Panic lit her, and she turned south, looking for some other flaw in the ice. Or for some instrument to make one. Around her on both sides of the river, the stones and buildings of Kithamar shuddered and cracked, and she knew with the logic of dream that they were being replaced. New buildings that, while they looked just the same, were not. Impostors made from architecture. The city itself was being eaten from within, and something alien, new, and malefic was taking its place.
The thump of punches from under the ice grew louder, and she sprinted, trying to find exactly where they were loudest, where Ausai was summoning her. And then her perspective shifted, and she was the one underwater. The Khahon carried her along under the gently glowing ice, and she saw no escape. She would be carried down to the sea that was also death and be lost in it.
She woke herself trying to scream.
She was in her room. Thin, milky moonlight pressed through the window like the glow of the ice she had just left. She pulled herself up from her bed and walked across the rugs, wood creaking under her with every step. Her private rooms looked out toward the east, the still-coming dawn, and the palace where her cousin Byrn a Sal slept in the prince’s chambers.
Her cousin who was not what he seemed.
She felt the urge to go down to the private temple, as if anything there would have changed. She resisted. The servant girl who slept in the pallet at the end of Andomaka’s bed muttered, stirred, and sat up.
“Lady Chaalat? Are you all right?”
“I had a dream,” she said.
“Should I get your books, lady? Or wake Master Tregarro?”
“I don’t need them. I know what this dream meant,” Andomaka said. “It wasn’t subtle.”
Each year, a day came that marked the end of summer.
The city rose as it had for months, but instead of thick, heavy, unforgiving heat, there was a crispness to the morning air. Before midday came, the city would be bathed in its own sweat again, the taxmen at the gates would be fanning themselves as they had before and would again, and the dogs would curl in the shadows and pant. Children would swim in the canals and be chased out by mothers afraid that their babies would drown. The following morning might have the same chill, or it might not. There would be more warm days to come, but they would be warm autumn days. Summer had surrendered its crown, and the slow, lush, sensual slide into harvest had begun.
This was the first one in Alys’s life that Darro wouldn’t share. And after it, the first Longest Night without him. The first thaw he wouldn’t see.
Since the night she’d found the knife and the coins, Alys had kept moving, spending her nights streetbound near the Temple or buying a place on a barge tied up on the Riverport docks. Most recently, she’d found a room set deep into the flesh of Palace Hill in the quarter they called Oldgate: a vast fortification that rose up the eastern cliff face from the river to the palace. She leaned against the retaining wall that held the switchback road from crumbling down to the water, and looked out to the east and the rising sun. She wasn’t even a quarter of the way up the black stone face of the hillside, but she could see out over the streets of Newmarket and Seepwater to Longhill. In the morning light, the roofs looked like a city of gold. It was an illusion. It was all stone and wood, brick and tile. It was only distance that made it beautiful.
And below her, on the southernmost of the four bridges that touched Oldgate—the one that spanned the northernmost edge of the Silt and reached across to Seepwater—she saw Sammish making her way toward her. Alys watched the little figure, small as a doll with distance, and felt a complexity of anticipation and dread, gratitude and resentment and growing restlessness. It was good having the girl as her accomplice in finding out what had happened, her eyes and ears where Alys was too wary to go herself. It gave her a path forward that she hadn’t had before. Already, they’d found that no one seemed to have a price on Alys. The taprooms of Longhill weren’t asking what had become of her except in the most idle, perfunctory ways. Nor had anyone come to her mother to dig for information about what Darro had been about when he’d died. All of it important for her to know, all of it calming in its fashion.
She should have been pleased, and in part she was. But Sammish wasn’t Darro, and some part of Alys’s heart felt betrayed by everyone who wasn’t. Everyone in the city. The world.
Sammish reached the near end of the bridge and began the long trudge up the face of Oldgate, coming in and out of sight as the switchback carried her, and growing taller and less doll-like every time. Alys felt a vague obligation to go down and meet her, and resented it until it was too late and Sammish reached her. Then she felt a pang of guilt and resented that instead.
Sammish squatted beside her. The sun was fully risen now, the roofs to the east had lost their gold, and the river hadn’t yet caught the brightness that it later would. A cart passed behind them, with the mule tied at the back as a brake against gravity pulling it down. The other girl pulled a tart from her sleeve and held it out to Alys almost tentatively. The crust was gold, and the center black with berries. Alys took it with a nod of thanks and bit into the warm, crisp salt-and-sweet. She hadn’t realized until just then that she was hungry.
Sammish had a tart of her own, and they ate in silence for a moment before Sammish spoke. “I found the bluecloak.”
Alys shifted to look at her directly. Pleasure danced at the corners of Sammish’s mud-brown eyes. “At least I think I did. You said he called himself Tannen something?”
“The one Orrel took the belt from?”
“I think so,” Sammish said. “I’m not certain. You saw him better than I did, and the one I found isn’t city guard. But his name’s Tannen, and he’s the right age and frame. I think it’s him.”
“Where?”
“Camnit warehouse,” Sammish said, gesturing across the water. “Do you know the one with blue doors next to the ropemakers’ guild hall? There. He’s new to the work. If that’s because he lost his place in the guard…”
Alys put the last of her pastry into her mouth, leaning forward as if by mere will she could see across the water and make out one door from another. The thing in her head was moving now. She couldn’t put a name to what she was feeling, but it was warm and high in her chest. And it didn’t hurt. It was strange to feel something that didn’t hurt. It left her lightheaded.
“Let’s go see,” she said. She rose and started down the slope to the river and the bridges. Sammish trotted after her.
At the bridge, the city guard eyed them suspiciously—two Inlisc girls on the wrong side of the water—then waved them past and went on collecting bronze tolls from the carters and laborers carrying cloth and wood and sacks of wheat to the eastern bank. Near the halfway point in the span, a street cleaner’s cart was parked. Four young men—prisoners of the city—stood in it shirtless, throwing shovelfuls of shit and dead animals into the water. They whistled at Alys and Sammish, and one dropped his trousers to wag an unimpressive penis at them both until the bluecloak shouted at him and flicked his bare ass with a mule goad. Alys noticed them the way she did the sun or the sound of the river.
Once they reached the docks at Riverport, the activity stopped seeming like an anthill and grew into something more like a storm. Harvest hadn’t come, but the preparations for it were stirring the streets. Boats unloaded barrels of sugar from island cities like Imaja and Caram far to the south. As soon as the holds were emptied, sacks of wheat and rye took their place until the waterline rose back up their sides. Fortunes were being made and lost in the chaos. A broken crane that slowed one family’s pier might mean their ruin. A wise purchase of vinegar could let another family keep pickled eggs and vegetables through a bad spring when a mouthful of food was worth more than its weight in silver or silk. Mules dropped their heads and pushed through the crowded streets. Carters whipped away dogs and beggars. The warehouses stood with their doors open, and enforcers with chains and lead-dipped ropes guarded the goods. The air was thick with the smells of sweat and spice and the river.