She didn’t weep. She was done with that. The shock and sorrow had been hard as a fever at first, but they were gone. All that was left were the bone-deep dread and the shame of her own cowardice. Darro would have followed through. Darro would have killed the girl. The box of ashes was on the table. From where she lay, she could just catch sight of it. One of her shutters was open, and the sunlight fell on Darro’s deathmark like the gods were pointing a finger at it.
“You would have, wouldn’t you?” But even in her imagination, her brother was silent.
The ache and emptiness she’d felt that terrible day at the temple when she’d seen Darro’s corpse had been pure and overwhelming. Something had screamed in her then, and gone on screaming for weeks. She still felt it sometimes, but she had to work for it now. She had to will the pain back to its fresh, transcendent rawness. The ache was duller now. Grey as ashes.
She was losing him. Darro’s face, his voice, the way he held his weight over his feet like he was always on the verge of running. She could remember them, but they didn’t intrude on her the way they had. The grief was in her, but it was weary, and she was weary along with it. And Darro wasn’t there to help her remember. She wanted the pain back. She wanted it to whip her on, because if it didn’t she might decide to stay in her little bed in the shadows and let herself starve or else eat her own shame until it poisoned her.
“I don’t know what Ullin did. You’ll have to ask him,” she said.
She wanted to feel bad for Ullin, and she did, a little. She’d liked him well enough, and seeing him dead was a blow. But she’d felt pure grief before this. She was a proud citizen of grief, and flew its flag in her heart. With Ullin, it was nearer to embarrassment that she’d let him down.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. And then, “Fuck.”
With a grunt, she hauled herself to sitting and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes. The candle was in her safe cache. All she had to do was light it, tell Andomaka what had happened and what hadn’t. Or tell her lies about it and brazen her way through. Anything would be better than waiting and worrying and chewing her own tongue with all the ways it had gone sour for her. Maybe she’d do it. She just needed a drink first. Beer or strong cider. A bowl of something warm in her gut. Then she’d do it. Get it over with. Be done.
Or maybe she’d light the candle, and the scar-cheeked Tregarro would appear instead. Or maybe he’d knock on her door.
“I have to get out of here. Get some food,” she said, opening her cache and grabbing up a few bronze coins. Darro didn’t answer. When she went, she left the shutter open as if he might enjoy the cool breeze and the light. If she felt a twist of disgust at herself for that, it was only one among hundreds, its significance overlooked.
The wooden walls and roofs of Longhill were dark with the runoff as old ice became fresh sludge. Rivulets of dark water ran down the streets, carrying away the dirt, shit, and food scraps of the long winter months. Rats gamboled in the shadows and in the sunlight, then scattered as dogs rushed in, barking in something part play and part hunt. The city was still cold, but the promise of spring made people want to believe it was warm. Men walked without jackets, their breath only smoking a little bit. Here and there, a girl had taken a summer skirt out, mended the winter’s damage of moth and mouse, and suffered gooseflesh for her optimism. The chill hadn’t gone, but the city was bent on pretending it had. If they did it long enough, it would become true.
Alys bought a cup of thick soup from a cart by the east wall and ate it while she walked. To the north, the Temple glittered in the sunlight, and the looming presence of Oldgate and Palace Hill was hidden by the wooden buildings on her left. She could almost imagine that everything west of the river had been washed away, and Kithamar become an Inlisc city the way it would have been had the Hansch never come.
She saw the funeral before she knew what it was. She crossed an intersection of two curved, shifting roads, and there almost at the bend a few people stood together. It could have been anything—a conversation about the weather or how to remake a wall thin with dry rot, a pull being organized or paying out, even just a collaboration of chance. But there was something in the way the people—adults and children both—stood and bowed their heads toward each other that spoke of sorrow. Alys slowed, turned, and walked toward them.
As she drew near, she knew some of the faces. Danna. Cane. Nimal. They stood outside an open door that someone had draped with a red cloth, talking in low tones. Nimal had tears on his cheeks, which was unnerving. Nimal was too worried about seeming strong and manly to weep easily. There were children with them—two girls young enough that they would have been genderless in different clothes—holding each other by the hand, a thin boy with bright white hair, an older girl with thick braids framing a broad and angry face. Alys knew them, even if she didn’t recall their names at first. The girl with braids was Danna’s daughter. The two holding hands had the same name, but she didn’t remember what it was. It would likely come back later, when she’d forgotten to think about it. She sucked down the last of her soup and shoved the empty cup in her sleeve. Cane saw her and nodded. Nimal saw her and looked away.
“Who passed?” she asked the thin, pale-haired boy. Elbrith. That was his name.
“Grey Linnet,” the boy said.
The name hit Alys like a stone thrown at her breastbone. “What happened?”
“She went to sleep, and she didn’t wake up,” Elbrith said. And then, with a solemn, knowing nod, “She woke down.”
Alys had known Linnet since she was younger than this boy. She’d gone to sweep the shores of the Silt with her and the other children. Nimal and Black Nel and Darro had too, before her. And this child, standing in front of her. How many generations of children had gone looking for mundane treasures at the side of the water with Linnet? There would have been a time not long ago that the idea Linnet could die would have been as ridiculous as the river dying. Linnet was a part of the city. Only she wasn’t. Hadn’t been. She’d been a woman, same as anyone, and just as mortal.
“I’m sorry,” Alys said, and the pale boy nodded as if she’d spoken a password or a reply in a religious rite. She’d said what she was supposed to say, and he approved. Odd child.
Alys went to the open door and stepped past the red cloth into the room beyond. It was a small space, narrower than her own room, with a cot and a thin mat of rushes on the ground, but it was filled with people. The air was hot, and it tasted like someone else had just breathed it out. There was little enough room to move through, but no one would run a pull here. Grey Linnet had lived alone, fighting for her food and a place out of the weather, but she had been known, and to judge by the press of bodies in the space now that she’d left it, she would be missed.
Alys would miss her.
She almost didn’t recognize her mother at first. The winter hadn’t been kind to her. She had looked wan on Darro’s nameday and lost more of the flesh from her cheeks since then. Her hair had been grey, but now it was thinning. Alys could see the shining, oily scalp back past her mother’s hairline. The whites of her eyes had taken on the yellow of old ivory, but her hands were steady and her eyes were dry. Caught up in conversation with an old, thick-bellied man, she didn’t see Alys.