax to melt. Most of the heat still came up through the circular hole the size of a dinner plate in the middle of the stone.

The foot pedal for the hearth was broken, so first the Attolian repaired that with a new piece of wood and the spare sandal leather he still had from Koadester. Then he fed the fire and worked the pedal until he had something that was even hotter than the sun out on the salt pans. He was dripping with sweat, and the old woman unbent enough to send Vedra out with ceramic cups of cool water scented with lemon for both of us. I hadn’t earned it and gave him mine.

The Attolian checked the pan occasionally, pulling it out of the lye bath and looking at the color, then letting it slide back into the acrid liquid. When it was bright pink, he decided it had set long enough and dried it above the hearth before he rubbed the beeswax all over the interior surface. While he worked, he sang in a surprisingly tuneful voice a song about a girl a soldier left behind.

He sent me to get a cloth from Vedra, whom I found leaning against the doorpost with the old woman, both of them listening to the song with expressions soft and distant. The old woman slapped Vedra on the arm and sent her to fetch a rag. Then the Attolian began to work in earnest, pumping the fire with the pedal and holding the pan over the heat with the fire tongs until it was heated through. He turned it up on edge, slightly tipped, and set it into the hole in the hearthstone so that he didn’t need to bear its entire weight as he threw the flattened pellets of tin a couple at a time onto the side of the pan. He rotated the pan as the tin melted, and after dipping the folded rag into the liquid beeswax, he rubbed the melting tin smooth. Again and again he threw in the tin until the entire inside edge of the pan was coated.

It’s all very straightforward to tell it, but there was a great deal of wobbling of the pot and swearing in Attolian. The beeswax and water mixture steamed like a miniature storm cloud, and the cloth caught fire several times for added excitement and more swearing. The Attolian had a wide-ranging vocabulary, really. Curses from at least four languages.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the old woman and Vedra still watching, very amused.

When the sides were finished, the Attolian tipped the pan onto its bottom and flung an entire handful of tin into it. Elbow grease and the beeswaxed cloth smoothed the tin down, and he added another layer and another. It was late in the day by this time, and Hemke’s brother had come in from the fields, as well as several other men bringing in their goats. They’d probably been sleeping for most of the afternoon in the shade of a rocky outcrop. They looked curiously at the Attolian working in the heat and conferred with Vedra before disappearing into the farmhouse and the other outbuildings.