“What are you doing here?” Alys said, her voice brittle and sharp.
“Looking for you.”
“Why? Who wants me found?”
“I’m not hired. I just… You were gone, and I didn’t know where.”
“You’re not being paid to hunt me down?”
There were hundreds of things Sammish had half imagined Alys might say, but this was none of them. “I wouldn’t take that job if someone offered. We’re friends.”
Alys seemed to turn in on herself, like she was listening to voices only she could hear. Sammish chanced a step toward her, and Alys didn’t shy.
“You can help me,” she said. “I’ll go to… I’ll go to the square where Nimal’s crew spends their days?”
“The dry cistern,” Sammish said with a nod.
“You follow behind and watch. See if anyone comes after me. If you see someone, shout to me, yeah?”
“Are you in trouble?”
Alys shook her head, but she didn’t mean No. “Let’s find out.”
In the street, the moon was little more than a sliver of white, the stars a scattering of brightness between the close-set eaves. What light there was came from the candle glow of windows. Alys was a shadow among shadows, and Sammish followed her by the sound of footsteps as much as by the glimpses she wrung out of the darkness. As they walked, she listened for anything else. Longhill at night was more nearly silent than in the day, but still Sammish heard voices. Two men shouting over each other about something. Someone else crying. Unnervingly close by, a single deep laugh that wasn’t repeated. Running footsteps from the east that ended with the clatter of a closing door. Sammish followed and watched, imagining what she would do if she did see someone falling in behind Alys. She wished that she had a knife. Before her, Alys slipped in and out of sight.
When they arrived at the square, it was empty. In daylight, it was hardly more than a wider space in the street with a cistern that had cracked four years earlier, spilling water into the street and through people’s homes on its muddy way to the river, and still hadn’t been repaired. Now the place felt like something from a song—a space between worlds where the familiar and the eerie mixed and became each other. Alys sat on the edge of the dry cistern, her hands at her sides. From the way she held herself, Sammish guessed they were in fists. Alys tensed as Sammish walked toward her, and then relaxed a little when she recognized that it was only the girl she’d expected. Sammish sat beside her on the crumbling stone. The grit muttered against her thigh.
Sammish’s eyes had adapted to the night, and in the weak glimmer of moon and stars, she could make out some of Alys’s features. The tightness of her mouth, the wildness of her eyes. She was so clearly in the grip of fear that Sammish half expected some overlooked threat to lurch out of the shadows at them. She felt her own throat tighten.
“Anyone?” Alys asked.
Sammish shook her head, then saw that Alys wasn’t looking at her. “No. No one followed you. Just me.”
“Good,” Alys said sharply. And then, more softly, “That’s very, very good.”
“What is going on? Where have you been? Is this to do with Darro?”
Alys took a long, shuddering breath made louder by the dark. When she leaned forward, it was as sudden as if she’d been punched.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but Darro was in something. A pull of his own, maybe. It was big.”
“Is it why he was killed?”
“I don’t know,” Alys said, her voice breaking on the final word. “I don’t know why it happened or who did it. I found things after he was gone, and I know there was something big happening. It might have been them. Or it could have been the bluecloak. The one from our pull. The one at the coronation. You remember?”
“Of course I do.”
“Or he was looking for Orrel and something happened. It might not have been his work at all. It might have been me. I can’t tell. I don’t know if I killed him. Maybe I killed him.”
Alys’s voice rose with each phrase like a plucked string being pulled tighter.
“I’ve been moving from place to place, watching to see if anyone followed. I thought of going back to Aunt Thorn, but what if she was part of his pull or whatever it was, because who else could it be with coin like that? I couldn’t even be in Longhill where everyone knows me and I know everyone, or it feels like that, and then I wasn’t going to come tonight, but…” She lifted the ashes and began to cry in earnest.
Sammish, heart aching, went to put an arm around her shoulders, but Alys flinched. Sammish made do with an awkward pat on her shoulder blade.
She couldn’t make much sense of the words spilling out in the darkness. The details, whatever they were, would have to wait. What she could take as certain was that Alys had been frightened and alone for long enough that she was drunk on it. She’d spent too long with only her fear and her grief, and it was throwing her mind off. Alys was the sure one, solid and comfortable with her own judgment. The bawling girl in the dark beside her was an aspect that Sammish had never seen before. The older girl’s vulnerability pulled at Sammish like a sudden rush in the river. She found herself weeping a little too, not even knowing what they were upset about. Only that Alys was broken by it, and so she was too.
Alys’s sobs slowed a little. The shadow of her bowed head went still. The soft, saltwater smell of tears came to Sammish like the subtlest perfume, and she sighed. The slap of boots against cobblestone came from off to their left, but Alys didn’t stiffen, and the footsteps passed and faded away. Some other poor bastard making their way through the dark on an errand that didn’t touch them. Sammish sighed deeply and gathered herself.
“All right,” she said. “Do you need money?”
Alys’s one bitter laugh could have meant she needed it badly or that she didn’t need it at all. Sammish didn’t press that issue. Not yet, anyway.
“Whatever it is you need, we’ll find a way to get it,” Sammish said, making her voice sound more certain than she was. She didn’t know if she was being strong for Alys or as a way to convince herself that what she said made sense. “We’re clever, and it won’t be hard. Then once you’re not spinning around like a feather in a windstorm, we’ll take care of the rest.”
Alys was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was still thick and raw. “You don’t have to do that.”
“We’ll take care of the rest,” Sammish said again, neither more forcefully nor less. “But first, if you can, tell me what we’re looking at. All of it. From go.”
Andomaka Chaalat, whom Darro had known as the pale woman, slept, and in her sleep she dreamed. She was very well practiced at dreaming.
In her dream it was winter, the great river in the heart of the city a single sheet of grey ice stretching north into the wilds and south toward the distant sea. She knew it was bitingly cold though she didn’t feel it. Just north of her, a hole in the ice wide enough to fall through framed black, fast-flowing water. She watched threads of water weaving over one another, the turbulence shifting like the river itself was alive and restless. Something struck the ice she stood on from below like it was aiming for her feet, and she understood that Prince Ausai was in the water. That he was trapped there, swimming against the stream but unable to reach back to the catastrophe where the ice had collapsed beneath him.