“Stop.”
The wild man scowled. The bread was only bread. The blood, if it had been blood, was gone, and perhaps it had never been. “We talked about this. If she can be scared away, she should be.”
“It’s cruel,” the woman said from behind Sammish. “We can kill her if we must, but I’ve had too much of cruelty. What do you want from me, child?”
Sammish turned. The woman stood beside a thin, black-barked tree, and her robes were the color of bone and snow. Her hair was dark, and her skin was brown and dry, and she had a single dark mole. She held a blade in her right hand casually, like a butcher who’d paused in her unmakings to talk for a moment, and her eyes were dark and weary. Sammish thought of pale Andomaka. This woman could have been her shadow. Sammish tried to speak, but nothing came out. After all her searching, she’d given up hope of ever really winning through. Now that she had, the woman seemed too solid and real to hold all the dreams and fears about her.
“You have a friend?” the dark woman said, prompting her. Her accent was thick, but it didn’t hide the words. “I’m supposed to do something for her?”
“No,” Sammish said, and it was hardly a whisper. She coughed, cleared her throat, and tried to stand taller than her fear wanted her to. “But I want to know what she’s folded herself into. And you know.”
“I do?”
“The woman she’s taken work for says that they’re protecting Kithamar, but I don’t believe her. Andomaka, that’s the woman. Not my friend.”
“And what’s your friend’s name?”
“I’m not going to tell you that,” Sammish said.
The dark woman tilted her head a degree, like she was solving a puzzle in her head. “Come with me,” she said.
“No no no,” the wild man said. “This isn’t happening.”
“Goro,” the dark woman said. The wild man sighed and gathered up the rest of the rolls.
“This is a mistake,” he said, and led the way deeper into the trees.
The Silt was smaller than any other quarter. Oldgate towered above it to the north. It was impossible to truly lose her way here, but there was a sense of displacement as they walked, as if the wilderness went on longer than the thin land it grew upon. It seemed however long they walked, the bridges glimpsed between trees didn’t change their angles, that Oldgate showed the same stony profile. It was an illusion of her anxiety and the unfamiliar path they walked. Not more than that. Probably.
The shed they reached was white wood, dry and a little rotten. It was only barely larger than Sammish’s room in the baker’s house. Letters and glyphs were carved into the old wood and colored with wax rubbed into the grooves—red and yellow and a weird, vibrant blue. When they stepped into it, the interior was warm and comfortable. A little table, two beds with fresh straw, an iron stove no larger than a dog’s chest with a fire already burning in it. Sammish remembered the fortune-teller’s rooms. This place felt like what the old man and his mix-eyed accomplice were only playing at. The door closed behind her, and she felt a deep certainty that she would only leave this place if the dark woman and the wild man permitted it. It wasn’t a stone room with an iron door like the one Alys had been taken to at harvest, but it might as well have been. A wave of vertigo rolled through her, or else the earth below them spun.
The dark woman sat by the little stove and fed a bit of wood into it. The flames leapt. “Now, child. Tell me what you know. All of it, except, I suppose, the name of your friend. I’ll know if you leave something out.”
Sammish sat, her hands between her knees. She felt a deep unease, but it was too late to pull back now.
“It began in summer,” she said. “There was a guardsman the day that the new prince took his place.”
She told everything—Alys and her brother’s death, the gold coins and the silver knife, Alys’s cell in Oldgate and the candle that summoned the pale woman, the night they found Andomaka and the way Alys had taken up her brother’s work. She had expected it to all come out disjointed, but it didn’t. She told the tale like she was a storyteller who’d said it all a thousand times over, and the dark woman sat, listening. After a while, the wild man took a paring knife from under his bed and a dry apple from a box and started cutting bits of the fruit into a bowl. The smell was sweet and rich, and it reassured Sammish in a way she couldn’t put words to.
She told of Alys’s errand for Andomaka, the slave house and the boy.
The dark woman sighed then, and it was more profound than tears. Sorrow and despair radiated from her like heat came from the fire. Sammish stuttered to a halt. The man offered up a bite of apple, and the woman wordlessly pushed it away.
“Is that…” Sammish began, and then found she didn’t know what question she was trying to ask.
“I wanted it to be otherwise,” the woman said. “I knew my hopes were thin. Go on.”
Sammish told of finding Orrel, candle-skinned and weak, in the hospital and his story of Darro’s attack and death. It was a surprise that the woman from that tale was sitting before her, but it was a satisfying one, like the last word of a good joke that pulled the whole thing into a new perspective. It brought the whole tale together, as if it had been meant to be this way. As if the gods had planned it. And still, the dark woman didn’t interrupt or speak until Sammish reached the point in her story where she’d gone to Stonemarket and found Alys among Andomaka’s knifemen. When Sammish had lied about finding Orrel.
“Why?” the dark woman asked, and her voice was soft and weary.
“Why what?”
“Why didn’t you tell her about what her brother did to me?”
Sammish shook her head. “I didn’t know what Darro did, not really. I still don’t. I mean, was it your knife? Was Orrel telling the truth about you making him ill? Maybe it wasn’t even true.”
“No.”
Sammish shook her head, not certain what the woman meant. The dark woman lifted her eyebrows. “I told you that I would know. That isn’t why,” she said. “Try again.”
Sammish looked away. The wild man, cross-legged on his bed, scratched his bushy beard. Sammish felt a blush rising in her throat and cheeks. “I didn’t want Andomaka to know. Alys told me that she’d pass it along, and I didn’t want that.”
She realized a moment too late that she’d called Alys by name, but neither the man nor the woman commented on it.
“Closer,” the dark woman said instead. “But try again.”
In the stove, the wood popped and crackled. A breath of wind shook the door. It was already dark outside. Sammish didn’t know how long she’d been talking.
“I want to help her the way I know her,” she said. “I don’t want to help who she’s become.”
“Yes,” the dark woman said. “I understand.”
“It may not be as bad as it sounds,” the wild man said, and Sammish knew he didn’t mean Alys.
“They have the knife,” the dark woman said. “They have Timu. I have nothing.”
The wild man hung his head and sighed, but he didn’t disagree. She opened the iron stove and fed in another stick. By the light of the fire, Sammish saw that there were tear tracks streaking her cheeks. She didn’t know how long the woman had been weeping. She hadn’t given any other sign.