If, as the builders said, houses learned by how they were used, the one where Darro kept his private room had learned to keep secrets: black under the stars and mazy within. For a moment, looking up at the looming shadow and the stars behind it, she almost changed her mind. There would be other places she could sleep tonight. She’d bite her own hand off before she went to her mother, but one of her friends would take pity. The only reason to go to Darro’s room was that it was still Darro’s, and nothing else was.
A narrow arch led to tightly winding, steep, lightless stairs. The scratching in the walls as she passed might have been rats or insects or the other tenants. She knew the trick of opening his lock, and slid into his room as quietly as she could. From the roof above her, a girl’s voice muttered. When Alys opened the shutters, moonlight spilled into the room like milk water. She sat at Darro’s blackwood table. The last place she had seen him. Her breath was calm now, but shallow. And it hurt.
She was empty. The small, dark rooms were empty. All the wide sky was empty. Sitting alone here, where no one would see her, she could feel the hollowness in her body. The anger was gone. And the grief. She’d fallen into a kind of numbness.
“Darro?” she whispered, and for a moment she could almost convince herself that there was someone there to answer back. The silence seemed to offer comfort or promise, but then it went on, and the silence was empty too.
She rose and went toward his pallet. She didn’t see the opened cache drawer under the slats until her ankle hit it. The pain was like being bitten. She jumped back, cursing, and then, when the sting began to fade, moved forward on her knees, feeling ahead of her in the dark.
The safe cache was a board made to fit into a section of wall. The latch was cunning. If it hadn’t stood open, she wouldn’t have found it. The moonlight barely came back this far. Alys pulled out Darro’s last, secret things: a cloth wallet, a lump of something black and waxy, a dagger in a leather sheath. She took them to the table and the light.
The wax stump was just a bit of candle with a prickly, dark wick. The blade was something more. The leather of the sheath was well made, with thick thongs to tie it to a belt, and an oval showed where a stone had been set in it and then pried off. When she drew it, the knife seemed to grab the light. The workmanship was good, and letters and symbols she couldn’t read had been worked into the flat. The cloth wallet was soiled. She saw hundreds like it folded over belts every day. It rang when she weighed it in her hands. The coins that spilled out on the table were smaller than she was used to seeing. Some had the crest and likeness of Ausai a Sal. Others were marked with the flowing script of the Bronze Coast and images of a mountain she didn’t know. But even the coins stamped in Kithamar were uncanny. Unfamiliar. Alys’s mind rebelled. They were too dark for silver, too bright for bronze.
Fingers trembling, she counted gold coins: one dozen, and then another. Enough money to buy every building on the street three times over. It was more pure wealth than she had ever seen in her life. Her heartbeat went fast, like she’d been running.
They killed him. As shocked and hurt as she’d been, she hadn’t asked herself until now who they were or why they’d done it. This was why. This had to be why. Her heart had ached. Now fear filled it like dark water.
She looked out the window at the street. Were there shapes in the shadows? Was someone there? If they weren’t yet, they would be.
Darro, she thought, what were you caught in?
She made a little pocket of her shirt’s hem, put it all—bag, blade, and candle—into the fold. Holding it closed, she went down into the night, vanishing before anybody could find her.
Orrel was missing, and apart from some lost money, Sammish didn’t care. Alys was missing, and about that, Sammish cared very much.
She understood in a vague, abstract way that there had been a time she hadn’t been in love with Alys. That she hadn’t dreamed about her and gone to the taprooms Alys liked and worked any pull Alys would have her on. After all, Sammish had been born a baby like anyone else, and on that day she hadn’t known the dark-haired girl with the sly smile and the broad shoulders. It stood to reason that Sammish had learned about Alys along with every other unchanging thing: the sky was blue, the river was cold, and she would lay her heart on Alys’s altar if the older girl only gave her a sign. Alys didn’t know because Sammish never said it, and because she was good at not being seen.
So while Orrel could live or die on his own schedule and not mean much to Sammish, Alys hadn’t been seen in Longhill since the day they’d found Darro’s corpse, and that mattered to her deeply.
“Any knives for me this week?” Sammish asked.
The alley was behind a row of stalls in Newmarket. The thin stretched-cloth door of the butcher’s stood open before her. A pile of cracked bones and gristle seethed with flies, and blood was soaking up into her shoes, but the old butcher’s smile was kindly.
“Is everything all right?” he asked. And when she didn’t answer, “You seem anxious.”
Today, the priest was saying the final rites for Darro, and if Alys wasn’t there, Sammish didn’t know where she would ever find her. But Sammish smiled the way she thought he’d find charming and shook her head. If he didn’t believe her, he didn’t press.
“Wait there,” he said, then trundled back into the cool and dark of his shop. Sammish shifted her weight from one leg to the other, keeping her mouth closed and waving away the insects that tried to drink from her eyes. The leather sack at her hip wasn’t hers. It belonged to a whetstone man who lent it to her once each week. For every five knives she brought him to sharpen, he paid her enough to buy a meal or a night’s shelter. Other days, she did other work: sweeping the street outside a merchant’s stall in Seepwater, wrapping twine for a weaver east by the Temple, hunting rats for the magistrate at a bronze coin for a dozen.
No one of her jobs would keep her from being streetbound, but all of them together were enough to eke out rent on a little room by a baker’s kiln and enough food to live on. She liked the knife work best, even if it meant the most running. The merchant family couldn’t hide their contempt and sometimes forgot to pay, the twine left her fingers raw, and she felt sorry for the rats. The money was just to keep her alive until she could reap the greater harvest later.
The whetstone man—Arnal his name was—had a brother who managed a brewery in Seepwater. He didn’t own it—some rich family in Riverport did that—but he had the day-to-day running of it, including the choice of who sat behind the iron grates and marked wagers. Sammish was learning the numbers and letters they used there.
A few months of showing up for Arnal and his knives to prove she was reliable, and also teaching herself how to run the wagers, and then she planned to push for a job at the brewer’s. She went about it like it was a pull, even though it broke no laws. Something about wanting it that badly felt like crime.
Steady indoor work with enough coin in a week to afford a few rooms where she could eat bread that wasn’t two days stale and cheese that wasn’t half rind. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, she would imagine her way into that future with the scent of lavender fresh cut from the herb gardens outside the hospital south of the city and a mattress of fresh straw sighing under their bodies as they shifted in languorous sleep.