The preparations for Longest Night were apparent in the windows and doorways. Bits of ribbon hung from the mantels, and candleholders sat outside the shutters, waiting to be filled. There was a comfort in knowing that the days would be stretching out again, even if the coldest weeks were still between them and the thaw. But Alys found herself feeling tight around the throat and strangely ill at ease as she looked at the little signs of celebration. She didn’t put her thumb on why until she saw Grey Linnet walking ahead of her. The old woman wore a shawl of woven, bright yarn across her shoulders as if she were going to a celebration, but her face was sorrowful. She carried a bouquet of thistle.
Alys remembered what she had been trying to forget. She knew—of course she knew—that Longest Night was five days on from where she stood. And that five days before Longest Night was also Darro’s naming day. It would have been his twenty-second, and instead it was the first of his absence. Another moment of traditional mourning that Alys had tried to erase from her mind through a clench-jawed act of will.
And she had failed. Looking back at all she’d done in the past days, she thought the impulse to buy the club in her hands today of all days hadn’t been as random as she’d pretended.
She felt as if she were two people at once: one who had forgotten the course that mourning her dead brother would take, and another who had followed the pattern of ritual, seeking out a token of the dead man and walking now toward the place where her quarter would end their debts and their mourning.
Alys resolved not to make the turn that Linnet had. She was her own woman now. The customs of Longhill didn’t command her. She could walk back to her room—Darro’s room—if she saw fit. Or buy a place on the back of a cart and make her way back to Stonemarket and Ullin. Or Green Hill and Andomaka. Or even walk to the cheap little room by the baker’s that Sammish still used. Kithamar had ten thousand different things happening that day, and her brother’s nameday was only one. She didn’t have to choose it. At the intersection, she hesitated like her feet had stuttered.
She turned toward her mother’s house, her teeth clenched.
The first nameday celebration she’d been to after someone had died, she had been too young to understand. It had been for Coward Holt, the long-faced man who had lived across the street from them back then. A fever had taken him in the height of summer, filling his lungs with water, like the river stealing in and drowning him from afar. Alys hadn’t liked or disliked the man, but her mother had forced her and Darro both to go to the funeral. It had confused her then when, just after harvest, her mother had told her to plait her hair and put on her good skirt, that they were going to Coward Holt’s nameday. She’d done as she was told, thinking that maybe there had been some mistake and the old man hadn’t really been dead. Or that he had, and death wasn’t as irrevocable as she’d thought.
In the event, it had been the dead man’s son and widow welcoming people who’d known Coward Holt, giving them cheap beer and stale cake. Instead of nameday gifts, the guests brought what the dead man was owed: the leather punch that Coward Holt had loaned to Fat Stanni, a few bronze coins with Prince Ausai’s likeness going a little green for want of polishing in payment for the door Coward Holt had fixed for Ibdish, a wool coat to replace the blanket that Tamnis Couard had taken from him and lost. Alys’s mother had owed the old man nothing, but she took a handful of thistle bound in ribbon as a token and a jar of salted fish. Whatever you think you owe, give a little bit more, her mother had said. We’re Longhill and we’re Inlisc, and it’s how we take care of each other.
In her memory, Alys had been surprised to hear that they took care of each other at all, but that might not have happened. It had been years ago, and she had been a child.
Alys hadn’t seen her mother since the day she’d seen Darro dead and learned that the woman hadn’t been willing to pay the full rites. Her mother had moved since then, but only a few doors down, where she seemed to be sharing a thin-windowed, one-storied converted storeroom with two other women her age. Alys might have walked past it without knowing what it was, except for the symbol drawn in black over the doorway. She’d spent hours looking at that same symbol herself, where it was carved into the box of ashes and filled with wax. She was almost surprised that her mother had bothered to learn Darro’s deathmark.
She went in with a sense of resignation, like a prisoner who had failed to win the mercy of the judge. The group within was smaller than the one that had gathered at the news of Darro’s death, but the faces were all familiar. Damnis Oltson. Nimal. Sarae Stone, with a baby on her hip that must have belonged to her. Ibdish and his wife. Alys looked for Sammish and was surprised by her absence. Her mother’s reed-thin lover was also gone. He’d left her, or her mother had told him to go; it made no difference. Her mother was sitting on a high stool, her hands folded on her lap, leaning close to Aunt Daidan the better to hear her old friend’s thin, watery voice saying, It’s so hard losing them young, isn’t it, Linly? So very hard.
Her mother caught sight of her, and for a moment fear bloomed in the old woman’s eyes. Then maybe relief, and at the end a shyness like a girl at a taproom finding the courage to talk with a beautiful man. Her mother had lost weight in the last months, even with the fullness of the harvest. Her cheeks looked deflated and papery. She motioned Aunt Daidan aside and stood. Alys took two short steps and was at her side.
“Mother.”
“Alys. I wasn’t sure if you’d…” She trailed off, then tried a smile. “You’re looking well. You look…”
Like him, Ullin finished in Alys’s memory, and she stood a little straighter. “I’ve been busy.”
“Yes, of course. Of course you have. It’s so good to see you.”
Alys nodded, acknowledging the words more than responding to them. Her mother’s gaze cut away. They stood neither together nor apart for a moment. Alys felt a sudden overwhelming sorrow, as crushing as it had been in the first days after Darro’s death, and then a rage she could barely restrain. She kissed her mother’s cool cheek and walked to the wall, leaning against it with her arms crossed. Sarae broke the silence, turning to an older woman and praising the wooden rooms. Ibdish moved across to Alys’s mother and murmured something as he pressed a cloth wallet into her hands. The rituals and ceremonies of Longhill found their feet again after Alys had tripped them, and she watched with a storm in her chest that she could not name.
Damnis left. Pocked Chelle and Bastard Leah arrived. Linnet took Aunt Daidan’s place at her mother’s side, and started telling a long story about when Darro had been a boy out on the Silt with her, and the day he’d caught a fish with his bare hands and tried to use a stick to gut it. The story should have been funny, and Linnet told it with a warmth and affection that had the others laughing and weeping, but not Alys. More people came, and the heat of their bodies began to warm the room, but Alys still felt the cold against her back. Ibdish’s wife went to Alys’s mother, took her by the hand, and talked quietly about how hard it had been when her own son had died. He hadn’t gone to the river as Darro had, but slipped off the top of a building where he and his friends had been daring each other into more and more dangerous tricks. His neck snapped against the cobblestones, and he’d died before anyone could bring her word. The two mothers shared their grief, and Alys watched them like they were beetles with particularly eerie shells.