She imagined Darro walking with her. She imagined that she was Darro. It brought her head higher and it straightened her back. It hid, she hoped, that she was so anxious that she hadn’t been able to eat.
She was walking into a situation she didn’t understand with people she didn’t know, and whatever had led her brother to his death was waiting somewhere ahead of her. She felt like she was standing at the edge of a bridge, looking down into the dark, swirling water, knowing that she was about to jump.
The soapmaker’s shop was dark and its shutters closed. Behind the windows on the second story, shadows moved. A family sitting down to their meal after a long day or else bowmen standing guard against an enemy. She had no way to know, and anything seemed possible. At the north side of the building, a narrow alleyway no wider than her shoulders opened like a crack in the wall. She stood before it, the key in her hand. How would Darro have held himself? Would he have smiled or lowered his head? Kept a hand on the hilt of his blade?
She stepped into the gloom, her senses straining. After a half dozen steps, the alley widened just enough that someone had built a wooden shed against the wall. Even though the sky was only a dark ribbon above her, the wood was grey with age and weather. She found the keyhole with her finger and fit the key to it. The soft sound of a voice came from the other side of the door, masculine and vaguely threatening. She felt the bolt sliding back as a vibration in her hand, and the door swung in.
Two men stood in the light of a single candle. They were older, and she didn’t know them. One wore a cloak of worn leather like a coachman and a knit cap with a lock of grey hair at the temple. The other, shorter and broader in the face, was dressed like a laborer in a pale tunic and trousers of undyed canvas. The coachman held the familiar silver blade in his hand as if he’d been showing it to the laborer. It was the first time Alys had seen it since she’d given it over at the harvest festival. For a moment, all three were silent. Alys swallowed to loosen her throat.
“Andomaka sent me,” she said.
“Don’t say her name again,” the coachman said, but not as a threat. “And don’t ask mine. Or his.”
“I won’t,” Alys said. “I’m sorry.”
The coachman nodded to the door, and Alys closed it. The inner face of the lock had a wide iron lever. She pulled it down, and the latch slid closed. The shed itself wasn’t as close as her cell in Oldgate had been, but it was nearly so. Thin shelves lined the wall, and the air stank of rosemary and lye. She was alone with two men in a place where, if they turned on her, help would not find her. She put her back to the door and a hand on the hilt of her blade as if she were only resting it there. The coachman’s smile said he saw through the casual motion to the fear behind it. He tucked the blade into a fold of his cloak where it seemed to vanish. If there had been some conversation between the two men, her presence had ended it. She waited, and they waited, but the two stillnesses were different. She could feel their enjoyment of her discomfort. She might have left, if it hadn’t meant turning her back to them.
The lock shifted and hissed as the latch opened. She stepped forward to let the door swing in, and a third man came in behind her. He was more nearly Darro’s age, with close-cut dark hair and a smirk. She could have imagined him around the brazier with Black Nel and Terryn Obst. He lifted his chin at the coachman in greeting.
“I’m late,” the new man said. He had an accent almost like Andomaka’s, but lighter. As small as the shed was, Alys couldn’t help brushing against him, though he didn’t seem to notice.
“I knew that,” the coachman answered.
“What’s the work, then?”
“You come with me and keep your eyes open. If there’s not a problem, there’s not one. If there is, see to it that the silver blade gets out and back where it should be.”
“And the money?”
“After. And we’d better be going,” the coachman said, biting the words as he spoke them. “We should have been there by now.”
The late one shrugged and backed out of the shed. Alys followed him, and the others came after. The coachman headed west with long strides, the laborer close behind him. Alys and the late one brought up the back. The sunset lit the western sky red as blood. Palace Hill and Oldgate stood silhouetted against the fading brightness like a god with his back turned. Alys walked fast, watching for movement in the windows and alley mouths without knowing what exactly she was looking for and too uncertain to ask.
The late one glanced at her, his eyes flickering to her boots and then back up her body the way men often would. On him, it didn’t seem to mean what it usually did.
“You look like him,” he said.
“Like who?” Alys asked.
“Darro.”
They didn’t speak, though the late man sometimes whistled a low, breathy melody. The night grew cold quickly. Though darkness came early this time of year, Alys felt as if they were travelling deep into night. They passed a patrol of city guard heading the other way, and though the bluecloaks watched them pass, they didn’t call them aside. Slowly, street by street, she was able to put her unease inside herself and lock it away.
The Temple rose to their right, a darkness against the night sky except for a single glowing window, yellow as the sun and steadier than a star. Alys fought the sense that the gods were watching her.
The coachman stopped at a wide, dark building just off the Temple gate. It wasn’t a part of Newmarket Alys knew. The cracked stucco walls and orange-stained lintels had little in common with the raw wood of Longhill or the unforgiving stone of the Hansch quarters. The roof was steep. No one would be sleeping on top of it. It was a merchant’s house, but there was no trade sigil or sign to say what they traded in.
The laborer stopped walking first, looking back down the way they’d come. In the starlight, he looked grim.
“Would have preferred to do this in day,” he said to no one in particular. Then, a moment later, “Watch yourselves.”
A wide door at the corner of the house creaked and opened. Thin, buttery light spilled from it, and a woman stepped out with a lantern behind her. Alys couldn’t make out her features, except that she was thick-bodied, looked more Inlisc than Hansch, and had her hair pulled back under a cloth. The coachman nodded to the new woman, then plucked the familiar silver knife from its hidden sheath. Alys felt a little bloom of pride that it was here. The woman, seeing it, stepped aside. The coachman went in, and the rest of the crew followed.
After the cold of the street, the interior felt hot and close. The air was wet and warm as a bathhouse, and dark mold dotted the walls at the ceiling. The woman let them through a hall past half a dozen doors with thick bars across them but no locks. They weren’t made to be opened from within. Whatever lived behind those doors lived in a cage.
The center of the house was like a roofed courtyard: an open space lit by half a dozen lanterns and paved with baked tile. A stairway led to balconies on three sides, looking down over the lit space where the woman motioned them to wait. Dark wooden beams high above them took the place of the clouds. The late one squinted up into the gloom, and Alys understood. They were in the light. Anyone in the shadows above them would see them like they were actors on a stage but stay invisible themselves.