She’d found her way there, and Goro had taken her in.
What is Goro? Sammish said.
The wild man raised a finger like a student at the university declaring himself present at a lecture.
Death had been close enough to smell her. Even with Goro’s kindness and protection, it took weeks before she found strength enough to walk on her own. Her injuries had brought on a fever that came back just when she’d thought herself well. And when she recovered, she reached out into the city again, but so much was in flux. The new prince, Byrn a Sal, was alarming the high court with his erratic behavior. The knife she’d sought had been seen and actually held by one of her sometime contacts. Her strength grew, and with it her despair.
Fear stalked her through the autumn streets. Its teeth were colder than winter, and she felt them in the night when she tried to sleep. The ache had been more than she could stand, and Goro had helped her, lending what power he had to help her pray for guidance.
And then, guidance had come in the form of a plain-faced girl with a sack of stale bread. And it had told her that her son was in the hands of the enemy. Her son had been given to her by the palace intrigues of Kithamar. She had broken her oath to separate herself from the world, and now she would be punished. Now her task was to find a way to live with the grief she had carried with her, unacknowledged, from the sea.
The woman went quiet. A tear fell down her cheek. There were already a dozen and more that had leaked from Sammish’s eyes. Saffa’s sigh was worse than sobbing.
“We have to make a decision,” Goro said. He wasn’t looking at Sammish.
“Do we?”
“You’re still in danger. Maybe you will be for the rest of your life. Maybe you won’t. But you are now, and this one is part of it. She knows where you are, and if we let her leave, other people will find out.”
“They won’t,” Sammish said. “I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
Goro shrugged. “I can trust you, or I can trust myself. The first one’s better for you. Second one’s solid for me. And for her.”
“You can’t kill me,” Sammish said.
“I really can.”
“No,” Saffa said. “We asked her here, even if we didn’t know exactly what we were asking. She came to our summons.”
“Or she showed up by coincidence. Not that it matters. The problem of your situation stays the same either way.”
“Killing her might be wise, but it would also be ungrateful,” Saffa said. She turned her dark, tired eyes to Sammish. “Go. Save your friend, if you can. Don’t mention me, and don’t come back.”
The central temple of the Daris Brotherhood’s house was open to the public. Its columns were carved marble the color of butter, its altar covered with fresh rosemary all year round, and the chimes rang at the sacred hours with a celestial harmony. It wasn’t where Andomaka and her acolytes within the mysteries did their important work. That was for the private temple.
It rested deep within the compound, a round room without windows or doors, secured by a series of maze-like hallways. The rites performed there required that the room not be sealed from the city, but the path in could be made obscure. The air was fresh but motionless, as if under a thick forest canopy during a storm. Lanterns burned at points of focus, drawing the stars of the sky and the paths of the gods into the small circle of the temple. Birth and death, betrayal and loyalty, the pure and the complex, everything was represented in the subtle relations of the lights and the darkness, the altar stone and the tapestries and the high, arching ceiling. Andomaka had spent days in the private temple when she was young. She had been consecrated there, learning secrets that had formed her. It was more than a home. It was the heart of her city and her god. That it was also just wood and wax took none of the miracle away from it. It was a place meant to call forth the thinness of the world. The way moments of change—Longest Night and Shortest; the first freeze and the first thaw; the night between the funeral of a prince and the coronation of a successor; the moment between a birth and first breath—invited disruptions in the order of the world, the private temple made that potential welcome.
And now, in the darkness after the year’s swiftest sunset, she was supposed to be there.
Instead, she was in a minor drawing room of the palace, drinking lemon tea and sharing the heat of the fire with her young cousin Elaine a Sal, daughter of the prince. The girl’s eyes were red from weeping, and there were bruise-dark bags under her eyes. She had fallen in love with a man below her station, and her father had been acting strangely. She was afraid that, to protect her lover—whom she wouldn’t name out of some misbegotten superstition or belated attack of discretion—she would have to abandon him. The pettiness of it verged on comedy. The fate of the city was in doubt. Titanic forces of history and magic were at play like an invisible storm, and the girl was oblivious. Andomaka’s training let her see her own contempt as if it belonged to someone else, and then add it to her understanding of the city and of herself.
“He’s asked me to come, and I went to him,” Elaine said.
“To his barracks?” Andomaka said, feigning confusion.
“No. His family house in Riverside. I don’t know what to do.”
“Follow your heart,” Andomaka said. “It’s a better guide than I am.”
Elaine nodded, as if the meaningless words were deep. Andomaka squeezed the girl’s hand and retreated, careful not to sigh until she was out of earshot. She walked quickly, aware that she had been expected in the brotherhood’s house. It wasn’t why she hurried. She hurried because she wanted to.
The palace was closer and darker than the compounds of Green Hill. Its past as a fortress showed in thick walls and narrow windows. The lamps swallowed the air. It felt more like a prison than a seat of power, and she was pleased to leave it for the open, frigid street. Her carriage was waiting, and Tregarro with it. The servants lifted her up, and almost before the thin door latched, Tregarro thumped the roof and the coachman called the horses to a fast trot. The darkness of the palace gave way to the darkness of Green Hill. Andomaka felt the subtle difference.
“I don’t like this,” Tregarro said. “They suspect.”
“They don’t.”
“They know.”
“They don’t.”
“The same night we choose to attempt the rite again, she decides to pull you in for a talk? Tell me that’s not meant to rattle us.”
“You were never young and in love, were you?” Andomaka said. It was a cruelty, but Tregarro pretended that she hadn’t meant it to be.
“Never like that one.”
“She’s half in the nursery and half in the marriage bed. The world she knows stops at her skin. None of what we’re doing exists to her. It was coincidence.”
“Magic and coincidence. I don’t like it.”
The carriage hit a rough cobble, jouncing hard and then coming back to true. Outside her little window, she saw the house of the Daris Brotherhood with torches burning at the door. Andomaka felt a pinch of real anxiety. What if the rite fails again? She pushed it away.
“If a girl’s lovesick gossip is enough to distract me, I deserve to fail,” she said.