“The fuck is this?” the tall man said, and the coachman shook his head.
“This is what my mother does when the children are squabbling,” Alys said. “We came here in good faith, and now the both of you are barking at each other like two pit bitches with one bone. So here’s your option. I kill him now and we all have a bad night, or else we leave with the boy. We do it now. And you get paid the usual way.”
Whatever the usual way might be, Alys thought. The gods knew what those details were.
The tall man didn’t speak, but his toughs didn’t rush her either. Alys turned the boy to face the slaver, her sword never leaving his neck. His body pressed against her own felt weirdly intimate. His skin was warm. She put her blade across his throat and took a step backward, drawing him along.
The late one and the laborer shifted, falling in behind her as if this had always been the plan. A breath later, the coachman started back as well, his eyes on the tall man. The coachman was whispering a sewer’s worth of obscenities, his gaze darting around the room. He didn’t tell her to stop, though.
“You’ll be paid,” he said as he moved back. “We will keep our word to you.”
“Fucking better had,” the tall man said. His face was dark with rage. It made the ink on his cheek look angrier somehow. The laborer and the late one went slowly and carefully, clearing the way. The coachman walked backward, his face toward the enemy, and slowly pulled out a thick iron club as long as his forearm with a spiked hammer at the end from his cloak.
“It’s going to be all right,” Alys said in the boy’s ear. So close to him, she could smell the muskiness of his skin and the oil of his body. The stubble on his scalp tickled her neck where it touched her. What he made of all this, she couldn’t imagine.
“Door,” the late one said.
“Head east,” the coachman said.
The laborer’s voice was a wheeze. “They’ll come after us.”
“They won’t,” Alys said because it fit the role she’d given herself. She didn’t know if it was the truth.
The open air hit like a slap after the heat of the slave house. The wind was ice and malice. She felt the boy start to shiver against her almost as soon as they reached the street. Alys turned east, walking fast to leave the slavemaster and his blades behind, but also to get the boy wherever they were going. The night was fully dark. The stars spilled across the sky, brighter than the windows of Kithamar. Voices came behind them, but not, as far as she could make out, into the streets. With every step she took, the enemy receded.
“Put your sword away,” the coachman said. “Unless you actually mean to kill the poor fuck.”
Alys took her blade from the boy’s neck and sheathed it as they walked. She felt the boy look back at her, but he was only a shadow among shadows. If he was smiling or afraid or still blank as a stone wall, she had no way to know. She didn’t even see the carriage until she’d almost walked into it. It was under the eaves of a weaver’s workshop, and if it had colors to it, she couldn’t make them out. She was almost surprised when the one she thought of as the coachman actually hauled himself up to take the reins. She’d guessed him right.
The thick-faced laborer opened the carriage door, took the boy by the elbow, and lifted him up into the deeper darkness within it. He turned back, peering down the way they had come.
“No one and nothing,” he said. “I think we got away with that.”
“I’m not staying to find out,” the coachman said, lighting his lantern. There were two horses in the team. They were huge black animals with blinders on. The coachman leaned over and pointed a long finger at Alys. “And if I see you again, I will gut you like a fucking trout. Do you understand me?”
“Then you should pay me before you leave,” Alys said. “That was the deal, wasn’t it?”
The late one laughed. “She might threaten to kill someone if you don’t. She’s wild that way.”
“Fuck you too,” the coachman said, but he took a pouch from his pocket and threw it on the ground beside them. Alys had to jump out of the way as the horses stepped out to the road and moved off into the night. Their hooves clattered against the stone, growing slowly quieter. It took her a moment to find the pouch. When she did, it jingled.
“Come on,” the late man said, taking her by the hand.
“I don’t think so,” she said, pulling back, but the late man held his grip.
“My share’s in there with yours, but we should get away from here before we start counting anything out. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t cross you. I’ve seen what that looks like.” As much as anything, the merriment in his voice convinced her to follow him. The merriment and the fact that he’d known her brother’s name.
The Temple was to her left now, and whatever glimmer of light had been in it was gone. To the east, the moon, almost at its half, began to rise. Kithamar at night was a different city, and in the cold of winter doubly so. The bustle and traffic of the day was gone, and the small sounds seemed louder. Rats scurried. Houses ticked as they cooled. The wind hissed across stones and over rooftops, a susurration that despite its randomness verged on music. Even when the moonlight was enough to cast little shadows and they didn’t need touch to keep track of each other, the late one didn’t let go of her hand. She didn’t fight him. He seemed to have some destination in mind, and Alys felt warm and soft inside. It was like she’d finished a bottle of wine all by herself but without the muzziness. She was drunk on something better.
“I’m Alys,” she said as they turned right toward the distant river.
“We’re not supposed to share names,” the late man said. “Mine’s Ullin.”
“Ullin. Good to know you.”
“I’m best on first acquaintance. I don’t age well. That, by the way, was the most awe-inspiring piece of not caring whether anyone around you lived or died that I have ever seen.”
“It worked.”
“Only makes it more astounding. They will tell stories of it forever, or they would anyway if we talked about any of this. Which we don’t.”
They walked in silence for another street. He let her hand go, and she found she was a bit sorry for the loss. He’d been warm.
“Who was the boy?” she asked. “Why is he important?”
“I don’t know. We needed the knife to know we had the right boy, and we didn’t have the knife. Then we got the knife, and so they sent for the boy, wherever he was being kept, and we came to see that he was the right one and gather him up. I don’t ask where he came from or where he’s going next.”
“Just someone Andomaka wanted, then,” Alys said.
“Is that her name?” Ullin said. “She must like you. She’s never told it to me.”
You seem all right,” Sammish said, but her gaze was fixed somewhere off to his left when she said it.
“No,” Orrel said. “I don’t.”
He’d never been a large man. His body ran toward lean. People said his father had been the same before age caught up with him and thickened his gut. Orrel had never seen himself in the man who he’d called Papi. He looked even less like him now. Where he had been lean before, he was skeletal now, and his skin had taken on a greyish undertone except where the sores made an obscene pinkness. His hair hadn’t fallen out, though the leech men said it might. The room had a small mirror made of beaten tin by the washstand, but he didn’t look at himself in it.