Alys was born to Longhill. She’d lived in its streets her whole life, almost, only leaving for beer or to work pulls. It was only since Darro’s death that she’d slept her nights in Oldgate and Stonemarket, visited Green Hill. Not half a year had passed, and yet it was enough that she looked at this last celebration of Darro’s life and felt herself out of place. She’d always known that the other quarters of Kithamar looked at Longhill with contempt, but she never had until now. Nor could she put a name to what had changed, except that every time Grey Linnet laughed or said some empty platitude about the brightness and dark of life, Alys felt embarrassed for her.
She stayed there as long as she could stand it, then, between one heartbeat and the next, the warmth of the bodies and the air just spat out from other people’s lungs made the room feel like she was buried alive. She lurched for the door, and then out, stopping on the street and turning her face to the white winter sky. The cold bit her, and she welcomed it. She gripped her new club in her hand like she was drowning and it was the last rope. An emptiness she had let herself forget opened in her.
Once, when she was very young, she’d known a girl who had been cut by a fish knife. She had seemed on her way to healing, but then the scab split open, and the pus and blood were worse than the fresh wound had been. She felt like that now. She’d thought she was happy. She’d thought she was doing better. Now, every bright feeling she’d had—every triumph, every laugh, every good night—seemed like a cheap song bellowed out to cover the weeping. A small voice in her mind calmly said This is only a hard moment. Ever since it happened, there have been hard moments. This one will pass too. But she didn’t believe it.
She didn’t notice that her mother had followed her until the old woman put a hand on her elbow. Alys wiped away the tears freezing on her cheeks like they’d betrayed her. She expected to see pity in her mother’s eyes, or need, or something. The uncertainty and fear that had marked her inside were gone now. Alys could almost imagine this was a wholly different woman.
“What?” Alys asked.
She thought her mother wouldn’t answer, that the two of them might stand in the cold Longhill street until night fell. When she did speak, she sounded the way exhaustion itself might have, if it had its own voice. “I’ve lost two of my children. I can’t stand it again.”
“I’m fine.”
“So was he, until he wasn’t. If you’re walking in his footsteps, you’ll end where he ended. Be careful with yourself.”
Alys scowled and stepped back. Her mother didn’t try to hold her. Instead, she seemed to grow smaller and greyer, her face losing what little expression it had, before she turned to her rooms and trundled back under Darro’s deathmark, closing the door behind her. Alys closed a fist around her club, squeezing until her knuckles ached. She didn’t know what she wanted to hit. She turned out into the bright, ice-bound streets, and as she walked, she raged.
The focus of her anger shifted. Between one intersection and the next, she imagined herself shouting down her mother for treating Darro’s death as another way to get a few cheap coins to spend on drink, never mind whether it was tradition or no. Then for half a block, it was Sammish, who could have been there, could have warned her, could have stood by her instead of being off wherever she was doing whatever she did. Then Grey Linnet for acting like she had a right to grief. Ullin for living on the ass end of the city where Alys had to walk half a day to see him, like all the gods kept him west of the Smoke unless Andomaka was paying him to go. And all of them at once, down to the last breathing soul, for treating Darro like he was dead. She muttered to herself and swung her club. Dammis Ragman passed her going the other direction, and gave her a wide berth.
Nothing she felt was justified, all of it skirted the edge of madness, and she knew it. But knowing didn’t dam the flood.
She reached the corner where her room waited and hauled herself up the thin, dark stairwell, taking the steps three at a time. When she undid her lock and pushed her door open, she was almost warm.
The shutters were closed, but a ray of milky light came through the crack where the hinges were. Dust motes floated in it like snow that wouldn’t fall. She sat at the table, shaking. In the niche across the room, Darro’s ashes stood. There was dust on the box, and the deathmark was little more than a few lighter bands of shadow. A vast guilt washed over her for leaving him alone so often and so long. She embraced the pain. That Darro was past caring whether she was there or not was sharper than her self-reproach.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Nothing replied.
The winter hours were short. The sun would drop behind Palace Hill soon, and the long, frigid night would come. There was no trekking back to Stonemarket, and the prospect of an evening shoulder to shoulder in some Seepwater taproom made her flesh crawl. Staying here in the dark with Darro conjured back those first days after he went: her cell in Oldgate, and the numbness she longed to have back again and also feared.
She didn’t open the shutters, finding the safe cache by touch alone. The coins were still there, though there were fewer. She had to be more careful how she spent them. They had to last. She lit the candle, and the little room filled with a warmer light that turned her breath the color of honey. The flame shifted as it always did, and the smoke from it gathered. Alys felt herself reaching for it, willing it to take a solid form. Even the scarred, caustic Tregarro would be better than sitting alone.
But the smoke thickened and wove, and Andomaka was sitting across from her. The woman’s pale hair was tied back and wet, as if she’d just risen from a bath. Alys wondered whether the noble houses of Green Hill had their own private bathhouses. She had to think they did. Andomaka’s robe was formal, though, and her expression vague. Maybe drunk.
“Did I call for you?” the pale woman asked, and didn’t seem to know the answer.
“No. I’ve been away. I thought there might… I thought you might have wanted to talk with me and I wasn’t here. So…”
“Oh,” Andomaka said. “No.”
“If there were something. Is there anything?”
“Are you out of coin, little wolf? Because—”
“I’m not. I have money. I need something to do. I need work.”
“Work?”
“I need anything,” she said.
The city changed for Sammish when her questions did.
When she had haunted the ports and gates, the marketplaces and taprooms to ask about the mysterious foreign woman who’d pay gold for a silver knife, the question that drove her had been Where am I most likely to find someone who knows something? and she’d been asking it with Alys in her mind like wine fumes. Now, she asked Where would you go if the man who tried to kill you had been wearing a blue cloak and a guardsman’s badge? and she asked it for herself.
It led her to very different places.
Dawn came late and bitterly cold. The crook-tailed cat that haunted the end of the street had decided that Sammish was sleeping in his bed, and she didn’t mind the company. She rose carefully, so as not to disturb him too much, dressed herself against the winter’s chill, and went out into Kithamar. The long, frigid hours of the winter night held sway over the streets even after the light came. Frost glazed the cobblestones, and icicles as thick as Sammish’s wrist hung from the eaves where no one had knocked them down yet. The baker’s oven was warm, though, and the smell of raisin tarts still hung in the air.