The woman looking out at her wore a servant’s clothes in the same pale blue as the shutters. Her hair was white, but had enough curl in it to speak of Inlisc blood. Her face was thin with age. She hoisted an eyebrow. Alys imagined herself being a brave idiot girl, there to demand that the man who’d planted his seed in her be there to help care for the child. She squared her shoulders the way that girl might, lifted her chin—but not too far.
“I need to speak with young master Garreth,” she said with just a little tremble in her voice.
The old woman glanced at the hand that cupped Alys’s belly and her lips thinned. Disgust, but not, Alys thought, for the troubled girl at her door. That was interesting.
“Try the barracks,” the servant said. “He’s had no place here for months.”
“Wait,” Alys said as the door began to close. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, Garreth made his decision when he entered the guard. If you have business with him, talk to his captain. He may be part of this family by blood, but his business belongs elsewhere.”
And then the door closed. The rasp of a bar falling into place made the degree to which her presence was unwelcome clear. Alys turned back, forcing her shoulders forward in mimic of a sorrow she didn’t feel. She walked away with bowed head in case anyone were watching. Ullin stepped toward her, but when she ignored him, fell back. Alys walked slowly and sorrowfully until the curve of the street took her out of sight. Then she straightened and grinned.
Tregarro, woven from smoke, sat across her table from Alys. As he listened, he rubbed the scars along his cheek and neck. When she was finished, he leaned forward onto his elbows, his gaze cutting from side to side as he thought. “What else do we know about the house?”
“Belongs to a family called Left. They trade in wool with a side in spices, mostly. They’ve just made an alliance with some northern village that’s supposed to have good sheep.”
“That’s all?”
Alys didn’t shrug. It felt too much like an apology. “We didn’t want to be too obvious asking.”
She wished it had been Andomaka who’d come for her report, but the pale woman hadn’t seen her for weeks now. Alys tried not to feel disappointed by that, and mostly she succeeded.
“And he’s the only one?”
“Someone named Garreth, son of a merchant house in Riverport,” Alys said. “He’s all you asked, but there may be others we haven’t found yet. It’s not as if we’ve tried every door in the quarter.”
“And he’s a guardsman?”
“That’s what I hear. I didn’t want to get my fingers too close to that, though. Bluecloaks don’t tend to love people like me.” The room was cold enough that her breath plumed. Tregarro’s didn’t. She wasn’t sure if that was because he was only there by candle or if he just got along with frost better than she did. When he didn’t speak for a few long breaths together, she said, “We can keep looking if you want.”
“No,” Tregarro said. “Not yet. Take a few days. Learn what you can about the streets around the house. When the family is away. If our man Garreth is meeting his lover there, she’ll have a way to sneak in and back out again. Find that.”
“And if I see him with a girl?”
Tregarro weighed some thoughts he didn’t speak. “Kill her if you have the chance. It will be worth the risk.”
“Who is she?”
“She’s the one you’re supposed to kill.”
“Best hope he’s not stepping out with more girls than one, then,” Alys said, trying to make it a joke.
“If he is, we kill all of them. As long as the one I want is among them, the others won’t matter.”
“Anything you can say so I know she’s the right one?”
“She’s Hansch,” Tregarro said shortly, and pushed a wallet across the table. It was warm, and solid, and the coins in it clinked nicely. “You did well. Keep going.”
“Am I paying Ullin out of this?”
“I don’t care,” Tregarro said. He stood and, walking away, unwove. The black candle spat, and she lit a normal wax one from the flame before she blew it out. In the less eerie light, she counted out her pay. Across the room, the box of Darro’s ashes sat on its shelf. It had grown dusty over the weeks.
She wanted to feel the victory of the job. She’d won the pull, but something about it chafed. She kept imagining Darro going up to the house, asking after the missing son. She didn’t know how he’d have done it, but it wouldn’t have been by pretending he was pregnant. She was glad enough that she’d done the work Andomaka needed of her, but she hadn’t done it the way her brother would have, and that tainted something.
She looked over at the box, and the deathmark stood out in the darkness. A few lines, straight and curved, that in the dark seemed like a strange and unblinking eye considering her. She went to it and rubbed the dust off with her sleeve until the wood was clean. She put Darro back in his place.
“Sorry,” she said. “I won’t do that again. It was… I don’t know. Sorry.”
Darro, of course, didn’t answer. She made a little dinner of a bit of bread, cheese, and mustard, then wrapped herself in a blanket against the cold and blew her candle out. Through the wall, she heard a man and woman talking seriously to each other, but she couldn’t make out the words. As she faded into sleep, the voices became her and Darro. Hovering between the world and dreams, she listened to herself and her brother, the conversation becoming more nearly comprehensible and less connected to the living voices in her ears.
In the dream, they were walking side by side down a hallway that was also a street. She was bragging to Darro, telling him how well it was all going, how she’d managed her pulls and taken up his work. She was desperate that he understand how it was all going to be well, and that he say it back to her so that she could know it too. Instead, the dream-brother answered her with indulgence and amusement, but never the approval she needed. Her frustration grew.
There were no actual words in the dream, but the sense of talking was immediate and powerful. She found herself having to shout, and realized that there was a roaring sound that came from above them, and that their pathway had led them underneath the river. The great, dark flow of the Khahon was above them, and she couldn’t make herself heard. She had to convince Darro that things were going well, that it would all come out right because of her. The sense of being thwarted was deep, and she found herself growing angry with her brother and the way he treated everything she did so lightly.
When he spoke, his words were perfectly clear and crisp, as if his mouth were almost against her ear: Why won’t you look at my face?
Alys’s scream woke her. Her heart was beating hard and fast, and she was sweating though she felt terribly cold. She sat in the darkness, her blanket pulled tight around her, and waited for a terror that she didn’t understand to pass.
The quarantined section of Stonemarket was a rough triangle not far from the western gate. At its most, it was three streets wide, almost twice that long, and narrowed to a stone-paved common that was hardly more than a wide place in the road. It was marked by thick rope with yellow rags tied to it every few feet. The guards who walked its perimeter had whistles and swords and the badges of office that hung from their belts. Their cloaks were not blue, but red. The prince of the city had closed these streets, and the palace guard enforced his ban. It was a measure of how dangerous the illness was, though Sammish hadn’t yet been able to get a clear description of what had raised the alarm.