“Don’t be like that,” he said. “I’ll go to ten because I like you, and Arnal’s been sharpening my knives on the cheap for years. It’s a favor, though. You’ll owe me one back.”
“I’m not looking to sell,” Sammish said, and she snatched the sheath back. “That’s mine. I only want to know what you thought about it.”
“I think ten bronze of it,” the old man said. “What’s a girl like you going to do with something like this? You’re not looking to come into my trade, are you? Because I won’t have that. People like us might not have a guild, but that doesn’t mean you can step into our business without consequences.”
He was holding the knife by the handle now. He wasn’t quite threatening her with it. Sammish felt her throat go tight. She couldn’t win a scrap if the old man wanted one. She didn’t want him to talk down to Arnal about her either. She wanted nothing more than to take his offer, however bad it was, and leave. If it hadn’t been Alys’s blade they were talking about, she might have.
“Not mine to sell,” she said around the knot in her throat. “You can give it back now.”
He hesitated. “A silver.”
“I’d like to have it back now,” she said, and the fortune-telling girl laughed. The sound was so unexpected, Sammish jumped. The old man snarled but at the other girl, not at her. He tossed the blade on the black table.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “It’s a shit blade with some nice drawings on it. Hope it keeps you warm in your old age. I’ve got work.”
He stalked out. His footsteps tramped back through the hall and up the back stairs as Sammish scooped up her knife and put it back in its sheath. Even with him gone, she felt the threatening weight of his presence. She was about to leave when the fortune-teller spoke.
“Don’t mind him. He’s only angry because he thought he could turn a quick profit. He has a buyer for it.”
“A buyer?”
The fortune-teller sat forward, languid as a cat. “Foreign woman came in a while back asking after a blade like that. Down to the markings.”
“Foreign?”
“Not from Kithamar. Her accent sounded like something from the south. All clicks around the edges. She came asking after a silver knife marked with the same words as that.”
“You can read them?”
“They say Death of Death. More or less. Translation isn’t my work. She offered good money, too. Gold.”
Sammish felt her gut tighten, thinking of Darro’s secret coins. “How much gold?”
“Enough to be remembered. If you’d let that thing go for a silver, you’d have been getting the worst deal in Kithamar, and we’re a city of cheats.” The fortune-teller’s smile was hazy. The old man’s footsteps passed over them as he paced the floor above. Sammish had the image of him, weapon in hand, working himself up to violence. The smart thing was to leave and leave now.
“When did this southerner come?” she asked.
The fortune-teller shrugged.
“Please,” Sammish said.
“After the word came about Prince Ausai being ill. Before he died. In there someplace. I don’t remember.”
That meant the woman, whoever she was, had been seeking the blade before Darro was killed. Sammish felt her blood moving faster in her veins, but couldn’t tell if it was excitement or fear or both. “Did she have a name?”
“Saffa, I think. Or Sabba. She was an intense little thing. I liked her. I would have read her fortune for free, just to try working on a southerner. I like you too. Do you want to know your future?”
A louder thump came from above them, startling Sammish. “I should leave.”
“I see death before you,” the fortune-teller said, her voice suddenly deeper. “Death for you and everyone you love.”
Sammish’s breath went thin. Something must have shown in her expression, because the fortune-teller laughed and leaned back in her chair. She looked younger when she did it.
“Why is that funny?” Sammish said, surprised at her own anger.
“Because, green pea, it’s true for everyone.”
According to the vivisectionists at the university, the hearts of all animals were a kind of fist, relaxing to fill with blood and squeezing to push it out through the rest of the body. Alys imagined it working like a man flexing his hands before a fight he knew he’d eventually lose. The city had a pulse like that too, and harvest was the time when Kithamar filled.
The weeks before harvest saw the streets of Longhill and Newmarket and Riverport emptier than usual as everyone in need of extra coin signed up for short work on the farms. Carts from all the trading houses lumbered out, filled with men and women. The carts would come back filled with the produce of the year’s growth, the men and women trudging exhausted behind them as spent as an army back from campaign. Then the race began: on one hand, the sugar and salt, pickling broth, and wax-sealed long pots, and on the other, the inevitability of rot.
Alys remembered being almost too young to walk, sitting in the great stone kitchen of some house in Stonemarket where her mother had gotten work stirring a vast pot of berries as they cooked down for the jars. The memory had the smell of the woodsmoke and the brightness of the berries. There had been a foam of pink on top of the boiling darkness, and the head cook had let Alys help skim it off. She could still taste the sharpness and sweetness from when she licked her fingers after.
Harvest was full of memories like that: the way the leaves in the Silt lost their green and fell; the Khahon flowing dark as tea; the slowly growing night and the fading day. The long weeks until the first freeze were a constant flow of wheat and barley, apples and squash, lentils and broad beans. Cows and lambs and pigs came to Kithamar on carts or tied by ropes, their eyes tired and incurious. The slaughterhouses in Seepwater and the Smoke poured blood into the river by the barrelful, and children helped pack the fresh meat into curing salts for a bronze a day. The pantries and larders and storerooms of Kithamar filled, and every shelf was the promise that hunger wouldn’t come.
The rush would end near the first frost with a great celebration led by the prince, and since it would be Byrn a Sal’s first, everyone was vastly curious how it would go. Would there be dancers and fire-eaters the way his uncle had done? Or would the new prince find some way to make the celebration his own? Longhill buzzed with rumors of the forgiveness for crimes, which there sometimes was, or the forgiveness of taxes, which never happened however much people dreamed. The first harvest festival without Darro.
Alys was in a Longhill taproom that everyone called the Pit, a beer in her hand. Ever since the bluecloak, she’d found her fear starting to ebb. She didn’t start at shadows the way she had, and while she hadn’t come back to a room in Longhill, she hadn’t jumped from her cell in Oldgate either. It wasn’t courage, so much as the growing sense that whatever dangers there were, they hadn’t caught her scent. And also the growing, half-felt sense that Darro wouldn’t have run, so maybe she shouldn’t either. She’d had one victory, small as it was. She couldn’t win others by running.
Around her, the younger men and women of Longhill were spending their coin and relaxing. She was at work. Sometimes she could forget what she was working at, as if digging into Darro’s death could make it not have happened. Sometimes it just poured ashes on the cut.