The baker had left her a cloth sack of stale rolls, and she set aside an extra coin to pay him. In other times, she might have carried them to taprooms and houses, tried to sell them on the cheap to people who didn’t want to brave the cold: the sick and the elderly and the sadly hungover. It was a small profit, but it was reliable. It wasn’t the work of that particular day.
Instead, she put the sun at her back and headed west as the winter city hauled itself to wakefulness around her. She had heard stories of the towns out in the countryside where nothing might happen at all in the long, dark snowbound months. Maybe the dark and cold meant a kind of weeks-long sleep elsewhere, but Kithamar was a city, and cities were restless.
By the time she reached the edge of Longhill, carts lumbered, and the horses that drew them sighed out great white plumes beside her. Children ran in packs, screaming and jumping and keeping the cold at bay through boundless energy and will. She passed a Hansch lightman pulling a handbarrow stacked with finger-thin wax candles wrapped in grey paper and a huge tin jug that stank of lantern oil. He didn’t notice her, because she didn’t want him to.
It was Longest Night, and so it was also the shortest day. There were families all through the city that would be celebrating their rites, depending on which gods and icons they worshipped. She passed doors with the evergreen pine sprig of Lord Kauth and the yellow smear of the Pajanic Rite. Some corners had old men, shirtless and blue with cold, declaiming the chant against the darkness that was supposed to turn the year back on its path toward summer. Sammish gave one of them a stale roll for free. She wondered whether, if the men of faith ever chose not to stand on their corners, the world would really slide into permanent night. She didn’t think it would.
It was midmorning already when she reached the river. The river was ice stretching south of her and forward into the northwest, flatter than a road. Far ahead by the piers, she saw the bright figures of Riverport skaters gliding over it. Sunlight glittered from the blades on their boots, and their embroidered jackets reminded her of the spring flowers that wouldn’t bloom for months. She walked carefully down the quayside to the ice, the cloth sack over her shoulder, even though there were no guardsmen on the bridges. There was no point collecting tolls, after all, when anyone could walk across the Khahon. Sammish kept on, placing each foot down squarely so she wouldn’t slip and trying not to think too much about the vast dark water that flowed invisibly beneath her. Across the ice, the thin, bare trees of the Silt reached up toward Oldgate or Palace Hill or the sky.
It was days since Sammish had even seen Alys. At a guess, she was gone off to Stonemarket again, to smoke and laugh with the other hired knives. Or maybe the pale woman had set Alys some other violent, risk-drunk errand. Either way, Sammish was almost pleased. Not because she wasn’t aching with jealousy for whatever had captured Alys’s attention, but because what she needed to do now, she needed to do alone.
And worse—or stranger, anyway—she felt herself changing. At night, she still dreamed of Alys. Alone in the darkness, she studied the marks for the brewer’s board, as she always did, and imagined that she would wake in a house of her own, and in the circle of Alys’s arms. But something about her dreams had shifted. It felt like the subtle greening of early spring bark, or the first yellow leaf on a summer tree. She saw that it meant something, but she couldn’t yet say what. There was joy in it, though. And fear. Whatever the change in her was, she walked with it to the Silt again, as she had every day for almost two weeks now.
Every quarter of Kithamar had its streetbound. Sammish had spent more than a few nights in niches or under the bridges herself, when she was younger. The few who made their camps on the Silt had chosen to live with danger. A river flood could wash away a sleeper before the warning came. A fire among the trees—which happened sometimes—would bring the bluecoats to the walls with pails of sand ready to tamp out embers that came down on the better quarters, but no one would bother trying to save the Silt. It was the wilderness within the city walls. The only ones who lived there were the wild, the desperate, and the mad.
And, perhaps, those who had reason to fear being elsewhere.
Sammish reached the shore where the shallow ice creaked under her, and when it broke, there was sand beneath it, not water. At the edge of the trees, she paused and looked back. The sun hung in the sky not far from the Temple. Plumes of smoke rose from a thousand hearths. If she closed her eyes and turned her face to it, the sun gave her some warmth, but not as much as winter air took away. She walked into the trees, and the city disappeared around her.
Another few steps, and the wild man was there.
It was, she told herself, like trying to make peace with a dog. Be friendly, be patient, be kind, and be ready to kick it in the jaw if it decided to try being her enemy. She’d made a habit of coming with her gifts. Sometimes no one met her and she left the bread for the first person to come or else the birds. Sometimes there were a few. The wild man was the one she saw most. He had hooded eyelids and dirty grey hair. His robe was filthy, but it was wool. He wore sandals as if the cold couldn’t touch him.
“Hello,” Sammish said.
“Yes, yes, yes. You’re looking for a woman,” the wild man said. “I know. You keep saying it.”
Sammish opened the sack and started laying the stale rolls out on the snow and dirt. “She isn’t from Kithamar. She might have been hurt.”
“Mm-hm.” The wild man’s eyes didn’t leave the rolls, and his tongue flickered on his lips.
“She’s been in the city since summer. Maybe longer.” She stepped back the way she would have from a dog, and the wild man moved toward the bread. His gaze flicked between her and her offering—hunger at war with distrust.
He grabbed up the first of the rolls and tilted his head. “What would she be here for?”
This was new. It was progress. Sammish pushed down the leap of hope before she started to trust in it. “She’s desperate for something, I think. She was looking for a knife. And maybe a boy. And she doesn’t want to be found.”
“You’re her enemy?”
“No,” Sammish said, and then, because she saw the glimmer of distrust in his eyes, “I don’t know. Maybe.”
The wild man squatted beside her offering, picked up a thick, gold-brown roll, and tapped the dirt from it. His look was challenging. “Why look, if she doesn’t want to be found?”
“Because I’m a little desperate too,” Sammish said. She was a little surprised at her own honesty. It was as if the wild man could see her in a way that most people she met couldn’t. As if he could command a deeper part of her than her own will allowed.
“For what?”
“A friend of mine is in trouble, and I don’t know what the trouble is, except that it involves this woman.”
“And the trouble your friend is in. What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Sammish said, hearing how thin she sounded. How lost.
“Maybe you should stay out of things that could eat you,” he said, and bit the roll. Something red ran down his cheek. Sammish started. He turned the bitten bread toward her, and it was the raw red of living meat.
Sammish cried out, but wordlessly. The voice that spoke wasn’t hers.