“This seems a promising place to die,” the late one said.
“Dying’s not the worst thing happens here,” the laborer said.
The coachman scowled back at them and spoke in a calm, conversational voice. “Both of you shut the fuck up.”
The footsteps came first, hard and sharp with nails in the soles. Then the sound of a door opening, and a short, harsh laugh. A tall man stepped into the courtyard, grinning, his arms wide as if he might embrace them all. Two men came after him. They wore straight, short, brutal swords at their hips and steel mesh gauntlets like animal handlers used to keep bites from cutting.
“This,” the tall man said, “has been a long time coming.” He had a mark inked into the skin of his cheek: two long lines crossed by a shorter third one. Alys had never seen anyone with the mark before, but she knew what it meant all the same. It was a Bronze Coast judgment mark. It was the kind they used when they caught a slaver. The tall man traded in the freedom of others. Alys remembered the barred doors and understood better what might be behind them.
“Sorry for that,” the coachman said, and then waited.
The tall man tilted his head. “That’s all? No explanation? No excuses?”
“None,” the coachman said. “We meant to come before, but then there was a complication. Now we’re here. You have the boy?”
The boy? Alys thought. She glanced at the late one and the laborer, but neither of them was looking at her. She couldn’t say if they knew better than she did what was happening here or if they were only better at keeping their confusion hidden.
“I do,” the tall man said. “You have the price?”
“There’s a formality.”
“All this time and worry because you wouldn’t take my word?”
“Not my call,” the coachman said. “You know that.”
The tall man raised a hand, and a soft shuffling sound came from the darkness behind him. It wasn’t only bowmen above them that the dark concealed. She had no way of knowing how many people were there, or how badly she and the others were outnumbered. The late one licked his lips, and she suspected he’d had the same thought.
A woman stepped out of the gloom with a boy at her side. He was younger than Alys by two or three years. His head was shaved, with only a rough stubble to cover his shining scalp. Long-faced and dark-eyed, he stared at the tiles. Dumb as a sheep, Alys thought, and then remembered the long rows of animals led on ropes to the harvest slaughterhouses. They had the same calm, incurious gaze. Exhaustion and fear that has lived past ripeness. The tall man stepped over to the boy and put a wide hand on the back of his neck, laying claim to him.
“This is the one.”
“And still,” the coachman said.
“Fine. Check for yourself.”
The tall man shoved the boy forward, out into the space between the two groups. He stumbled on thin legs, almost falling. He didn’t have ropes or chains, but red marks at his wrists and ankles showed where they’d rubbed wounds into him. He was too young to have a beard, but soft fuzz darkened his upper lip. If he’d been on a Longhill corner, no one would have looked at him twice.
The coachman stepped forward, and the silver knife—Darro’s knife—was in his hand. For a moment, Alys thought he was going to kill the boy, but the coachman only steadied him with his left and gestured with the blade in his right. The boy didn’t respond.
“Hold your hand out, son,” the coachman said. The boy looked at him blankly. The laborer barked a half dozen syllables in a language Alys didn’t know, and the boy shook his head. The coachman slapped him smartly across the cheek, and the boy lifted his hand.
The coachman steadied the boy’s open palm with his hand and cut across it. The boy moaned and twitched, but he didn’t try to pull away. Alys wasn’t looking at him any longer. She was looking at the blade.
She’d spent hours in her cell in Oldgate considering it, tracing the arcane letters on its flat. She could have drawn them again from memory, she was sure of it. But the dark markings on the bloody silver now weren’t those. The air around the knife shifted like the heat off a forge, and there was something like light but without the brightness that made it hurt to look at. She caught her breath.
Across the tiles, the tall man stepped back, his expression grave. Only the coachman wasn’t unnerved. He knelt and sketched a symbol on the floor. It looked like a deathmark, but not for anyone she knew. The air thickened, and a sense of presence filled the room as if something vast was considering them all. The boy moaned and the mark began to blacken and smoke until the coachman rubbed it to nothing with his foot.
“Fair enough,” he said. “He has the blood we’re looking for. I accept him. Give him a cloak so he doesn’t die in the cold, and I’ll take him now.”
“And I’ll take the rest of my payment.”
The coachman went still, and the late one at Alys’s right made a small sound like he’d been stung by something small.
“That’s not how it is.”
“It’s how it’s become, though. I held this one for weeks more than we agreed.”
“We didn’t have the knife,” the coachman said. “If we couldn’t be sure he was the right one, you’d have thrown us one of your castoffs. We both know that’s true.”
“Might or might not. That’s a world that didn’t happen. The one that did had the boy with us longer than we agreed. Had to move and move and move to keep his people from putting hands on him. Now you want to take him and dance away, and I ask myself why I should think the payment will come on time when the collection was so, so late. I’m not asking for more than we agreed. But I’m asking for it now. And you, old friend, changed our arrangement before I did.”
Alys saw something shift in the shadows. She kept her focus there, not glancing at the lantern flames and willing her eyes to adapt to the darkness.
“I don’t have that option,” the coachman said. He put the silver blade back in its sheath, but as he did, he looked back. The laborer nodded almost imperceptibly, as if to say he’d seen where the blade was, if he should need to grab it up and run. The tall man crossed his arms and scowled. Alys felt her breath coming faster.
She tried to imagine Darro, the way he’d been outside Ibdish’s iron grate. The smile in his voice as he taunted the guardsman. His fearlessness. The late one at Alys’s side made a small, almost contented-sounding noise and murmured to her, “Get ready. This may go poorly.”
“I’ll hold the boy a little longer,” the tall man said.
“I don’t have that option either,” the coachman said, and Alys stepped forward, drawing her blade as she did. She took two long strides, casual and loose, as if she were confident. She took the thin boy by the shoulder, lifted her sword, and put its tip against the notch of his collarbone. Everyone in the room went still and silent.
“What… are you doing?” the coachman said in a voice that was calm and gentle, given the situation. Alys made her answer to the tall man.
“Here’s a counter-offer,” she said, picking her inflection to match someone she’d heard before. She couldn’t recall quite who. “I kill this one. Everyone starts killing everyone else, and nobody gets paid for any of it.”