The dark wick spat and reached its end. The pale woman blinked out with the light.
“We’re in over our heads. This is too much,” Sammish said. And then, “What did her voice sound like? Did she have an accent?”
Alys frowned, trying to recall exactly how the pale woman’s words had sounded. It seemed impossible that something so astonishing could fade from her memory so quickly, but with each question that Sammish asked, Alys felt less certain of the answer. “She did and she didn’t? Not like she was from Hyian or Bronze Coast, but not like she was from Longhill, either.”
“But Hansch? You’re sure she was Hansch?”
“I was until you pushed me on it,” Alys said, more sharply than she’d meant to, and Sammish pulled back like she’d come too close to a fire. Alys tried to cover over her snapping by going on in a gentler voice. “She seemed almost… kind, really. Like she’d just found a puppy someplace she hadn’t expected to and was trying not to scare it off.”
It was midmorning, and they were sitting in the street outside the baker’s house where Sammish slept. Alys had spent the night walking, and exhaustion was deep in her bones. Staying in her little room after the apparition or visitation or whatever it was hadn’t been possible. She’d scooped up her things in the darkness and left, trotting down the wide path toward the bridges almost before she’d thought about where she could go or who she could stay with.
The night had been cold, but not bitter. She’d thought of going to her mother’s thin, loveless squat, or Sammish’s, or Aunt Thorn. Every impulse that came to her had the same problem: they were places that she would go. In the darkness, being where she was known felt dangerous. The sense that someone or something out there had seen her, that it would be looking for her, made her want to keep far away from the places where anyone could expect her to be. Instead, she had made her way across the river, and through the streets of Riverport and Newmarket. She’d even gone to the Temple grounds. The only rest she’d taken was sitting in an alley between two ill-dignified minor churches there.
The morning light had taken away enough of her fear that finding Sammish felt like a risk worth taking. She’d found the baker’s house when the scent of woodsmoke and yeast were thick in the air. The oven—a clay kiln set apart from the buildings around it to keep down the risk of fire—was only a few feet behind them now. Alys felt the gentle warmth of it against the back of her neck. The ground was pale with the residue of years of flour dust and rain.
“It might have been a Green Hill kind of voice,” Alys said. “Like the magistrates when they’re passing judgment or when the prince gives a speech. And she was pretty like they are.”
Sammish scratched her chin like she was stroking a beard. “This is bad. I mean, it wasn’t good before. Orrel gone. Your brother killed. But now foreigners looking for enchanted daggers and wizard women weaving themselves from smoke? Whatever this is… There might be some sense in letting it be?”
Alys felt anger in her breast, twice as vicious because she’d had the same thought. “Darro wasn’t your blood. I don’t expect you to do the same things I do.”
Sammish looked down, scowling hard. “Are you certain Darro would even want you to do this? He cared about you. He loved you. No one wants the people they love to be hurt. Maybe he’d tell us to stop? You paid his rites. You took care of him. What if that’s enough?”
On the street, the cleaner’s cart ambled around the corner. The prisoners with their flat wooden spades scraped the horse manure and other shit from the paving bricks and hefted it into the dark-streaked, stinking cart while four bluecloaks walked far enough behind to avoid the worst of the stink.
“It’s not enough,” Alys said.
“All right.”
“If you don’t want to be part of this—”
“No. It isn’t that. I just… I’m scared.”
Sammish’s gaze was fixed on the ground between her feet. Her hair was loose and falling forward like she was trying to hide behind it. Alys dug a finger in her belt, opening the hidden seam and popping a silver coin free from its hiding place. She held it out. “You’ve earned it.”
Sammish took the coin like she was stealing from a temple box, never meeting Alys’s eyes.
“Give me back my knife,” Alys said. Sammish brought it out from under her tunic. It was warm from her body, and the leather sheath was dark on one side from her sweat. Alys stuffed it in her boot the way Darro had taught her, the hilt tight against her ankle and ready to be drawn if the need came. She was surprised to see the tears on Sammish’s cheek and the shame in her expression.
Alys felt a rush of annoyance and then guilt at being annoyed. “It’s all right. It would probably be too much for me as well, if I could get away from it. But I can’t. Whatever this is, it’s mine. Until I find the one who killed Darro, I have to follow this. You don’t.”
“But then you’ll be going alone. I don’t want you to be alone,” she said, or close to it. She’d coughed a little on the you.
“How long have we known each other?” Alys asked.
“Since we were scrapping in the Silt with Grey Linnet,” Sammish said.
“And how long have we been crewing up?”
Sammish laughed through her tears. “Since you stole that sack of onions from the stand at Newmarket and I pretended to be hurt when the seller knocked into me. You had that green cloak and red boots. You were amazing.” She was still and silent for a moment, then reached out, the silver coin pinched in her fingertips. Offering it back.
Alys shook her head. “You’ve earned it.”
When she didn’t take it, Sammish balanced the coin on Alys’s knee.
“Pay me my cut when the job’s done,” she said.
Green Hill spread to the north and west of the palace where Hansch villagers and farmers had once huddled close to the ancient keep, ready to run for its protection when the Inlisc raiders came. Centuries ago, they had dug the canal, a diversion from the northern reaches of the Khahon, built to protect the village’s western edge and give clean water to irrigate fields and orchards that had long since become flower gardens and private groves.
Great houses stood on the bones of those almost-forgotten farms, and the trees and gardens that gave the quarter its name boasted of the wealth and power of its residents. To have open, living green space inside city walls verged on bragging, so while the stone towers and mansions with their vaulted ceilings and statues of fauns and spirits and serpents were designed to awe those who saw them, so were the oaks and alders that shaded them.
To the southwest, down the slope of the hill, Stonemarket spread out like a map of itself, streets and plazas arrayed like a field under a watchful farmer’s eye. The Smoke, to the south, was hidden by the palace, a servant kept out of sight until something needed cleaning or mending. The eastern half of the city from Oldgate to the Temple could have been a rumor except for the accents of the tradesmen and round-faced cleaning girls and kitchen help.
Green Hill might bow to prince and palace, but nothing less.
The great families had their compounds—Reyos, Chaalat, a Sal, a Jimental, Abbasann—but old Hansch brotherhoods also kept their houses there: Clovas and Daris and Climianth-Sul. The brotherhoods were not families of blood descent, but of oath and custom. If asked, all would swear their loyalty to the gods of the city, but in private, each also kept their own mysteries and secret rituals. Tradition ran deeper than wells in Green Hill.