“You don’t have to tell me,” Sammish said. “It’s all right.”
“You aren’t angry?”
“I’m not,” Sammish said, surprised to find it was true. Something was complicating her heart, but it wasn’t anger.
The conversations in the Pit all found a pause in the same moment, and the barman’s voice cut through like he was an actor on a stage. “There’s gods on the streets these days. Be careful is all I’m saying.” He looked up, embarrassed to have spoken so loud in the sudden quiet, and the mutter of voices rushed back. If Sammish had been in the mind to look for omens, it would have been one.
“We need something to drink,” Alys said. “You want cider or wine?”
“I’m fine with the soup.”
“You’re sure? I’m paying.”
The dark-eyed, brokenhearted woman hiding in the Silt was paying, she just didn’t know it. Sammish remembered the day Alys had offered her a coin for helping. She was glad she’d given it back. “I’m certain,” she said.
The yearly rituals that followed Longest Night took up the palace and most of Green Hill. The great families had their turns hosting the prince Byrn a Sal and his retinue, and in return the palace was opened for the private rites and observances of the brotherhoods. Crystal lanterns hung at the street corners, and music filled the galleries and temples. It was a seventh year by the reckoning of the Clovas brotherhood, so its members were out in masks and rags, giving out charms and bits of sage-scented candy. Tregarro had heard that the apparent charity led to a vast orgy on Tenthday, but he’d heard similar rumors about the Daris that he knew from experience to be false.
Andomaka was out among the celebrations somewhere, standing for the Daris Brotherhood and Chaalat. The double duty meant that the little time she could spend at the brotherhood’s house was in its public halls and temple. On Sixthday, Byrn a Sal himself came to the house with Halev Karsen at his side, and Andomaka had welcomed them both as if there were no dark war between them. It made Tregarro’s neck ache.
There were rumors of unrest. The quarantine in Stonemarket set a nervousness about the season, and Byrn a Sal did little to reassure people. There were stories of him drunk and shouting in the palace, as if his unclean conscience haunted him. Maybe it did. But the most dangerous animal was a cornered one, and if the prince lashed out, he would do it with the force of law behind him. Tregarro was pinned to the brotherhood’s house, protecting not Andomaka but the boy who had been Ausai.
That one kept to the most private rooms of the brotherhood’s house, sitting in the temple itself for hours playing a game with red and white glass beads on a complex board. It was one Tregarro knew, though he wasn’t expert at its strategies. Sometimes, Ausai would play against himself, shifting one red bead and then a white with equal concentration. Other times, he would invite Tregarro to take a color. They sat across from each other, passing the long, anxious hours, and vying for position on the board. Sometimes, they drank beer. Sometimes, they talked.
“I keep wanting to call the palace guard,” Ausai said, taking one of his beads to a corner spot where it could shift to a different circle. “It’s habit, you know? I haven’t been cut off from my guard for… well, for a very long time. It chafes to think Byrn has their loyalty and I don’t.”
“You should have,” Tregarro said. “You will again.” He reached for a white bead, ready to block the corner transit, but stopped himself at the last moment, pulled his fingers back. The corner move was a trap. He chose a different bead on an inner circle.
Ausai smiled mirthlessly. “It’s a dangerous moment. I hate relying on stealth. Give me a chance to open a few necks, and I’m fine. This… waiting? I feel the risk in every minute of it.” He moved not the corner bead, but one beside it, then rocked back a degree and passed an open palm across his chin and cheek. Tregarro felt a moment’s vertigo at the gesture. He had seen it many times when the prince had done it. Though he knew better, some part of his mind had rebelled at this deep magic. Without intending to, he had put the boy in the same class as street-corner actors and performers for the court, aping the expressions and cadences of their betters. Having that one unconsidered gesture come again in this unfamiliar body drove the strangeness of their situation home.
Ausai looked up at him with a question in his young brown eyes. Tregarro moved one of his beads. “We will not fail you again.”
“You’d better not. The farther the blood connection gets, the harder the transit. Children and siblings are best. Nieces and nephews are good too. Cousins like this start to get tricky. Having a few disposable offspring is good as a storm port, and I have enemies. There are gods in the streets these days. And look at me.” He lifted his thin, boyish arms. “If you think anyone’s putting this lump of skin into the palace of Kithamar, you’re drunk. Until I am in the palace again, I’m at risk, but being this child is worse. Put me in a noble skin, and I have some status at least. If Byrn a Sal threw some Bronze Coast boy in a dark room for a few decades, who’d object?”
Tregarro understood that Ausai didn’t need an answer from him. The prince was using him as an excuse to talk to himself. Also, he was more than a little drunk. Ausai shook his head and shoved the corner bead in a level toward the center of the board.
“Irana has to have known that Byrn was a bastard,” Ausai said. “She was there at the getting of him. But maybe Tallis knew it too. He was a strange one from the time he was born, and looking back, Byrn doesn’t even look much like him. The mysteries unnerved him. But can you imagine letting your wife fuck another man and then raising the child as your own, knowing it all the time, and swallowing it all just to spite your brother?”
“The issue’s never come up,” Tregarro said.
“Or your father, maybe,” Ausai said as if he hadn’t spoken. “Maybe it was something I did when they were children, and he hated me as his father before he hated me as his brother.” He sighed. “They were good children, those three. Two boys and a girl. Tallis and Ausai and Hanan. But maybe I did Ausai too many favors, and left Tallis jealous. He was a sensitive child. There was the hound of his that Ausai wanted, and I let him take it. Maybe that was the seed of all this shit. They say it of girls, but mark me, young boys are pettier. The gods all know I’ve raised enough to see it.”
Tregarro felt another wave of strangeness as he realized the boy wasn’t speaking as Ausai any longer, but as Ausai’s father, Prince Airis, dead almost a century ago. The wistfulness in the young boy’s voice was born from memories of things his grandfather by blood had seen and said. Prince Ausai had once had his name written in water and welcomed this spirit into his flesh. The man he had been before that, Tregarro had never met. Ausai moved another bead, trapping one of Tregarro’s white ones. He plucked it from the board like it was an insect and tossed it into the dead pile.
“You’re losing focus,” Ausai said.
“You’d beat me even if I didn’t,” Tregarro said.
“True, but it means more if you give it some effort.”
“I will do my best to defeat you, my lord,” Tregarro said with a smile. It took him some time to find a good counter-move, but he did. Ausai nodded in approval when he saw where the white bead landed, but did not otherwise respond to Tregarro’s little joke. The scarred man grew concerned that he had given offense. “I don’t mean to presume.”