The most reliable story she’d heard—which only meant that more than one person had repeated it before her—was that it was a fever that turned into thickening, greying skin. She had also heard that it was a cough that rattled the ill so badly they couldn’t sleep or a bleeding in the mouth and asshole that wouldn’t heal. Whatever the details, it was the source of fear and dread, and the people of Stonemarket kept their distance from the plague quarter, even if they only lived across the street.
Sammish walked the whole rope, looking down the forbidden streets as she passed. In more than one, the bodies of dogs and cats lay lifeless on the stone paving where the palace guard had thrown them. In one, there was the corpse of an old man among them. Sammish couldn’t say if illness or a redcloak had ended him, only that he was dead in the street, and no one had come to carry him away. The story was that water was hungry, and whoever died in the river could lose their soul to it. That might have been true, but Kithamar had more than one hunger in it, and the stones of Stonemarket carried a death of their own and would until the palace said otherwise. Now and then, she caught sight of someone farther down the street, inside the quarantine. Sammish didn’t call to them, and they didn’t come forward.
She carried her cloth sack over one shoulder, the weight of it bumping against her back as she walked. It had food in it, along with fresh water and incense she’d bought from the hospital. All she had to do was duck under the rope. It should have been easy.
“You,” a man’s voice said. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for my grandmother,” she said, the lie coming easily to her lips. She turned to see a group of three redcloaks on their patrol. They were large men, all three of them Hansch, and one carried his sword unsheathed. She tried not to look them straight in the eye.
“Your grandmother?” the bare-bladed man said. It was his voice that had spoken before. “If she’s in there, she stays in there.”
“I have things for her. To help. She knows to meet me here, but she hasn’t come.”
The redcloak stepped close to her. He had scars on his knuckles and an unnerving kindness in his voice. “She may not know anything anymore. So you listen here, yeah? Toss the bag over and go home. If you cross in looking for your old grandmother, we will let you, but you won’t come back out. Not unless the order comes.”
“She needs to eat, though,” Sammish said.
“I hope she does. But she may not. Don’t go in.”
Sammish nodded, staring at the man’s boots.
The redcloak sighed. “Or if you do, keep some of the medicine in a sleeve or in your shoe. They’re desperate in there. They’d kill you and drink your blood if they thought it would help them.”
“I know.”
The redcloak sighed. “Be careful. And don’t try to come back out. I don’t want to be the one that kills you.”
“Thank you,” Sammish said, and ducked under the rope.
“Well. Look who lost her milk teeth,” Goro had said. “All right, then. Let’s talk.”
Back in the Silt, Sammish had followed him with her heart in her throat. The cold had pressed itself so deeply into her feet that she couldn’t feel the ground she walked over. The old man led her along pathways she didn’t recognize. They passed a huge carved stone statue of a Hansch god that had cracked through at the chest and been abandoned. She was certain she’d have remembered it if she had seen it before, and yet only a few yards more and he was at the door to his little cabin, and waving her inside.
The little stove popped and snapped; the cheerful sounds of fire. Sammish sat beside it. Her cheeks hurt. Her ears hurt. She found herself weeping not from sorrow or distress, but the terrible awareness of how nearly frozen she had been now that the first bits of feeling were coming back. The old man closed the door.
“You can stay long enough to get warm,” the wild man said. “Then you have to go. I have business today you’ve got no part in.”
“Get a lot of custom here, do you?” Sammish joked, but Goro didn’t laugh.
“People find me who need me. Sometimes I expect them. Sometimes I don’t. You… you’re a hard one to see. What does that come from?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
The wild man sat on a little stool and hauled off his boots. His feet were pale as ice. “Never mind it, then,” he said. “Let’s try this instead. Why in the name of all gods together do you think I’m going to help you find Saffa now that she’s gone?”
“I’m going to help her,” Sammish said. And then, “If I can.”
“You said that, but what’s that to me?”
“She’s your friend,” Sammish said, but there was a sense of confusion growing in her. “You gave her shelter. You were trying to keep her safe.”
Goro shrugged. “I did what I did. That doesn’t say what I’m going to do. Saffa paid for everything she got here. Not in coin, maybe, but there was a price for it.”
Sammish felt a sinking in her stomach. She was suddenly very aware of being a girl alone in a man’s home. Goro must have seen the thought in her eyes. He barked out a laugh.
“No,” he said. “I don’t trade in that. But I do trade. You want my help, I’ll want something back. A dream, maybe. Or a memory. Your best day, if you want. Or your worst.”
“Are you serious?”
Goro shrugged. Sammish remembered the illusion of raw meat when he’d bitten into the stale bread the last time she’d been here. She liked magic better when it was fortune-tellers’ pulls and the empty piety of priests.
“One memory’s not too much,” he said. “You forget things every day, and then forget that you forgot them. Everyone does. Feed me one, and you won’t even notice it’s gone.”
Sammish leaned forward. Her feet ached now, which was better than feeling nothing. “I’ll bring you bread for a week. It won’t be fresh, but it’ll keep you fed.”
The wild man’s smile seemed both feral and inexplicably affectionate. “You drive a hard bargain, but I’ll take it if I can ask you a question. I won’t eat it.”
“You won’t eat a question?”
“I promise. But, no offense, you’re a Longhill street rat. I’ve known ones like you since I was young, and I’m older than you think. People like you live on the edge of not living at all. Three things go wrong, and the prison cart will be hauling your frozen corpse away with the horseshit. What are you doing this for?”
Sammish felt her jaw move, but she didn’t know what she was going to say. If she was going to say anything. It seemed like something she should already know. She thought that she did, but now that someone—anyone—cared enough to ask, it was hard to find words for it. Only that it was bound up with Andomaka and Darro and Alys. And a little apartment that she’d imagined so many times that she could walk through it in her mind even though it didn’t exist.
“I want to,” she said. “I’m doing it because I want to.”
“Best reason I’ve heard all day,” Goro said. His feet were getting some color back in them, and he flexed and curled his toes half a dozen times before he hauled his boots back on. “All right. I’ll help. But I’m not leaving the cabin, much less the Silt. It’s my place here, and I like it. Also, I don’t know where she is.”