“It started when she spoke. You don’t know what it was like. I haven’t been right since then.”
“You will be,” Sammish said, but she said it with pity. She saw him as clearly as he saw himself.
He could dream of taking a boat south when the spring came or riding with a team of towing oxen, but it wouldn’t happen. Before thaw came, he’d be in the ground or in the river. Whatever else he’d imagined or expected for his life—half-noticed ambitions for love or sex or comfortable old age—this was what he’d have instead: a few more days or weeks in a cold stucco room with floors that stank of lye and vinegar and the herbs the benefacts burned to cover the stink of corruption. Soon, he wouldn’t even have the will left to be horrified at the thought. He let Sammish’s fingers go. He felt too weak to hold them.
“Did…” Sammish began, then let it trail away. She squared her shoulders and tried again. “Did he say why she wanted the knife so badly? Or what it was that made it special?”
“I don’t remember.”
“It’s important,” she said. Then, “You didn’t pay me for that pull. You owe me. Just try to remember.”
Orrel opened his eyes. He didn’t remember closing them. “Something about a rite? It was supposed to be some sort of religious thing like they do in Bronze Coast. Ancestor worship.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“No,” he said, and let his eyes close. They felt very comfortable closed. He heard Sammish’s stool clatter against the stone floor. Her footsteps hushed toward the door of his cell.
“I tried to find you,” he said, or else dreamed that he was saying. “You and Alys both.”
In her rooms at the Daris Brotherhood, Andomaka neither woke nor slept. Her mind did something else entirely, feeling the world as if it were a part of her body. The same act of will that lifted her finger and arched her foot might squeeze snow from the clouds or shift deep-buried stone. It was a beautiful way of being, and she had practiced it since she was a girl. Her uncle the prince had taught her. Prince Ausai a Sal, who had dreamed once as she did now. He had shown her that Andomaka was an illusion. What they called her self was a series of impulses as wild as a rainstorm, and as transitory. She had practiced letting go, just as all those of royal blood did when they were inducted into the Daris Brotherhood.
Her cousin Byrn a Sal had not, because his father, Tallis—brother to both Prince Ausai and her own long-dead mother—had turned away from the rites. Ausai had told her that it would make no difference. The unprepared vessel of Byrn a Sal would carry what it had to carry just as well. The only price was that the invocation would be more uncomfortable for Byrn, more frightening, less beautiful. The thread of Kithamar, Ausai had promised her, would be unbroken. But that was before Prince Ausai’s final illness, before the discovery of the blade’s disappearance, before the rite had failed and Byrn a Sal ascended to the prince’s house unhallowed. Unsanctified. Wrong.
The thread of Kithamar was broken. It was hers to repair it.
She felt him there, in the room with her. Ausai, and more than Ausai. The spirit that had dwelled within him and within his city. She felt its fear and its rage. She felt its distance. It was like hearing the desperate pounding from the wrong side of the ice. She reached out her focus, pulling her will past her skin and into the dry water in which the whole world swam. I am here she thought to the spirit of Kithamar. I am faithful. I will find you. And perhaps the rage lessened.
She opened her eyes, and Tregarro was there. For a moment, she was too broad and diffuse for her own body, and she couldn’t keep from drifting into his. His banked lust and the complex knot of self-hatred and pride at his core were unpleasant, and she pulled back quickly.
He held out a goblet of hot mulled wine, and she accepted it.
“Well?” he asked.
“No. Not yet.”
His impatience was palpable even when she was wholly back within her own flesh. “We have the boy and the blade. We could perform the ceremony tonight. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s not like we’re keeping the bastard once it’s over.”
“Not now. There’s a reason we do this after the funeral and before the coronation when everything is thinnest,” she said, and didn’t add And what if we do it all correctly and it still fails? The memory of Ausai’s last days—his desperate struggle to recover or remake the lost blade, his death, and the failure of the rite—haunted her to the degree that she could be haunted. Her dread was another illusion, and she was aware of its impotence. “Longest Night, maybe. Or first thaw. Thaw might be better.”
“The first thaw is too far,” Tregarro said. “Longest Night. It has to be.”
She rose from her couch. The candles around her, thick and dark and smoking with perfumes, were low and guttering. Her room went darker as the small fires failed.
“Are you advising me of that?” she asked. “Or was it an order?”
“I don’t order you.”
She tightened the sash at her waist. The wine was thick and rich, and her belly warmed with it. A shudder passed through her, as it sometimes did in these moments.
“Longest Night, then,” she said.
Ullin slept in Stonemarket, west of the river. He shared a common barracks with twelve other men his age. They paid a bronze a day to keep claim to a sleeping shelf, a box the size of two balled fists for their things, and the protection of the landlord. Alys didn’t want to take him back to the room that had been Darro’s before it became hers, and there was more than one reason for that. First was that it was Darro’s and it was hers and she didn’t want too many other people in that communion. Also, it felt like bragging to have a place all to herself when Ullin was breathing in the dreams of a dozen strangers.
And though it never quite rose to the surface of her mind, there was a flavor to Ullin’s friendship that could have turned to sex if the opportunity had presented itself. While she found herself hungry for his company, what she needed from him wasn’t that. Rubbing up against him would have ruined it. So instead, the Longhill knife made her long way through Seepwater and the Smoke to Stonemarket.
It was the farthest quarter of Kithamar from the ones she knew. Even if she paid to ride in the back of someone’s cart, it could take more than half of the winter’s short day to pass through the canals of Seepwater, over the river’s southernmost bridge, through the filthy soot-blackened canals and streets of the Smoke, and into its squares and lanes. Travelling back at night would have been walking in the dark through the bitter cold. Instead, she rented a bed from a merchant family that would eat through half of another of Darro’s gold coins before springtime came. When Ullin or one of his friends asked, she pretended to be staying with a cousin who apprenticed with a coppersmith. No one questioned her story. The only qualm she felt came from leaving the box of Darro’s ashes by itself. She hated imagining Darro lonesome.
The cold and dark of winter slowed Kithamar’s blood, but Stonemarket was a revelation for her. She had passed through it before, run pulls by its grand fountain and sold stolen cloth at its marketplace, but she had not lived there. A thousand small things made it different from Longhill and the city she knew. She felt like she’d been transported to some foreign country. The buildings here sounded different. The bread they baked here rose from soda, not yeast. Even the landmarks she knew meant something else here. She’d gotten badly lost twice before she realized that Palace Hill was to the east here, and her whole life it had been a synonym for sunset. She caught glimpses of round Inlisc faces like her own, but they were few. All humanity seemed Hansch in Stonemarket.