There’s plague in the Stonemarket,” Black Nel said. “Palace guard shut down three streets for quarantine. Anyone that wants can go in, but try to come out and they fill you full of arrows and burn your corpse.”
“Bad omen,” Deva’s Quinn said.
Seems like there’s a lot of those these days, Sammish thought. She almost said it aloud, but she was afraid people would agree. It was six days now since she’d sat with Saffa and Goro, and she hadn’t been able to get the woman’s dry voice out of her ears.
We’re in over our heads. That’s what she’d said to Alys, it seemed like years before. She hadn’t understood how deep they’d really been, or how dark the waters were.
The Pit seemed almost comforting. Longhill and Seepwater might be desperate in their poverty. People might risk freezing if the weather turned cruel or starving if their coin ran out. People caught knives in their guts over a wallet of bronze or a romantic betrayal or a mad, angry sense that this was all the life they would ever have coming out in impotent rage. What they didn’t have was dark magic and the prince’s throne.
Sammish sat in a corner, her eyes on her bowl of broth-and-onion. No one noticed her because she didn’t want them to. She didn’t want anyone to, ever again. Her mind kept circling back to Saffa, sitting in the strange little hut on the Silt. Her voice as she said She came to our summons. Had she? Sammish had lived her whole life around the petty magics of Kithamar: the fortune-tellers and the rat wards and the herb sellers whose tea promised health or love or the return of whatever else you’d lost. Most were pulls by a different name, but some were true. Had Saffa doomed Orrel to a slow, ugly death, or had he only been unlucky? He’d puked after watching someone he knew die. So what? He hadn’t stopped, but he’d hid himself in a plague house. People got sick all the time. Had Sammish put together the better hunting grounds to find Saffa by herself, or had some spirit drawn her? She didn’t like to think of herself as a small piece in a larger game, driven by forces she didn’t control. And when she did, she’d rather the forces be gold and knives and politics. But hadn’t Grey Linnet called the way she could choose not to be noticed a little magic? Could that be truth?
Sammish’s mind skipped and jumped around her skull like a trapped sparrow looking for a window out. Her stillness was a mask for her storms.
“I heard there’s rot in the granary,” a thin Hansch man said. He was sitting by the fire. Sammish didn’t know him, but some of the others seemed to. “Green rot. The kind that makes you sick up and go crazy.”
“That’s bad, if it’s true,” the barman said. “If the brewers can’t get the temple priests to sneak them out cheap grain, I’ll be charging all of you two fingers and a nose for a tun of beer come summer.” His voice was jovial to pull the sting.
“It’s shaping up to be a hard year,” Black Nel said. “We’ll all be thinner before harvest comes again, you can count on that.” And then, “Plague better not fucking spread. A quarantine in Stonemarket’s all to the good, but the palace starts thinking it’s here, and they’ll burn Longhill to the ground and us inside it.”
“Hey,” the barman said sharply. “No talk like that.”
Sammish sipped her broth. It wasn’t that odd for someone to be a little tipsy and start railing at the atrocities the nobles and merchants rained down on the Inlisc of Longhill. It meant more that the barman was worried about reprisals for it. Or maybe it was only that Sammish was frightened and uneasy, so that everything seemed soaked through with menace and portent.
The street door clattered open and closed, and then Alys herself pushed through the folds of cloth that kept the heat in.
If Sammish hadn’t known her, she’d have guessed Alys was one of Aunt Thorn’s crew. Leather and good wool, black boots and a thick belt. The only thing that made it seem like she might not be wealthy in her own right was that she carried a lead-dipped club instead of a blade. She looked around the taproom, her eyes fever-bright and a smile on her lips that left Sammish anxious. Alys didn’t see her, and Sammish took the moment to stare.
Alys’s hair was tucked under a woven cap except for a curling lock that had escaped at her ear. Her broad cheeks showed a little color where the cold had bitten them. Her body, hidden though it was, left Sammish aching in a way she didn’t like to think about. All that was usual. Alys was beautiful, but she’d always been beautiful. Today, she was sharp; hard and brittle as cracking ice. And that was new.
We should have run, Sammish thought. As soon as Orrel cut the bluecloak’s belt, we should have run for the city gates and never stopped. Sammish lifted her palm and let herself be seen. Alys’s smile flickered into something more genuine. Relief, maybe. It was odd. Usually Sammish was the one who took comfort in it when they found each other.
“You’ve been thin on the ground,” Alys said as she slipped onto the bench across from Sammish. She didn’t quite make it an accusation, but she didn’t keep it from being one either.
“I’ve had things,” Sammish said. “Figured you did too.”
Sitting close as they were, Sammish could see the seams on Alys’s coat. Black, thick, and triple-stitched. It was good work. Expensive work. Sammish had known that before, but now when she saw it, she thought of Saffa begging her friends and family for the coins that had bought it, and it made the jacket less in her eyes.
“I’m making progress,” Alys said. “Tregarro came to me. The scarred one.”
“I know who he is.”
“I think they’re preparing for something big. The people that killed Darro are about to suffer a real loss. I don’t know all the details, and what I know, I can’t… I can’t speak of. You understand.”
Sammish didn’t laugh, and if she had, it wouldn’t have been mirth. “I do.”
“They’re going to suffer,” Alys said, and to her it was a good thing. Sammish felt something shift in her gut. She must have made a sound, because Alys looked up at her, an apology in her eyes. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you. I’ve promised not. Once it’s done, I maybe can.”
“It’s all right,” Sammish said.
Alys reached across the table and put her hand on Sammish’s arm. Her eyes had taken on an expression that was almost a plea. “Don’t be angry with me. I know you’ve been with me on this. Even when I had to do parts of it by myself, I know you’ve been there. I’m not looking to keep you out of it.”
She’s frightened of something, Sammish thought, and it brought a bitterness that surprised her. When Alys was strong or sad or angry, Sammish was tolerable: worthy of a warm bed in the Stonemarket cold or a beer if there was no one better about to drink with. When Alys was frightened, Sammish mattered. The kindest way to phrase it was that she was who Alys came to when, for whatever reason, the stakes were highest.
She could think of other less charitable ways to describe it.
If I told you everything I know, she thought, you would run to the Silt to try your hand at killing Saffa. Or worse, to your pale woman to spill it on the floor for a pat on the head.