In her dream, it was always the both of them. Her and Alys.
The old butcher trundled back toward her, a long, curved blade in his fist. She smiled as he cracked open the door and handed it through. She didn’t know why he bothered with the cloth. There were as many flies in the shop as out of it.
“Take good care of my boy there,” the butcher said.
“Always,” Sammish said as she folded the blade into a sheet of leather the way Arnal had taught her and put it in her satchel with the others. “I’ll have him back to you by sundown.”
“Bring it before the market closes, and there’ll be something in it for you.”
“I’ll do my best,” Sammish said with a little bow, then turned back down the alley and left the blood and rot and flies behind. Her shoes were dark and sticky, and for a moment a fly was trapped in her hair. She’d never seen war, but she imagined it was like the alley behind a butcher’s shop, only better because she liked animals more than she liked people. On a battlefield, the flies all danced on bodies that had had the chance to fight back.
She made her way in a loop, moving through Newmarket and east to the outskirts around the Temple where the gods of the city were worshipped and the grain stored against emergency, moving fast, but also looking through every crowd at every corner on the off chance she’d see Alys in it.
She passed through streets and alleys, thin private yards and streets that had been closed off and forgotten, all to avoid the bluecloaks who might stop her and ask for proof she’d paid the city’s tax on her work. She hadn’t.
Riverport, Newmarket, the Temple, Seepwater: there was no place east of the Khahon that Sammish didn’t know, but she didn’t brag about it. Pride was the poison of Longhill. To want better than life and death in the narrow, winding alleys was disloyalty. To try for even so small an escape as work in Seepwater seemed complicit in the city’s contempt for Longhill and the Inlisc who lived there. She knew to keep her ambitions to herself.
She came to the whetstone man’s shed just before midday. The heat was climbing, and the air had a thick humidity that stuck her tunic against her back. The afternoon would be as hot as midsummer, even if the night came a little sooner. The shed had no windows, and the air inside it was sluggish.
“What do we have today?” Arnal asked. He was older with white hair in tight curls that stood away from his scalp like they were trying to get away from him. She liked his voice. He always seemed like he was on the edge of laughing at something that wasn’t her.
Sammish sat on the floor at his feet and undid the satchel’s ties. “Shears from the tailor’s shop under the chandlers’ guild hall. She said to tell you these were for wool, not cotton. This hooked one here is from the cobbler’s by the temple gate.”
“Hard leather or soft?”
“This one’s for hard. I’ve got another one here for soft. Soft has the red handle. There’s the usual from the Newmarket butcher.”
Arnal nodded, then pointed to the last remaining blade. “That?”
Sammish held up the ritual dagger with its false runes and glass gemstones. “Fortune-teller.”
“Why do they need an edge on it?”
“Sometimes they bleed a chicken.”
Arnal opened the little water sluice that kept his stone wet. Sammish stood, brushing the dust off her legs, and turned toward the door.
“You’re not staying to run them home?” Arnal asked.
“I’ll be back. I have to check something first.”
“Death is division,” the priest said. “Not only for the dying who passes from this world to the coming cycle, but within each of us. We are trapped between the life we had when our friend, our lover, our parent, our child was with us, and this diminished world without them. We are split in two, and bringing ourselves back to wholeness is the spiritual work of mourning.”
Darro’s body was already gone. The priests had burned it to ashes over the course of three days, chanting and praying over the kiln as it worked. What had been a man now fit in a box of stained scrap oak no longer than her forearm.
The pews in the little common temple had half a dozen people in them. Alys’s mother was there. One of Darro’s old lovers sat apart, her eyes shining and bloodshot. A few others from the quarter who had known the man and either liked him better than Sammish guessed or enjoyed the ritual for its own sake sat together gossiping quietly.
Alys wasn’t there.
“In the name of all the gods of Kithamar,” the priest intoned, “and in the name of the man we knew as Darro, and in the names of those who remain in this world to carry his memory on, we now sing his soul to safety.”
The death song was a single melody; the priest’s voice was hoarse and low. The words were old Inlisc. Sammish had heard them before, but she didn’t know what they meant. She lowered her head and pretended to pray to gods she didn’t believe in on behalf of a soul she didn’t care about. All she really meant was Please let Alys be all right.
At the end, the priest took a blade and carved a mark in the box. As Darro had been the name of his life, his deathmark would be the name of his absence from the world. The priest rubbed bright yellow wax to fill the new-carved grooves, and the full rites were complete. Neither the water nor the sky nor any spirit had claim on Darro’s soul now. To Sammish’s mind, that put him ahead of everyone else in the room.
Alys’s mother went up to claim her son’s ashes, but the priest only took her hand, murmuring soft words in a kind voice. He didn’t pass the box over. Sammish saw a flash of humiliation in the old woman’s face and felt something like joy leap up in her chest. The only reason Sammish could think that he wouldn’t give the box to Darro’s mother was that the old woman hadn’t paid for the rites. Which meant that even though Alys wasn’t here now, she would be. Alys would come for Darro’s ashes, and when she did, Sammish would be there.
The others left, and the priests cleared ceremonial tools away. Sammish stayed. She’d take the knives back to their right places in the morning if she had to. The priest looked at her, a question in his slow, heavy eyes. She said nothing and waited before the empty altar with a hundred different gods and no one.
It was dark before she came.
The public door scraped, and Alys came in like a thief. The cloak over her head might have hidden her from someone who didn’t know her, hadn’t watched her from the corners of their eyes, wasn’t hoping to see her there, but Sammish’s heart tightened and relaxed in the same moment before Alys had taken three steps toward the altar. The priest came forward to meet her, the box of Darro’s ashes in his hand. Alys took it, spoke a few words too softly to be heard, and let the priest return to his duties. She traced the deathmark with her fingertips and let the hood fall back a few inches. In the warm light, the darkness under her eyes looked like bruises, but they were likely only sleeplessness.
Sammish stood, and Alys started, noticing her for the first time. The fear in her expression was like Sammish had snuck up on a cat without being heard and tugged its tail. For a moment, she was certain Alys would race for the street and be gone. Sammish stood very still, met her friend’s gaze, and nodded slowly.
She could see Alys weighing something in her mind, but she had no idea what it was. Alys moved forward with twitch-fast, uncertain steps, crowding close to her. Her eyes looked wild in the soft light.