“They may know the city. But they don’t know her.”
“They know she exists, and that’s better than we had yesterday. The Bronze Coast boy’s still in play. He’s still kept safe, so if we can get the knife, we haven’t lost anything we can’t win back.”
“Only if it’s the right Bronze Coast boy,” Andomaka said.
“If this girl had the candle, she may know where your Inlisc friend kept his other secrets. If he had the blade the way he said and it didn’t get stolen when he got himself killed, maybe she can lead us to it.”
“If and if and if,” Andomaka said, and the dreamy quality had left her voice. She seemed only like what she was: a noblewoman of Kithamar whose will had been thwarted by circumstance. “They’ll poison us if we let them, these ifs.”
“Let me give you a few more, all the same,” he said. “If this new girl is like your wolf boy, she may be greedy. If she is greedy, she may be looking for us as well. And if that’s the case, you and I and the city have just gotten very, very lucky.”
The foreign woman with the fascination for blades had passed through Kithamar, but she’d been careful about it. Every person the woman spoke to had suffered hundreds of fresher dramas and curiosities in the days since. A calligrapher near the Temple might have met with her if he wasn’t mixing the question up with one that his wife’s father had asked. A brewer in Seepwater had let a woman who had been asking after knives sleep in his back room for a night, but he didn’t think she had been foreign. The street magician who sold amulets of glass and tin had seen a Bronze Coast woman, but she’d been looking for her son, not a blade. The petty blessing men and fortune-tellers who plied their trade in the markets—more of them frauds than real—had seen her, or pretended to have done until they could decide whether Sammish had money to trade for their story. Sammish knew better than to pay good coin for someone to echo back what she wanted to hear.
She didn’t ask about the woman made from smoke. She told herself it was because Alys was following that thread, but that was more than half a lie. The truth was, Sammish didn’t want to find that one. It wasn’t only the high magic that disturbed her, though she didn’t like it. It was the idea that the woman of smoke sounded like Green Hill. In the games of the noble and the wealthy, girls like her and Alys spent like small coin. What had happened to Darro could happen to them, and Kithamar wouldn’t miss a meal. Putting herself into this would have a cost.
It already did.
“Nothing for you today,” the butcher said.
Sammish laughed, then saw that he wasn’t joking. She gestured at the flesh around them—sheep and pork and lamb unmade and ready for the pot. “All of this, and your knives are still sharp?”
He didn’t meet her eye. “I have a Newmarket boy taking care of it for me. All my blades are fresh yesterday.” Then, when she didn’t speak, “You missed your day twice. Two times, I lost a morning’s work because I didn’t have my tools.”
“I said I was sorry for those,” Sammish said.
“You did, and you were, and I am too,” he said. “But the Newmarket boy gets them back to me when I need them, and neither of us is trying to make chops with apologies.”
“What about the skins?” Sammish said. “They go to the tanners, don’t they? I could carry them there?”
“The tanner’s boy does that. I don’t have anything for you. Not today. Maybe… Maybe next week. I don’t know. Don’t count on it.”
She stood there, trying not to show her humiliation and guilt. The truth was that she would probably have done the same in his place. A helper who doesn’t help was less than worthless. She was less than worthless.
“I’ll come back,” she said, and left. She wouldn’t come back.
She ran to the next house, feet slapping hard against the stone so that it hurt a little. She told herself she’d never miss her work again. She’d just push herself harder. If she only bore down more, she’d find a way to do all the things she’d promised…
It was the week of the harvest festival, and the streets were crowded. The men and women who’d gone off to the farms for the gathering in were returning, and the fat of the land came with them. A mule-drawn cart rumbled along before her as she walked, piled with rough burlap sacks and smelling of apples. The stalls of Newmarket were so filled with gourds and sacks of beans that the walkways were hard to pass through. Children sat on the corners with wicker baskets piled with honeyed walnuts and late summer berries that stained their fingertips. All the food was cheap, and everyone had coin. Now and for a few weeks more, all of Kithamar could pretend it was wealthy, or at least everyone who had spent the time to earn the extra silver and bronze.
It was wrong that seeing people she knew happy and thick with coin left Sammish feeling diminished, but it did. Even Alys had her secret cache of gold, though she was sworn not to spend more of it. Everyone had something extra except Sammish. She remembered something her father had said when she was very young and he was alive. Plant daydreams, eat dreams. He had meant Don’t be lazy, but Sammish wasn’t lazy. She’d been working as hard this last season as she ever did, only the payment she wanted wasn’t coin. Not even the silver that Alys had offered her. She wanted to matter to Alys. Now, with all the wealth and plenty around her, part of her began to wonder whether she’d been foolish.
The festival itself began at sundown and lasted for three long, drunken days. Servants in the colors of the great families and laborers for the guild halls rolled tuns of beer along the street. Bright cloth banners were being hung from the windows. As long as it didn’t rain, there would be music and dancing in the streets, lanterns hung at the prince’s expense to push back the night, costumes and masks and open doors at every house with food and wine to offer to passersby. In a better world, Sammish and Orrel and Alys would have been out among them making their own harvest. Only they wouldn’t, because Darro was dead, and Alys was drowning in it, and Sammish was a lovesick idiot busy trying to forge loyalty out of lust. She tried not to see all of them with contempt, and she succeeded a little where it came to Alys and Darro.
When she took the knives she had to the whetstone man, he was in a cloak of orange and blue. His hair was tied back by a woven leather thong, and he looked almost handsome. He was working, though, pedaling the little pump that passed the water over the pale flesh of the stone, holding the blades at just the proper angle, listening to the music as they hissed softly and took their edge. She imagined herself in his place, and the simple, pure sensuality of the movements. It wouldn’t be so terrible to live her life alone, maybe, if she had some simple, well-practiced beauty like that to fill her days.
“You’re taking these back tonight?” he asked as she unfolded the leather and removed the knives.
“I am,” she said.
“Not going to be taken up by the festival? Put off delivery to after?”
“Fuck no,” she said.
“Good,” he said mildly.
“I’ll be back before sundown.”
“They’ll be ready,” he said.
And when she came back late that afternoon, they were.