She knew before she saw the body. It wasn’t rot; the world was too cold for that. But death had a smell all its own. The only light was from the door, and it was enough to see Linnet there on her cot, curled up. The brazier beside her was scorched where the wood had been, and ashes lay in the bowl. The rats hadn’t taken to her, which was a kindness. In death, she looked younger. Or if not younger, at peace. Spring was coming, that was true. But not for Linnet.
Linly sat on the end of the cot and patted the dead woman’s thigh as if she could still be comforted.
“Good work, you,” she said. “No more Linly and Linnet, I guess, but that’s mine to carry. You did good work. You should rest proud.”
There was no answer, nor had she expected one. Everything that rose, fell. Everything born, died. The only questions ever were when and who was left behind.
She sat there, communing with the dead woman for a time, then went to find a bluecloak who could call for the body men.
The weather was foul and threatening storm the second time Sammish went to Green Hill—low, angry clouds and a wind damp enough to leave the cobbles slick.
She’d thought that taking away the banners and decorations of the harvest festival would leave the quarter looking less than it had, but the truth was the absence only changed it. It was like seeing someone in a gilt mask shaped like a wolf, and then removing it to discover they’d been a panther all along. Green Hill in the midst of harvest had been a cacophony of magic and illusion. Green Hill at the trailing edge of winter, standing as it was under a low and ominous sky, was wide and austere. Its houses were clad in stone, its streets so clean it was hard to believe they’d been used, and the servants and low courtiers who walked under its bare arbors and leafless trees would all have been beautiful in Seepwater or Longhill.
Sammish felt like an impostor just breathing the same air that they did. Which, fair enough, she was.
She and Saffa stayed off the larger avenues where the carriages and litters travelled, keeping to the narrower alleys and back ways meant for servants and mules. The brotherhood’s house had been designed to be seen from the front, but even this oblique view of it impressed Sammish. It was less a building and more a small quarter to the city in itself. Ivy rose along its walls, and a patio in carved marble led to its public temple. Its private rites and mysteries were available only to those invited in, but Kithamar had more gods than sparrows, and most of them gave out a free taste to whoever wanted it. The fountain at the patio’s side was empty, the pipes dry against the winter cold. In summer, it would have been astounding.
The nearest thing to the Daris Brotherhood in her experience was Aunt Thorn’s little fortress beneath Longhill, but even that would have needed ten of its own kind stacked one atop the other to match the brotherhood’s compound. It would have been the central fact of any other district of Kithamar. In Green Hill, it was one ostentation among many.
Sammish wore a servant’s dress she’d borrowed from Averith, who’d kept it from when her sister had taken a place at a Riverport merchant’s house. The sister was dead now from a bad childbirth, but the dress was decent, and it almost fit her. Saffa walked at her side, a brown cloak pulled tight around her, a hood concealing her hair and her features. Sammish could feel the anxiety in the older woman’s walk and see it in the way she held her shoulders. She tried to imagine what it would be like, coming so close to the home of your enemy. Whether the urge to run back from the danger or forward into the fray would be stronger. She didn’t know, and it didn’t matter.
“I should wait for you,” Saffa said.
“You shouldn’t,” Sammish said. “You should walk around the outside of the compound with me once the way we planned. You should look for any signs your son might have left to guide a rescue. And then you should go back to your hole in Stonemarket and wait for me.”
Saffa didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.
“We’ll be fine,” Sammish said. “This will work.”
“You don’t know that.”
Sammish shrugged. Of course she didn’t.
Riverport wasn’t quite in riot, but the energy in every passing stranger spoke of its anxiety and unease. The magistrates were taking up the complaint against the winter caravan, just the way everyone had known they would. The guilds and merchant houses were in array against each other. Fortunes were going to be made and lost before the sun set. Even if Garreth Left’s family hadn’t been at the center of the controversy, they’d likely have gone to watch. Everyone else would be there. As it was, the house was as good as promised to be empty for the lovers to use. The sky was dark with low, blue-grey clouds that blotted out the sun, and the breeze had a thick, eerie texture that told Alys worse was coming. More snow, maybe. Or something worse.
“You’re upset,” Ullin said.
“I’m paying attention. You should be paying attention too.”
They were walking around the household of the family Left the way they would have if they’d meant to rob it: changing their appearance a little each time they passed, coming together one time and apart the next, never looking quite the same way twice. If she was still angry—not that she was, but if—it was only that Sammish should have been with them on the pull. But Sammish was too busy being a little shit, so never mind her.
What Alys hated was the way her once-friend had corrupted her own tools. She’d spent months now growing into Darro’s shoes. She walked the way he’d walked, swung her club the way he’d swung his, held herself the way she remembered his body. But now when she did, Sammish’s voice threaded its way into her mind like a thistle in a wool cloak. This that you’re doing? It doesn’t even rhyme with him. How would she know? Darro wasn’t her brother. Sammish hadn’t grown up around Darro and his friends. No one liked Sammish. Not even Alys, now.
But it irritated her that Sammish had been able to put that grit into her wheels. Trying to make her doubt her connection with her brother was unforgivable, and that Sammish had almost, sort of, halfway managed it was worse.
“To the right,” Ullin said. His voice was light and casual, but the words hit her all the same. And yes, there ahead of them was the bluecloak, only he wasn’t wearing his blue cloak or his badge of office. He was just a young man with a sword at his hip and an anxious look in his eyes. Alys looked down and started counting her steps to fifty the way Darro had told her. The way Darro would have done himself.
“Girl?” she said quietly.
“Not that I’ve seen yet,” Ullin said. She could hear his smile. “We will, though. Today is our day.”
She imagined telling Andomaka it was done and saw the pleasure in the pale woman’s face. The gratitude. She knew she had to hold that image if she was going to get through to nightfall. You’ve never killed anything more than a rat.
“We’re strong. We can do this,” she said, and took a firmer grip on her club.
Sammish felt bored and a little bit put upon. Normally it was easy. She would just be the girl who was like that, and it happened, simple as putting on a jacket. Today it was hard. Her body was vibrating with fear and hope and an anger that she’d been carrying so consistently that she was starting to wonder if it would ever pass. Taking all of that and fitting it into a version of her that was just moving through another dull day in order to reach an uninteresting night was like pulling a sock over a street cat. Might be possible, but it also might not.