The corner of Riverside nearest the docks meant good money, but low blood. The people there were healthy and washed, but their clothes had a tradesman’s cut, and there were no silks or fine linens. Orrel’s attention skipped to the best marks—a boy with a basket of food he kept putting down, a girl with a belt that hung slack enough that a deft hand could lift out her wallet, an old man sleeping in the shade with his mouth open. But they weren’t the job. First, he saw that there weren’t any bluecloaks nearer than the bridge, and those just a pair of men collecting tolls for the prince. Once that was clear, there was only finding the woman.
It wasn’t hard, since he knew to look. She had a hard face with crow’s-feet at the eyes and a mole as black as tar on her cheek. Her braid was as thick as his arm, wiry hair that was black where the first frost of age hadn’t touched it. Her clothes were well made, but subtly wrong. She held her body for a different outfit, even if Orrel couldn’t guess what it was. She was in costume as much as he was. As much as Darro. They were players in a little drama put on for an unsuspecting crowd. Orrel made his way back through the streets quickly, trying to reach Darro before any patrol bumbled into the square and took the whole thing down.
When Darro met his eyes, Orrel nodded. Darro didn’t smile, just shrugged off the brown cloak from above the blue, put his hand on the grip of his club, and strode into the square like a man who owned the place, the way the guardsmen did. The costume wasn’t bad. The only thing that spoiled it was the dark stripe of sweat down the back. The badge of office glittering at his hip more than made up for that. Orrel followed a few paces behind, his heart tapping at his chest. The promise of violence was sharper than wine. More intoxicating.
The woman didn’t recognize Darro as he walked across the square. Her gaze didn’t shift to him until he was almost on her. He spoke then in a loud, booming voice, “You there! Put your knife down! I said down.”
She didn’t have a weapon drawn, but Orrel knew the pull. If Darro said it for enough people to hear, they would remember a blade into her hand. Darro raised his club and brought it down hard. The sound was like a butcher’s meat hammer. The woman spilled out across the filthy stones of the street.
Orrel thought she would cry out, or scream and try to run. Darro shifted his club in his hand and struck her twice more in the ribs and once, aiming for the killing blow to her head, on the shoulder. The girl with the loose belt squeaked and danced away. The boy with the basket turned, confused by the shouting.
Orrel saw something in Darro’s eyes. A horror, perhaps, at what he was doing. A fear that it was taking too long to finish his prey. Maybe sorrow that he had come to this as his best choice. Darro swung his club up with both hands, aiming at the back of the woman’s head, and the dark woman lifted herself toward him. She had the grace of a dancer, an economy of movement that made everything she did seem like she was only being carried along by a soft breeze.
She ducked inside Darro’s swing and punched him once in the chest as she did it. Only afterward, Orrel saw that she did have a knife in her hand after all. And it hadn’t been a punch. She walked briskly away, the speed of running without the effort of it.
“You! Stop!” Darro shouted, and went after her. She didn’t look back, but made her way along the riverbank, swimming between the men and women and children at their business like a fish through river weeds. Darro ran after her, and Orrel followed. Because he was behind, he didn’t see the blood on Darro’s chest until the older boy stopped and sat on a low stone wall that overlooked the water. The woman was almost lost in the crowd.
“She pinked me,” Darro said, but his cloak was soaking red. He lost his grip on the wooden club, and it fell into the water. He didn’t try to catch it back. “I just… I have to catch my breath.”
When he slumped to the side, Orrel tried to catch him, but Darro was already dead weight.
Was already dead.
Someone shouted, and Orrel stood. His hands were covered in Darro’s blood. The two bluecloaks from the bridge, too far off to know what had happened, were looking toward the river wall. With a clarity that mimicked calm, Orrel realized how much trouble he was about to be in.
“Get a healer!” he shouted. “This poor man’s been hurt!”
A crowd was starting to form, and getting out under its cover before the guard found him was his best chance. He grabbed a girl who came near, pressing her toward the corpse with a terse Do what you can for him, and then began weaving his way south, touching as many sleeves and backs as he could. A single bloody man stood out, so better that there be twenty people with stains on their clothes.
As he slipped from the edge of the crowd, a man shouted and a woman shrieked. A splash came as Darro’s body fell into the Khahon. Orrel paused for a moment to look: dead skin pale against the tea-dark water, blue cloak billowing as the ripples from the bridge folded Darro into themselves and pulled him down. A sorrow found its way through the fear: maybe for Darro, maybe for the gold he’d promised that would never come.
When he looked back up, the woman was watching him.
She was at the corner of a stall where a boy was selling wheatcakes and honey, her braid pulled over her shoulder like a huge snake. She gasped for air like a fish hauled up from the water, and her face was striped with blood. Darro’s or her own, he couldn’t say. It might have been only the distance and his fear, but the whites of her eyes seemed black.
Her lips moved, and he swore he could hear her whispered words cutting through the roar of the crowd and the rush of the river as if her lips were against his ear. Weird, oily syllables that made his head spin. She turned and walked away, vanishing like a flame when the candle’s snuffed.
Orrel took another half dozen steps, his legs unsteady, and vomited on the street.
“That’s why you came here?” Sammish asked. “Because you got sick?”
“I came because I have a cousin who tends their medicine garden,” Orrel said with a thin laugh. “I thought it was just… I thought it would pass. And no one’s looking for you in a plague house. It wasn’t you and Alys I was dodging. It was her. Darro’s fucking witch. Only I kept puking. It didn’t stop.”
He lapsed into silence. Sammish moved her stool a few inches closer and took his hand. Her fingers felt cool in his, which probably meant the fever was coming back.
“When they found him,” Orrel said, “did he have the badge still?”
“No,” Sammish said. “The river took it or the guards did.”
“Good. That thing was bad luck from the start. If I could live it over, I’d have stayed in bed that whole day, and never mind Byrn a Sal and his coronation parties.”
“Yeah,” Sammish said. And then she laughed. “It was a good pull, though. I mean, a guardsman’s badge right off of him? Who’d even try that? We did it, though. The three of us. Not even a fish to help.”
Orrel let himself smile and remember being that boy in the sunlight, more drunk on his own daring than on wine. It seemed like a memory from someone else’s life. He sobbed, and Sammish squeezed his hand. She was crying with him.
“She cursed me,” Orrel said. “We tried to kill her and she cursed me.”
“You’re living in a sick house,” Sammish said. “Someone passed their illness to you. It happens all the time. You’ll get better.”