“As do I. How does that help me?”
“I can find their house, get in, draw you a map. If he’s there, it’ll help you get him out. If he’s… if it’s too late, it might be useful in other ways.”
“You will be caught and killed.”
“I won’t. I’m good at not being noticed.”
Saffa leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. It was a small shift, hardly more than a few inches, but it left the older woman looking exhausted instead of enraged. Sammish saw the softness of Saffa’s cheek and the weight in her shoulders.
“He may be gone already. It is too late.”
“Might be, might not. It doesn’t matter,” Sammish said. “You’ll be trapped here until you know one way or the other. You’ll live the rest of your life in ratholes like this. If all I can do is help you go free, then I can help you go free.” Saffa shook her head, and Sammish felt an unexpected surge of frustration. “You thought the gods sent me last time. Maybe they sent me again. It’s something to try.”
“Why would you do this?”
“To get the plague out of my city, apparently. If I were smarter, I’d do it for money,” Sammish said sharply.
“Why really?” Saffa asked, and there was a humor in her voice Sammish hadn’t heard there before.
“You know, you and the old man seem awfully happy pushing after all my whys. Maybe let me worry about that,” Sammish said.
The Bronze Coast woman bowed her head, but she was smiling.
Sammish found herself smiling back. “I assumed if you were here, you had a way to sneak back past the quarantine line. Hope I was right about that. Now, tell me what you know about what this blade is and how it works and what we’re looking for.”
Saffa did.
The first winter of Byrn a Sal’s reign went on cold and harsh. Even as the days grew longer, the chill sank into the bones of the city. Old snow piled in niches and turned to grey and stinking ice. The air reeked of smoke from thousands of hearths. The brewers, whose trade never stopped, hired boys to chop through the ice on the canals and draw up the water from below that would be next month’s beer. Andomaka stretched her awareness over it all like a skin over the mouth of a drum.
Now that she was to be prince of the city and carrier of the thread, what had been a lazy, soft spreading of her mind through the world had grown harsher. She drilled it like a guardsman or a soldier, but training for something stranger than war. With her eyes closed and her flesh relaxed, she pushed herself in ways she’d never done before. She felt the forges of the Smoke and tasted the brightness of the waste metal that poured into the river from them. The lectures at the university were like little headaches. The palace was a numbness. She tried to extend herself out past the city walls to the hospital and down the river to the south. Some days she could manage, but most she couldn’t. On rare occasions, she knew something else, something from far away that wafted into her mind like a tendril of perfume from another room.
“Good,” Ausai said with the young boy’s throat. “You’re doing very well. Slow your breath. Try to slow your heartbeat.”
She tried, but it was difficult. Being aware of her body and the world at the same time was like breathing in and blowing out at once. She felt her concentration shift and slip. A grunt came from her throat, though she only heard it. It wasn’t a thing she felt.
“It’s all right if you can’t,” the boy who was the prince who was the city said. “Just try, and then be what you are. Know what you know.”
She let her body go, and now her awareness was broader. She felt the world in ways she couldn’t have without her mentor at her side. To the west of the city, a space of warmth and the smell of animals. She drifted to it, astounded to be so far from Kithamar.
“A caravan’s coming,” she said. “Three days?”
“A winter caravan?” Ausai said. “Someone took a risk.”
“They have… peppercorns. And cloves.”
She swirled back inside the city walls, carried like a dried leaf on the wind. She was dreadfully tired. She wanted to stop. But Ausai hadn’t said she could. For a moment, she was in a dark place. Cold, and filled with rats. It was like using the candle to be in two places at once, but without the warmth and the light. There was a woman there, curled in the dark. The thought passed through her Grey Linnet is dead without knowing quite what it meant. If it meant anything. She felt a self-annihilating impulse like looking down from the top of a tower, and the terrible urge to step out into the void.
“I have to stop,” she said. And then, “Please.”
“Come back,” Ausai said.
Andomaka opened her eyes. The feeling of nausea and being stretched too thin passed quickly. She rolled to her side. Her body felt heavy and slow. Waterlogged. But Ausai was sitting at her side, his boy’s smile familiar. The eeriness of the prince’s expression on this new face was fading, and she found herself thinking of Ausai as if he were the young man. As if he always had been.
He took her hand. “You’ve done very well. You have a talent I haven’t seen in generations.”
“Thank you,” she said. She sat up.
The temple was cold despite the braziers and lanterns. Or perhaps that was only her. Tregarro stood against the wall, his arms crossed. When she nodded to him, he brought her a thick black mug of heated wine. The first sip of it felt like it might burn her, but then the warmth spread through her throat and chest.
“You are the most honored and powerful woman of your age,” Ausai said, and his voice sounded like he was almost awed by her. She noticed her own pleasure at the compliment, felt the warmth of it like it was a different sort of wine. Ausai turned his attention to Tregarro. “Nothing more of my false grandniece?”
“Not yet, my prince,” Tregarro said, and there was something odd about the color of his voice. First, that it had a color at all. Andomaka closed her eyes and let the oddness of that pass through her. Tregarro’s words were the grained brown and beige of polished wood. Beautiful and hard. “The guardsman Garreth Left is Elaine’s lover. We’re certain of that. But they haven’t met at his family’s house since we found him. It’s possible that there were more opportunities during harvest when the family house was empty. But our eyes are on it, and our knives are ready. When the moment comes, we will be there.”
Something else tugged at Andomaka, but the dizziness was coming back. There was something about the winter caravan and why she’d been able to feel it when anything outside the city walls was so difficult for her. Tregarro took a step toward her, and she felt his concern as if it were her own.
The boy made a soft chucking sound deep in his throat. If he had been in the body Andomaka had known when she was younger, it would have been impatience. Perhaps it was still. He said, “We can afford to wait better than we can to hurry,” but he said it with distaste. As if he were trying to talk himself into believing it.
Ausai’s gaze softened, seeing something she couldn’t imagine. Where the world and Tregarro and her own flesh were all weirdly present, Prince Ausai seemed to stop at his skin. What was within him was hidden from her like a face behind a carnival mask. As if he had heard her, his attention returned, and he put his thin young hand on her shoulder. “You are everything I had hoped for. You are going to save Kithamar.”