She was a stranger here, and so she could be anyone.
“So there I was,” she said, gesturing toward the fire as if it were the summer streets of Longhill, “running like hell, and this baby guardsman screaming behind me with his cloak billowing out like a sail because we’d cut his belt off him.”
Ullin was laughing so hard, tears were running down his cheeks. Two of the others from his barracks were with them: one tall and thin as a sapling tree, the other with a scar that pulled down his right eyelid when he smiled. She didn’t remember either of their names, though they’d said them earlier. They all sat together at the mouth of an alleyway, bundled in wool and leather. Their breath was white and thick as clouds, but she didn’t feel the cold. Ullin had brought a rough iron pan to hold a fire, and they had cooked strips of meat over the dull red coals before moving on to burn bundles of herbs whose fragrant, soft smoke left her feeling warm and expansive and pleasantly outside of herself.
“He must have shit himself!” the one with the scar said.
“Funny you should say that,” Alys said, “because let me tell you what happened next.”
Ullin leaned back against the frost-crazed stone of a building, his head in his hands, and only the edge of his grin showing past his wrists. She couldn’t tell if the hiccups of laughter were telling her to stop or go on. She went on.
It was what Ullin and his crew seemed to do in the long darkness: tell stories and drink. She liked it that the stories were almost evenly weighted between tales of victory and comic stories of their own humiliations. When Ullin laughed at her, it didn’t sting, because he laughed at himself too. As she reached the part of her story with the night pots of Longhill opening up like a yellow-brown raincloud over the guardsman, an old man hurried past on the street. He wore a foxfur overcoat and an embroidered hat that covered his ears. He scowled at the winter cold or at the four of them, or at both. When the tall one made a little bow, the man only hurried his steps. Alys saw Ullin weighing whether to go after him and relieve him of his wallet and furs, and then deciding it wasn’t worth the bother.
“Ah, Darro was a one, wasn’t he?” Ullin said instead. “I didn’t know him except through…” He gestured vaguely with one hand. When he’d said they didn’t talk about Andomaka and the work for her, he’d been very serious. More serious than Alys had seen him be about anything else. He also knew or guessed that what Alys wanted from him was her brother. He was right about that. Any story, any scrap of the life he’d lived and kept from her was worth more than the gold he’d left.
The one with the scar took a small brown bottle from his pocket and drank from it. He didn’t offer it around. Ullin took a deep breath, then blew it out. It looked as solid as a feather in the cold.
“I remember one time I was out with him,” Ullin said. “Would have been about a year ago. I’d just met him.”
That was interesting. Had Darro only been taking work from Andomaka for a year, then? She realized Ullin was waiting for her, that the pause had gone on a heartbeat too long. “Yeah?”
“We had done a thing, and after, we stopped at a taproom in Seepwater by the canals.”
“Won’t see me going to the fucking river,” the tall one said. “Water’s hungry. Stay in my place, me.”
“Well, my place is where I’m called,” Ullin said. “Anyway, there was this girl there, hair dark as pitch and straight as spooled thread. Don’t recall her name.”
“Nel?” Alys said.
Down the street, a small woman turned the corner, wrapped in grey rags and a hood, head lowered against the cold. Alys noticed her and ignored her in the same moment.
“Could have been. Don’t recall. But she was looking for a fight with whoever came in range of her. Now this place, the keep had a rule: You left your blades at the door. So we were there, Darro and me, not a knife between us, and this girl with her teeth out and her fists cocked. Darro said something about it too, and she came at him like he was her best enemy with his belly showing. Only he picked up his club. You know the one?”
“Hard oak,” Alys said. “One end dipped in lead.”
“Thought you said you left your arms at the door,” the one with the scar said.
Ullin lifted a finger like a university tutor making a fine point of public rhetoric. “Blades. I said we left our blades at the door. Weighted stick’s not a blade, which was Darro’s point. So this fine young woman sees how she’s just started something that won’t finish well for her, and her eyes—”
“Alys?”
The woman in her grey bundle of rags had stopped near them and, improbably, Sammish’s face appeared from under the hood. Her cheeks were dark with the cold, her upper lip shining with snot. Snowflakes clung to her eyelashes. Alys noticed that it was snowing. She tried to stand, but it was more difficult than she’d expected. She wondered how many bundles of herbs they’d burned and whether she’d been sitting downwind without noticing.
“You know this one?” Ullin asked at the same time that Sammish said, “Are you all right?” Alys took a moment to untangle the two questions in her mind, then turned to Ullin.
“I’ll be right back.” She stepped forward and took Sammish’s arm. She’d meant to pull the girl away, but found herself leaning against her instead. “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” Sammish said. “What are you doing here? No one’s seen you in days.”
“I’m… working,” Alys said, but it wasn’t quite the right word.
Sammish glanced around, alarmed. “You’re doing something for them now?”
“Not that kind of working,” she said.
“I was worried. I thought something bad happened to you.”
Behind them, Ullin said something. The tall one laughed his long, braying laugh. Alys had missed the joke, and she saw Sammish seeing her impatience. Alys smoothed her expression like she was playing at tiles. “Nothing bad. Just learning more. About Darro. What he was working.” Her heel landed on a slick bit of ice, and she stumbled. The road seemed to shift and roll like the river after a storm. She shook her head to clear it. Sammish started to say something, but Alys, annoyed, cut her off. “How did you find me?”
“Tamnis has a cousin working in Green Hill. He said he’d seen someone that might have been you by the fountain a few days ago. And I didn’t have any place else to try.”
“How long have you been looking for me?” Alys asked.
Sammish shrugged and repeated herself. “I didn’t have any place else to try.”
A rough clanging made Alys turn. Ullin was upending his iron pan, scattering the coals in the gathering midnight slush. Embers rose in the air like bright insects and then went dark. It wasn’t something that would ever have happened among the wooden structures of Longhill, and it made the stone walls around them seem magical. Things that were impossible in the world she knew became possible here. The tall one fumbled with his belt, hauled out his cock, and started pissing out the few coals that still glowed. Ullin met Alys’s gaze, raised a hand in farewell, and turned away. The night, it seemed, was over. She considered the two who were still there. They didn’t take jobs from Andomaka and they hadn’t known Darro. They didn’t mean anything to her. A breath of wind set the falling snow swirling.