A trickle of sweat ran down Alys’s face and stung her eye. Even with that, she didn’t weep. She only looked at the body in the soft, steady light. She began to understand that something precious was gone. She waited to see how she would react.
“I’m very sorry,” the priest said. “Death is a great mystery.”
Darro didn’t breathe. His eyes didn’t move. They had killed him.
“Your mother said he kept the Mattin rites?”
“If she says so. I don’t know.”
The priest lowered his head. For a moment, neither of them spoke. When he did, his tone was an apology. “She asked for the partial rite. I understand if that’s—”
“Full rites,” Alys said.
“Yes. Yes, that would be better, but it would require—”
“I’ll find a way to pay for it. Full rites. Everyone knows the river’s hungry. His soul’s not safe unless it’s full rites.”
“As you say, little sister.”
He stepped back. The candle flames bowed as one, pulled by the same breeze. She moved closer to the altar. A sudden storm woke in her belly—rage or grief or something else—and she wondered whether she was getting ill. She thought about vomiting, but it seemed childish and overdramatic. Darro, who had sung her songs when their mother was too drunk to care for them, looked up at nothing from half-closed eyes. She took his hand, and it felt cold. She wanted to say something. She didn’t know what.
In the twilight, Kithamar seemed like a place she’d never been before. Like she’d woken from a dream into a city that was too real to bear.
The stars were coming out, just a few at first with more appearing with every minute. Summer ivy traced its way up the mortar in the low stone walls. The flatboats floated on the canals with men calling to each other as they negotiated their ways across the water and into the warehouses and boathouses for the night. A small flock of finches, bright as festival kerchiefs, sped past her, fleeing some enemy she couldn’t see. The stink of temple slowly left her nose, and the stink of the canal took its place. The storm in her grew wider, louder, more viciously angry as she walked.
The mourning group milling in the street outside her mother’s house were mostly older men and women, but she recognized some of Darro’s friends among them. Little Coop, who worked as a cutter some days, stood at the edge of the group, neither with it nor apart from it. Lurrie, who’d had eyes for Darro when they were both Alys’s age, wept quietly. A grey-haired man sat with his back against the raw wood wall and played a mournful song on a reed flute.
Someone had set up a pot on the street and started a little fire under it, held in place by stones, with a jug of water beside it in case it had to be quenched quickly. Aunt Daidan sat beside it while Grey Linnet served out watery stew to all who came. There would be music and crying and stories tonight. Her mother would be fed on beer and sympathy. And when the morning came, there would be a soot mark on the street where the cookfire had been. It might stay there until the next hard rain.
Alys’s rage glowed brighter than the flames.
Alys stepped into the circle of light. Linnet rose, opening her arms as if for an embrace. “Oh, Woodmouse!” Alys recoiled.
“Where is she?” Alys asked. “Where’s my fucking mother?”
“Linly?” Grey Linnet said as she pulled back and glanced over her shoulder to the darkness of the thin house. Alys heard someone calling her name like the echo across the river.
Her mother sat in the darkness by her little cot: grey, greasy hair, permanently reddened eyes, and a bottle of beer in one hand. She looked up as Alys stepped in, and her gaze swam a little trying to find focus. She was drunk.
In the corner, an old man sat shaking his head at nothing. One of her mother’s sometimes men. Alys didn’t know him and didn’t care about him.
“Daughter.” Her voice was slurred. “We’re all that’s left, you and I. Come here. Come to your ma.”
“Partial rites?” Alys said, and her mother’s bloodshot eyes snapped closed. Her lips pressed thin, and she turned away. The rage in Alys’s chest redoubled. “They found him in the water. He died in the river!”
The voices from the street went quiet, listening. The reed flute wheezed and lost its song.
“He was dead before they put him in,” her mother said. “A strike like that one, and my boy was gone before he touched the ground. You could see that by looking.”
“Do you know that? Were you there?”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
Her mother’s lover rose, his wide, greyish fingers fluttering in distress like moths. Alys ignored him. “Were you there?”
“No, I wasn’t. Nobody was.”
“Then you don’t know!” Alys shouted.
“The rites are a pull,” her mother’s lover said. His voice was as dusty and insubstantial as the rest of him. “I was a priest for a few years down on the river towns. Anyone lost to the water, we’d charge double. It was just part of the pull.”
A thin tear sheeted down her mother’s cheek, and it felt like an insult.
“It’s because you don’t have the money, isn’t it?” Alys said. “You drank away everything you had, and now you can’t pay for his rites?” The lover tried to step in, and Alys prodded his thin, chicken-ribbed chest. “If you come between us, I will break you. Do you understand?”
Fear bloomed in the old man’s face, but he stood his ground. A hand took Alys’s shoulder. Grey Linnet. The woman’s soft-featured face was red at the eyes and nose. Her mouth made a tiny “o” as she shook her head. “It’s the grief, Woodmouse. Don’t let the grief talk.”
Alys pulled herself away, but Linnet stepped toward her, still talking. No no no. It’s all right. Pain makes us bite. You don’t have to bite. Alys made a fist, placed her knuckles between Linnet’s breasts, and shoved her back.
“Do not ever fucking touch me,” she said. To her horror, there was a thickness in her voice. She turned back to her mother. “If you can’t take care of Darro, I will, and—”
Sobs choked off whatever else she would have said. She turned, wiping her streaming eyes with a sleeve, and stalked out into the darkness, trembling like the city was shaking with her.
The night was warm, even with the sun gone. The sound of the mourning party faded away behind her. Only her hitching, hurt breath stayed with her, tenacious as a dog. She walked west, toward the river, head down and jaw clenched. At first, she didn’t know where she was going.
Then she did.
The edge of Longhill by moonlight was a darkness with greater darknesses folded in it. Even the fullest moon had to fight down to the narrow, curving streets. Other parts of Kithamar might have public lanterns or bluecloak guards patrolling with torchbearers. The wooden buildings of Longhill left little appetite for open flame, and if the guard came here after sunset, it was with violence in mind.
The echoes of her footsteps told her how open the street was. The texture of the cobbles in the road gave her some sense of where she was. A dog ran past her, its nails ticking against the stone. A man called out, but not so close that he was a threat.