Alys blinked, and Sammish willed her to let the subject drop. There was no path that led from here to Sammish working one of Andomaka’s jobs, and the more Alys pushed her on why, the more Sammish would want to explain it, and anything she said would go straight back to Green Hill and the Daris Brotherhood. Better not to talk at all. Sammish hurried her steps a little, and Alys matched her pace.
The street bent to the left around a dry cistern, and then opened to a tight, uncomforting square. The dark lines showed where wagon wheels had crushed snow against stone. Crows huddled at the roofline, three stories above them, shifting their feet and muttering complaints at the low white sky.
Ullin was leaning against the wall, sending greyish smoke up from a bone-yellow pipe. When he saw Alys, he hitched up his chin in greeting. He didn’t acknowledge Sammish, and she didn’t want him to. At her side, Alys shifted her gait, sinking lower into her hips like she was another lank young man, easy in her joints and ready for violence. Everything she did was a performance. Ullin pushed off the wall, but didn’t step forward.
“We have a thing we need to do,” Alys said.
“Won’t stop you,” Sammish replied.
“Think about what I said, though, yeah? You’re good at finding things out. We could use someone like that.”
“Good luck,” Sammish said, and didn’t mean it. Or at least didn’t mean it as Find what you’re looking for. Alys slouched over to Ullin as Sammish angled her way back east toward home. Alys and Ullin traded words, but she couldn’t hear them, only see their breath in the cold and the falling light. Ullin laughed and moved to put his arm around Alys’s shoulder, but she shifted out of his reach. Sammish could still smile. She felt a pang of jealousy, but even that seemed like habit.
By the time she reached her room, the night was falling. There was no sunset, only a slow dimming of the world. The cat had found comfort elsewhere, or else had finally crossed a dog he couldn’t outrun. Sammish lay in her bed though she wasn’t tired and thought about what she would do now that the knife running had gone away. There were other sharpeners in the city. If she could find one that was looking for more work, she might be able to keep her regulars. Even if it wouldn’t open a path to something better later on, it would bring in coin to keep her fed. Or she could go back to the hospital and see if they needed someone to clean up after the sick and the dying. She could see if, against all chance, Orrel was still alive. Or she could go begging for cleaning work at the merchant houses, though those jobs were jealously guarded by the people who had them, and she couldn’t think of anyone who’d speak for her.
She closed her eyes and willed the sleep to come. It didn’t. Thought after thought after thought rose and fell away, none of them connected. She didn’t plan it when, still in the darkness, she rose and dressed. She only knew she had to get out of her little room. The night air was bitterly cold. Her nose and ears ached with it. By memory and the few lanterns that burned outside taprooms, she trudged west. By the time she reached the frozen canals of Seepwater, she was almost warm. When she lowered herself down to the Khahon, the sky was starting to lighten. She fell twice on the way across the snow-covered ice, but she didn’t get hurt. She did imagine what would happen if some bizarre warm current from the north had weakened the ice enough that she fell through it and how the ice would look above her as she drowned, but that was only being morbid. Thaw hadn’t come. Rotten ice was the least of her worries.
The bare, black trees of the Silt were stark against the pearl-grey sky. She used the looming darkness of Oldgate to put herself near where she’d been the time before, but the city seemed to shift around her. She was always too far north or too far south, too near the river or too far from it. She considered going back to her room. Not to rest, but to get the stale bread the way she had before, as an offering to the residents of the Silt. To Goro. But her feet ached and Longhill was far and, more than that, something in her gut rebelled at being a supplicant anymore. She’d drunk too much of that already.
With morning turning the still-falling snow ash-grey against the sky, she planted her feet at the treeline, cupped her hands to her mouth, and shouted his name. Nothing happened but a stirring of bird wings. She shouted again and again, repeating the syllables until they lost their meaning and she was only making noise at a world that wasn’t listening. When the cold began to creep up her legs, she walked and shouted. When her voice grew hoarse, she shouted hoarsely. If the wild man didn’t come, she didn’t know what would make her give up. Exhaustion, maybe. Or some bluecloaks sent along to gather up the latest madwoman and put her in a cell until she calmed down.
But he came, trudging out from between two trees that she wasn’t certain had been there before. He wore a stained wool cloak and walked with a staff of gnarled wood, and his frown could have lit fires.
“The fuck are you doing?” he spat when he came close enough to speak.
“Is she still here?”
His eyebrows rose. “Of course she’s not. You found her here. If you did, someone else could. She’s been gone from me since the night you came.”
“Has she left the city?”
“I’ll say this again,” Goro said. “She left here. I don’t know if she stopped inside the walls or kept going until she put her feet in the sea, because she didn’t want to tell me and I didn’t want to know.”
“I think she stayed.”
“What does it matter to you?”
“I’m going to help her,” she said. “And you’re going to help me find her.”
The wild man’s beetled eyebrows rose in astonishment. “Well. Look who lost her milk teeth,” he said. And then a smile as if he’d seen something pleasing or had a long odds come good. “All right, then. Let’s talk.”
Finding a merchant house in Riverport was like finding a raindrop in a thunderstorm. If it didn’t matter which one, it was easy. Finding one in particular was hard.
The first problem, and it wasn’t a simple one, was to understand what merchant house meant. Riverport was thick with trade on every scale. There were only a dozen great compounds that aspired to echo the noble houses and brotherhoods of Green Hill, and if those were the only merchant houses, then the job wouldn’t be that difficult. But for each of those, there were twenty family businesses focused on one or two goods with buildings that were both the center of commerce and the shared hearth. Add again the little shops for the tailors and cobblers, the leatherworkers who sold belts and caps from their own homes, the healers who passed tinctures and powders from their kitchens, the butchers and lamp oil carts and soap-and-candle men, and almost anything with a door and a window might be called a merchant house, excepting only the public temples where the residents of Riverport gathered to perform their piety at each other, and those weren’t merchant houses only because it was rude to say what the priests were selling.
Of all the quarters of Kithamar, winter touched Riverport least. Snow and ice clung to the shadows and the edges of the streets, but wagon wheels, boots, shovels, and sand cleared the way. As long as there was daylight and the snow and wind weren’t too vicious, the corners boasted musicians playing for spare coins and criers announcing the virtues of some particular taproom or private baths or tea house. Longhill might be poorer than dogs, Alys thought, but at least they wore their station with dignity. They were who they were. Riverport had money and a kind of power, but at the price of wearing a bright mask until the face behind it faded to nothing. Comfort, yes, but never ease.