The news swept through every quarter west of the river. Every taproom was alive with it. The guild halls were filled by meetings where merchants and artisans decried or defended it, and more than once the city guard were called to keep the arguments from spilling onto the frozen streets. The shutters in the magistrate’s office and the tax post showed glimmers of lantern light well into the night as clerks and lawyers read through contracts, guild agreements, and city law.
A winter caravan had come.
Outside the temple gate, a rough corral had been built. A dozen small, shaggy Inlisc horses stood in it, snow caking their coats. Half as many wagons made a rough circle, their leather sides rimed with frost. The caravan master was a thick man with a beard as scraggly as his horses, and a calm that said he’d anticipated the scandal and thought it was funny.
Three merchant families had quietly commissioned it. The risk had been huge, and the gamble had paid out. Now, with the river still locked in ice and spring little more than the occasional less-biting afternoon breeze, the sponsors of the caravan had a jump on spice contracts. By the time the boats and wagons arrived, orders would be filled and markets glutted. Fortunes had just been gambled. The audacious had won, and the houses and families who stood to lose were all frantic as a kicked anthill as they looked for some way to unwind what had already happened. The brewers’ windows had started taking bets on whether the issue would end in murder, and while the odds weren’t good yet, there were plenty of people in Longhill and Seepwater willing to put a bronze or two on it as a kind of prayer. Please let the wealthy and powerful suffer a little bit too.
For the rest of Longhill, it meant groups of people meeting, which meant a chance to run a pull. It meant sneaking messages and money over the city wall to cut side deals with the caravan before the guilds approved or the taxes were levied. It meant the anger and fear of men and women with money to spend, and there were more ways to shave a bit of silver off that than there were stars in the sky. All it took was being clever enough to find them. For Alys, what mattered was that one of the families behind the caravan was called Left, and their disgraced son was a bluecloak who had been spilling salt with the girl she was meant to kill.
Andomaka hadn’t been able to find them a time when the assignation would be most likely to happen, so Alys and Ullin had set up a rough watch of their own, trading day for day. She’d spent the morning before finding plausible reasons to pace through the streets of Riverport, circling back to the house with blue shutters. Everyone she saw, she cataloged. There was the old man, the pinched woman, the rooster—that was a small man with angry eyes and a chest that preceded him through the doorway. There was an Inlisc girl whom she’d seen more than once with porcelain-smooth skin and full brown lips who looked like she could be someone’s lover, but Tregarro was adamant that the one they wanted was Hansch. And once, three streets over, she’d seen a group of three bluecloaks, the youngest of whom bore a resemblance to the old man. She’d even spent part of an hour following him, but the city guards had done nothing more than harass a vendor who was shy on his tax bill and break up a fight outside a taproom. She’d committed his face to memory, though. If she saw him again, she’d know him. If he was being discreet with a Hansch girl, she’d know that too.
That and feet so cold they’d gone numb and bloodless were all the day had brought her, and Ullin’s turn was up now. The next day she’d be out again, and there was more than one problem with that.
“A few days in a row?” Alys said, keeping her voice low enough that it didn’t carry even as far as the next table. “I can be overlooked. But every time I go is another chance that someone will take note. And then what happens?”
Sammish shrugged. Her gaze seemed to focus somewhere off Alys’s left shoulder. Her friend had grown thinner since they’d seen each other last. It was a look Alys had seen before when someone’s fortunes had started to slip. When the choice was between freezing in the street or not eating, starvation killed you slower. In the summer, it might have been different. Sammish might have taken the coin that paid for her bed and used it for a bowl of trout or a sack of walnuts. Warm nights in Kithamar had their dangers, but they were easier to live through than the cold. But here Alys was, with good work for solid money, and Sammish couldn’t be bothered to pay her full attention.
“You’re perfect for this,” Alys said. “It’s like being the walk-away, but there’s not even that chance of getting caught. You didn’t do anything. And when the time comes, you won’t be the blade. You’ll be here, or at some brewer’s house, or sitting on a bench with half a dozen bluecloaks. It won’t matter. You come be our eyes for a few days, and I’ll see that Andomaka pays you.”
Sammish shook her head, and Alys’s impatience ratcheted up again.
“This will get you enough to last to thaw. It’s not even a hard pull. I don’t know why you’re being stubborn about it.”
“Stubborn,” Sammish said. Alys was starting to wonder if maybe the girl was drunk on hunger. It happened. Someone hadn’t eaten in a few days and their mind went soft sometimes. Maybe what she needed to do was get a bowl of broth and a crust of bread, then explain the offer again. But when Sammish spoke again, her words were clearer and sharp at the edges. “What are you doing?”
“I just told you,” Alys said. “He brings the girl to his old house. We’re learning the place. When we see the rhythm of it, we can—”
“You can what? Murder a girl because your Green Hill friends told you to?”
“Keep your voice down!”
Sammish did, leaning forward and speaking low, but her words had a serrated edge. “What do you tell yourself this is? You went into it because you wanted to know Darro didn’t die because of you. You’ve known that for months. You think this girl you’re stalking after killed him? She didn’t, and what’s more, you don’t think she did. You don’t care whether she did.”
The same irrational fear she’d felt in her dreams poured into Alys’s chest like ice water filling a cask. She leaned back on her bench and scowled at Sammish like she was scolding a dog that had nipped at her.
Sammish wouldn’t be stopped. “You’ve never killed anything more than a rat, and now you’re some kind of assassin? A year ago, you’d have turned away from a pull like this in half a heartbeat. Now you don’t ask anything about it, just put your head down and bull forward. And do you know why?”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I’m done with this.”
Sammish’s hand was quick as a snake; her fingers wrapped around Alys’s wrist like a guardsman’s rope. “Because you’re so afraid to stop and look. This whole plan to take on your brother’s work isn’t about getting justice. It’s not even about getting revenge. It’s about not having him be dead, but he is. He’s dead. You’re turning yourself into him so that he’ll still be in the world, and who gives a shit if it eats you while it happens? And what’s more, it’s not even working. You’re not him. You aren’t, and you never will be.”
Alys made her voice deep and hard. It barely shook at all. “You’re hurting,” she said. “Take your hands off me. Now.”