Alys found him where she expected him to be: sitting on the steps outside his own house, half out of a costume that looked like it had been a warrior-priest and drunk on someone else’s wine. He watched them as they approached with a vast incuriousness and cocked his head at Alys when she stopped before him. Sammish stood to the side, arms crossed and looking away.
“I know you,” he said.
“Alys. My brother was Darro. He kept a room from you.”
“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.”
“I want it.”
“Good to know what you want. Already gave it to some of the roof girls. It’s getting on toward winter.”
“Move them someplace else. I want Darro’s room.”
Sammish hissed her name, but Alys ignored her. Instead she took one of her gold coins and placed it carefully in the center of the man’s broad palm. Kennat looked at it for a long time, then up at her. His expression was more sober than his voice. “I’ll have them out in the morning.”
She considered demanding that he evict the other tenants now. With the money she was paying, he’d have done it. The hunger to have strangers out of her brother’s room plucked at her, but something about having Sammish there made her feel odd about it.
“Good enough,” Alys said, then turned and walked away. It was an odd thing to feel like victory, but it did. She had Darro’s room. She had Darro’s work, whatever it had been. Sammish’s footsteps slapping along behind as she tried to catch up were the only flaws in the night.
“You’re spending the gold now? I thought you were saving that.”
“Andomaka didn’t ask for it back,” Alys said.
“Maybe it isn’t hers. Maybe he was working for someone else as well. It doesn’t make sense. He was supposed to give them the knife, but he had it and he hadn’t passed it over. Why not? Who’s the woman that was looking for it? Your brother had all this gold, but the people he worked for don’t seem to know about it. None of it fits together. You see that none of it fits together?”
“Weren’t you just telling me that I’d found out enough and there was nothing left to look for?”
“I was,” Sammish said, and her voice was despairing. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“You don’t like them.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“I didn’t say you were. I said you don’t like them.”
They walked on for another half block. The buildings around them were largely dark, largely quiet. Here and there a window glowed, candlelight showing from the faults in the shutters. The stars swam behind clouds and peeked back out again. The only sounds were their footsteps and a man’s voice somewhere, laughing at a joke they hadn’t heard.
Farther south, there would be Seepwater and beer and fires in the streets to keep their hands warm by. There would be roasted sugar beets and honeyed walnuts, and enough beer to keep them both tipsy until dawn if they wanted. After all, it was harvest. Kithamar was as fat as it would be anytime in the whole year. It could afford to be generous.
“I don’t like them,” Sammish said.
PART TWO
WINTER
To know a thing—a house, a city, a street, a lover—one must be with it for a full year. A street locked in winter’s ice is a different street than the same stones under spring storms. A lover in the first flame of passion is a different person when those fires have cooled.
And even then, a year is only a year, and a lifetime is only a life. With time enough, even gods may be startled by the newfound sweetness of a well-bruised heart.
—From the pillow book of Anayi a Jimental, poet to the court of Daos a Sal
The first snow came early that year, falling from a low grey sky. The sunlight felt weak, strained through the clouds like milk through cheesecloth. Alys sat at her window—her window now, and her blackwood table, and her room looking out toward the distant river—with the shutters open and watched as the flakes passed from dark spots against the paleness above to white with the buildings across the street behind them. It seemed like a trick a street magician would do, transforming a thing to its opposite before her eyes and yet also invisibly. Her breath plumed, but only slightly. The cold made her cheeks feel like a mask.
She wore a dark wool cloak, not black but a deep grey, and fingerless gloves to match. Her boots were well made, with leather that was both supple and thick and a buckle on the side. Her shirts were three layers of cotton, and she had a dagger at her belt. It wasn’t silver but steel, and it cost more than anything she’d ever owned before. All of it was newly bought. Given how unlike it was from her customary dress, it should have felt like a costume. Maybe it did, but it was comforting too. It was what she wanted.
The room was dark and close, and the walk up from the street was long enough that she didn’t leave it without reason. There was a boy, thin-faced with pocked scars on his arms and neck, who brought around bread and cheese and water once a day if she paid him. The two girls from the roof had taken the room that shared her north wall, and they were willing to share their monthly cotton when Alys needed it. The night pot, she could empty out the window. The mattress on her pallet was thin, but it didn’t stink and the bugs hadn’t found it yet. Her blanket was soft and warm enough to keep away the bite before dawn.
It was the first room that she’d truly felt was her own, and she felt that because it was Darro’s. She could have stayed the whole winter there and never left, except when Andomaka or Tregarro had need of her. She imagined her brother sitting where she sat, feeling the same combination of solitude and isolation that she did, or the same sense of his own adulthood. She imagined him watching the snow, and she felt herself changing.
Throughout Longhill, people wore heavier jackets or shawls against the chill. Shops and taprooms closed a bit earlier as the darkness pushed people to early beds. Frost began to whiten the morning cobblestones, but the first snow was the sign that said the inevitable had arrived, and all the comforts of autumn were gone. The best parts of the year had already passed. The river would run cold as death until the killing frosts came and sealed the city under ice.
On the streets below her, old Ubram Foyle rode his cart, whipping the same grey nag he’d had for years and calling out for bones and iron. Children ran out to him as he passed with handfuls of chicken and pigeon bones left over from their family meals or the longer, pinker ones from dogs that had died or been killed. The old man traded bits of honey rock for the bones. Iron scrap and chain, he weighed in his hand and paid for in coin. When the cart grew full, he would haul it to the Smoke and sell the metal to the smiths and the bones to the gluemen. Alys could remember being one of those children bolting for the street when his smoke-and-gravel voice called out, the anticipation of honey already making her young mouth water.
She wasn’t that child now. Sweetness had less appeal.
Alys’s mother had been born into Longhill, one of a half dozen children in a house large enough for three. She’d been called Nandy when she was a young child and Linly when she’d grown to be a girl as old as Alys was now. From all the stories, she’d been something of a beauty, dark haired and sharp-eyed, with a laugh that taught birds how to sing. Alys couldn’t see even the traces of it in the soft jowls and greying hair that made up the woman she knew. Still, there had apparently been a time when a girl named Linly had skipped through the same streets that Alys travelled now, had drunk beer with her friends at the same bridges Alys crossed, and met and teased and loved young men who found her beautiful.