“What about this one?” Ullin asked, pointing down the corner with his chin. Alys considered the mark. A yellow stuccoed warehouse with broad, red-painted doors presently closed to the street. The windows above it had shutters open despite the cold, and bright curtains with awnings that had likely once been the same shade of red but had faded to something nearer to dark pink. The rows of windows above that were for the family’s sleeping rooms and the last, thinnest, and nearest the sky for servants and visitors of no particular dignity. A flight of worn stone stairs led up from the street to a double door on the family’s floor with thin columns on either side of it like an echo of the compounds of Green Hill.
Alys looked up and down the street, not for any particular threat, but to recall as best she could what other houses they had tried nearby and how long ago. Down on the left, there was a larger compound they’d tried four days before, but nothing else nearby.
“Might as well,” she said. “You or me?”
“I’ll take this one,” Ullin said. “You come with me and back me if I need it.”
She nodded once and sharply, the way she imagined Darro would have. It felt natural to her now. She walked a bit down the street and leaned against a wall where she could see and hear all that happened without seeming to and nodded Ullin on.
Ullin stepped smartly to the warehouse doors and slapped them twice with an open palm. Alys waited. A wagon rolled by, a load of cloth bales covered with an oiled tarp against the wet. The carter didn’t so much as glance at them. Ullin pounded again. They’d been running these pulls long enough that she could read the angle of his shoulders and the way he held his weight. He was about to turn away when the door scraped open and an older man’s wide face looked out.
“Looking for Garreth,” Ullin said.
“Fuck yourself,” the wide man said, his tone conversational and without heat. He started to close the door.
Ullin blocked it with his boot. “No offense. I don’t need to speak with the man. Just give him a message for me?”
“There coin in it?” the wide man asked. This was a trap. All they wanted was to know whether there was a Garreth in the house, and if there were, if he was the son of the family and not a groom or kitchen boy. If they offered money, the servants were just as likely to take it, promise to deliver a message or a package to someone who didn’t exist, and call themselves clever for their own little pull. Alys couldn’t blame them for the impulse, but she did have a little contempt for their amateur ambitions.
“There’s thanks if I know he gets it,” Ullin said, which wasn’t a yes or a no. “Is he here?”
The wide man considered, and sloth won out over greed. “No one here called Garreth. You’ve the wrong house.”
“You’re certain? The son of the house, I heard it.”
“Then clean your ears, and get your leg out of my door before I break your kneecap, you little Inlisc shit,” he said amiably.
Ullin laughed, stepped back, and made a false and elaborate bow as the red door pulled to. Alys slapped his shoulder. “Don’t show off,” she said.
The hunt they were on had rules—don’t use the same approach too often, let a street cool for a few days rather than hit every door at once, don’t make trouble, don’t say anything you can’t take back, stay dull enough that no one starts telling stories about you—and they all cooked down to one central edict: Notice but don’t get noticed. She wished Sammish were with them. For one thing, she was a genius for work like this, and Alys found herself weirdly missing the girl’s company. It would have been good to run a pull with someone from Longhill.
“North?” Ullin asked. “Been a while since we saw the city wall.”
“Fine with me.”
They turned down the street and fell into step together, Alys stretching her legs to match Ullin’s longer stride. She could tell the work was hard for the Stonemarket knife. For one, he stood out on this side of the river. There were plenty of Hansch here, but Ullin knew he was out of his circle, and it made him puff up. He acted out his ease and comfort so much he seemed uneasy and discomfited. It annoyed her, but she wanted his company more than she didn’t. With the quarantine closing down half a dozen streets in Stonemarket, she knew she should have been grateful he was there at all. As they walked, they spoke. With Ullin, it was mostly steam and piffle, jokes at the expense of whoever was out of earshot and stories that didn’t stand up to too much inquiry. But enough of them had Darro mentioned that Alys was happy to sift through the dross.
Ullin, according to his own account, had been born the third son of a coppersmith, and spent his early days splashing in the polluted canal that ran through the Smoke. His brothers had taken the family places in the guild, and left him to make his own fortune, which so far he’d done by running jobs for himself or for people willing to pay. Tregarro had found him four years before, when the old prince was still firmly in power and there weren’t even rumors of illness. The pale woman hadn’t come into his circle until after Darro had, which Alys tucked away. Andomaka hadn’t taken any interest in Ullin, but in Darro she had, and it left Alys feeling quietly pleased. As if she’d won a point in a game she didn’t fully understand.
To hear him tell it, Ullin had broken hearts and lifted wallets and windows all through the western half of the city, excepting the palace. Crossing the redcloaks was more than he was paid for, he said with a laugh.
At a thin house with only two stories just outside the northern gate, Alys pretended to an old woman that she was bringing a note from a physician to Garreth, son of the house, about a girl they both knew. The implication was that this fictional girl might have caught a whore’s pox, and while the old woman was alight with curiosity, there was no Garreth there to give the message to, but maybe she meant Gaucin who worked at the grocer’s at the corner? Along the long, curling street that bent back toward the river, Ullin was there to give a warning to young master Garreth about a rumor that he’d heard from a mutual friend who might not be the friend he seemed, but the only Garreth there was comfortably into his sixth decade and cared more about his own gout than what anyone was saying about him in the taprooms.
The winter sun went down more slowly than it had at Longest Night, but it was standing at the shoulder of Oldgate and a cold wind was picking up as they made their way back toward the river. Alys found herself thinking of the salt warehouse where she and Sammish had braced the disgraced bluecloak. It hadn’t been half a year earlier. It seemed like something from a different life.
“One more, and then soup and beer,” Ullin said.
“Works for me,” Alys said as if he had made an offer and not an assertion. She pointed ahead at a four-story compound with pale blue shutters and white walls warmed by the colors of the coming sunset. “That one?”
“Your turn,” Ullin said instead of yes. “Pretend you’re carrying.”
“No,” Alys said.
“Oh come on,” Ullin said. “You can’t be embarrassed for bedding down with someone you’ve never actually met. It’s a lie. You’re pregnant. Garreth may be the father. Go.”
He pushed her, and she stumbled forward. She hated the story, but it wasn’t one they’d used before, and nothing better came to her as she walked the half block to the house. She reached the door. No stairs on this one, but a bracket where a lantern could be hung and a fresco of a wreath with red berries and pale green leaves over the doorway. When she glanced back, Ullin was watching her from across the street. His smile was halfway to a smirk, and she felt a little stab of anger toward him. But she put a hand to her belly, and with the other she slapped the door. A few breaths later, it opened.