Alys didn’t know if the tightness in her throat was anger or fear.
For the pull to work, all three had to reach the mark in the same moment. If Alys didn’t start walking now, she’d have to rush at the end. It would call attention to her. If she refused, Orrel might turn aside, or he might not. If he trusted her to be where she was supposed to be and do what she was supposed to do, and she failed him, he’d be caught.
If he were caught, he’d be killed. The guard might take him to the magistrate first, or it might end here. He was forcing her to choose between letting him die or doing what he said.
She stepped forward. The guard paused at a little stand where a boy was selling honey cakes at two for a bronze coin. Orrel shifted his trajectory through the crowd, and Alys matched him. Sammish, her eyes wide and her lips thin, knelt in a doorway and pretended to dig a pebble out of her boot. Alys tried to take comfort that she wasn’t the only one who thought this was a mistake.
Close up, the guard seemed young. His beard was thin fuzz, and his skin had the oily look of an adolescence not quite outgrown. Orrel strode casually toward the man’s back. Alys had three steps before she reached him. Two. With another man, she might have brushed a hand against his crotch. A gentle squeeze of his sex to confuse and capture his attention. Instead, she yipped and stumbled forward like she’d tripped on her own toe. The guard almost didn’t react quickly enough to catch her, and she had to really take his arm to keep herself from falling. She felt Orrel’s tap only because she knew to expect it. For all his faults, Orrel’s fingers were light.
“Sorry,” she said to the guardsman as they stood back up together. “I’m sorry.”
“Be more careful,” he said, and Orrel was already past. Sammish’s grey-brown back disappeared down the street. Alys nodded and made some stupid attempt at a curtsey the way she thought a guard-smitten girl might before she turned and walked away. She hoped the warmth in her cheeks would seem like a blush. The guard snickered as she went. She put her head down and headed east, into the crowd.
The thing to avoid was looking back.
She looked back.
The guardsman was still standing by the boy with the honey cakes, but his haughtiness had vanished. His tunic hung loose under the cloak because the belt that had held it was gone. His eyes were wide with alarm, his arms out from his sides as if amazed by some miracle. His lips quivered, and his chest worked like a bellows as he gasped.
Suddenly vulnerable, he reminded Alys of a child discovering that a beloved toy was broken. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d sobbed. She felt neither triumph nor regret, but he held her attention. If she’d seen him bathing, he wouldn’t have been as naked as he was at that moment. She would have understood him less.
He turned half around as if his belt might be behind him and teasing him like a puppy. He lifted his anguished gaze to the crowd.
When his eyes found hers, she knew she’d made a mistake. His jaw slid forward, and his lips pulled back. By habit, he reached for the whistle at his belt. She turned, walking away more quickly, telling herself he might doubt himself. Then, fast-hearted, she broke into a trot.
“Grab her! In the name of the prince, someone stop that bitch!”
All around her, people shifted in alarm and uncertainty. It would be seconds before they understood who he meant. The shape of her life rested on the edge of the moment.
The slap of boots against paving stones came from behind her. She muttered Fuck, scooped up her skirt, and with the guard close at her back, sprinted for Longhill.
Of the twelve districts of Kithamar, Longhill was the oldest. And the newest.
An Inlisc camp had been on that same ground when the Inlisc had been nomads and herders. The camp called Longhill had been built of wood then, and it was now.
The long-vanished buildings had been placed to shelter each other from the vicious winds of spring, and that same logic held as the camp became a village and the village became a war post: narrow, undulating streets that broke the fury of the weather kept the air calm even when storms raged overhead.
After the conquering Hansch crossed the river, burning the Inlisc homes to the ground and founding the city called Kithamar, Longhill was rebuilt from the same kinds of trees and in the same style. All that changed was its meaning.
As the long centuries passed, Longhill slept, but its sleep wasn’t easy. It could never forget that it had once been free and unbound, and that it wasn’t anymore. And it changed. Buildings decayed and rotted and were replaced, and the district grew into something both the same and new.
The little red temple to the old Inlisc gods, infested with dry rot and centipedes, was set afire and a road made over the ash pit. The wide square where Inlisc grandmothers had bought and sold worked leather and hand-woven cloth calcified as market stalls added roofs and posts and walls. Eventually, there wasn’t even a free street to pass through.
The quarter remade itself. Street maps drawn just a generation before were worse than useless. There were stories that old Inlisc priests still held the ancient rites somewhere deep in the shadows and narrow streets, but no one seemed quite sure what those rites were. Round Inlisc faces and curled Inlisc hair were normal here. The food that old men sold door-to-door from greasy sacks used more hot peppers and pickled fish than they ate near the Temple or in Stonemarket. The hard, percussive accent of the people who lived in Longhill was a remnant of the language that they had once shared and now shared in forgetting. A city within the city, Longhill clung to its pride like a man with only one good shirt.
At its western edge, Alys’s brother Darro sat on the third floor of a building that had been cut into shelter for fifty people or more. The shuttered room had a pair of benches, a waxed cloth with clean-picked chicken bones from his breakfast, and a blackwood table. The pale woman sat across from him. Her voice was usually half-dream, but today she was agitated. Shaken, even. He’d never seen her care about anything, and it was eerie.
“We have to get the knife. That’s what I need from you. It will be fine, if we can get the knife back.” She was trying to convince herself.
Everyone wanted that knife, it seemed. Magic and politics and the gods alone knew what else was involved, but what mattered to Darro was the money. And the sense, deep in his bones, that if he played this right, he’d be able to buy himself any life he chose. He tried to act like he was only what she thought he was.
“I have someplace to look. If it can be had for you, I’ll have it,” Darro said, and the woman nodded, trying to believe him. A finch tapped at the shutters, its yellow feathers nothing more than a bright shadow, and sped away. “I have your back.”
She managed a smile.
“You do, don’t you, little wolf,” she said as she took a worn leather wallet from her belt and slid it across the table. Darro opened it with an affected calm. Ten pieces of untarnished silver glimmered as he counted them out. It was enough to let him pay Kennat Water for the use of the room and keep himself fed besides through the first frost if he was careful with it. “When can you have it?”
“Soon,” Darro said, which was true. “Days, not weeks.”
“Someone else is looking for it. Not a friend.”
Darro tried to look as if he didn’t already know that. “Someone else?”