He was sitting on the altar like it was a table, and he was playing some little game, but it wasn’t dice. He wore a simple robe, warm against the chill air. A brazier on high iron legs was beside him, and the smoke from it was fragrant. She turned to leave, and he looked up. His expression was mildly curious. Sorry. Need my pan was on her lips, but she saw his eyes and the shape of his face. The color of his hair. He was older than she’d imagined him from Saffa’s stories.
Her heart beat like bird wings and any thought of her false story blew away like ashes in a high wind. The boy’s eyebrows rose as he saw her better.
“Timu?” she said.
“Who are you?” His voice sounded a bit like Saffa’s too. The same reed-like music in it, but without her accent.
“Your mother sent me,” she said. “I’ve come to get you home.”
There were voices. Alys heard them as they reached the landing. A man and a woman, too indistinct to make out words, but the tone wasn’t of love. If the hope had been to catch them together in the throes of passion, it didn’t seem likely.
The floors at this higher level were of dark wood sealed with oil and hard wax, and they shone like stones in the river. Windows with a dozen palm-sized panes set in lead filled the hall with soft light and looked out over the herb garden below. Window boxes with living green plants stood in the light and brought a sense of the garden into the space, protected from the hissing winds outside. It was beautiful.
It occurred to Alys that this was a home. People lived here, with these solid walls and bright windows. The grand halls of Green Hill never struck her as human. They were too grand, too strange. But this was like Longhill could have been if it had been richer, surer, less desperate. It made the house feel obscene.
Ullin shot an angry look at her, and she realized she’d made a little sound—grunt or laugh or growl—deep in her throat. She nodded, half apology, half merely acknowledging that she’d made a mistake. But the voices hadn’t changed. She and Ullin had gone unnoticed so far. They crept forward, trying to keep the floor from creaking. Her hands ached.
The closer they came, the clearer the voices grew. Both were distressed, but in different ways. The guardsman spoke in a low, controlled voice, less anger than tight frustration. Or fear. The girl’s voice was higher. Not shrill, not chiding, but rich with pain that bordered on despair. Whatever they were to each other, it didn’t sound as if it was going well.
“It’s the same for me,” the boy said.
“Nothing is the same for us,” the dead girl said. “It can’t be. We aren’t the same.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“I know.” And then a long breath later, and more softly, “I know.”
Ullin reached the door that the voices had come from, even as they stopped. There was some softer sound. A rustling of cloth. Maybe the two were finally done talking and getting around to the business of sex. Alys felt almost dizzy, with a growing sense of not being the one inside her body. Her mouth was dry.
“Do we go in?” she whispered, and from the other side of the door, the boy said What’s that?
Ullin pressed his lips thin—annoyance and disappointment. She’d gotten it wrong again. She didn’t have time to say she was sorry for it. Ullin took a step back, kicked the door open, and they charged inside. Alys—shamed, frightened, divorced from herself, and ready for murder—followed after.
Timu blinked, shook his head, and laughed once as if at a joke only he understood. For a tense moment, she thought he was going to refuse her. Then he took her hand, and she smiled, trying to be reassuring. This wasn’t her plan, and never had been. Sneak in, map the place, sneak out, and then make a plan was very different from sneak in, grab the boy, and run like hell.
“If we find anybody, let me talk,” she said.
“What will you tell them?”
“That…” Her mind danced. “That they saw lice in your hair, and Andomaka’s having me bathe you and shave your head.”
“That’s good,” Timu said. “You know Andomaka’s name.”
“We have friends in common,” Sammish said, and led him back along the way she’d come. “I mean, not always friends we like much, but there you have it.”
“Not that way,” Timu said. “Follow me.”
He tugged her toward the back of the temple. She didn’t like it. Retreat was never the time to go exploring, but he’d been in the house longer than she had, and apparently with enough freedom that they left him unguarded. Which was odd.
“Hurry,” he said, pulling at her, and Sammish let herself be led deeper into the brotherhood’s house. He ducked behind one of the tapestries, and back to a curving hall that it concealed. She went ahead of him. For the story to make sense, she had to be the one taking him. He had lice. She was fixing that. She tried to believe it, but something was wrong. The back of her mind wouldn’t let the new story fit.
“Where is she?” Timu asked quietly.
“What?”
“My mother. Where is she? She’s in the city?”
“Yes,” Sammish said. Once they got out of the brotherhood’s house, they’d either have to head south through Green Hill toward Stonemarket or north to the bridge to Riverport. The first got them to Saffa faster, but it meant going through more of Green Hill. Leaving the quarter fast might be better, even if it meant half a day’s walk through the eastern half of the city. But she shouldn’t be thinking about that. The pan or the lice or something else. She was thinking like someone trying to escape, and so if anyone saw her, that’s what they would see.
“Where?” the boy asked.
“She’s safe. I’ll get you to her.”
“But where is she?”
They turned another corner and what had been a hall opened into a narrow courtyard with winter-killed ivy climbing up the face of the walls. There was no one there. Their luck couldn’t hold much longer. The sky was the grey-blue of slate, dark as twilight though the sun wouldn’t fall for hours. Distant thunder rumbled. The first real storm of springtime. It would help if it kept people in the homes and taprooms. Assuming they got that far.
“How do we get to the street?”
“It isn’t far this way. But where is she?”
She was reluctant to answer, and she didn’t know why. Maybe only because she was in the heart of the enemy’s place, and it seemed like bad luck. That, and it kept her from thinking about the lice. Fortunately, the boy was at ease. Bad enough that she couldn’t focus, but if he was acting like a prisoner slipping his chains, they’d be caught for certain.
And he wasn’t. He wasn’t acting that way at all.
Sammish’s skin crawled as she understood what the back of her mind had been screaming since she stepped into the temple. The thing looked back at her with the boy’s too-innocent eyes.
Alys saw it all in an instant. The bedroom larger than any she had ever seen; the rooms she’d taken from Darro could have fit inside it. The bed with four posts holding up thin, gauzy fly netting. A scholar’s desk under a window with paper shutters that let in soft light while hiding the room from prying eyes. The walls painted with flowers.