“She goes by several,” Alys lied. It was a reflex. If she’d been able to think, she wouldn’t have, but her body knew the smell of a predator. Instinct led her to the strategies of the Longhill street rat that she was. “But I know where she sleeps. I can find her.”
Andomaka leaned back on the bench, stroking her chin as if she were a man touching a beard. For a moment, the silence between them was brittle. The pale woman came to her decision.
“Hunt her down,” Andomaka said. “Bring her here.”
That’s all you can tell me?” the coachman said. He had a way of scowling that Tregarro found annoying. It was as if the man was making a mask of his own face. They stood in the yard nearest the stables, the late morning sun pressing down from a blue-white sky. If there had been even a breath of wind, it would have been frigid. With only sunlight and still air, the day could have been mistaken for warm.
“It’s what you can start with.”
The coachman scowled again and shook his head. “There’s a lot of Inlisc girls who don’t look like much of anything, boss. Wasn’t there anything about her that stood out?”
“She was in the private temple without anyone stopping her. That was exceptional.”
“How am I supposed to look for where someone was before they got where they are now? It’s not like there’s a mark on her from it.”
Tregarro scratched his cheek with a casualness he didn’t feel. The coachman had been one of his most trusted knives for half a decade. The impatience he felt now was likely more about himself than his hired man’s impertinence. “Try going to taprooms near Longhill and listening. If someone’s drunk and bragging, maybe you hear it. If someone stops talking when you mention the Daris Brotherhood, maybe you notice it. I’m giving you the place to start from. If I knew the whole path to the finish, I wouldn’t need people like you.”
If he put a little roughness into the words people like you, the coachman didn’t notice. He only shook his wide head in a performance of despair. “That’s going to be a hard fish to hook.”
“You aren’t doing it alone. Everyone is on this. If you’re the one to haul her in, it’s well worth the time.”
“I’ll do what I can,” the coachman said, as if there had been an option.
Tregarro wasn’t offering work that his people could pick up or turn down at will. He was instructing them. But he was also aware that he was raw and itching. When he felt like this, it was too easy to start fights he regretted later. “I trust you to.”
Mollified, the coachman nodded, turned, and trundled back across the courtyard to the stables. Tregarro stretched his shoulders, trying to get the tightness out of his joints. It had been there for days.
Thaw was past, and the vines that climbed the courtyard wall were already wrapping themselves in fresh green so bright they looked false as a child’s memory of leaves. The early flowers were already blooming, and the air smelled like the promise of summer that hadn’t come. He had the sudden and visceral memory of walking through this same space only a year before and finding Andomaka here. She had been sitting with the corpse of a bird, looking at it as if it were singing to her.
The true thread of Kithamar—the founding spirit that had held the city safely in the world from its first days—had returned, what had been broken was mended, and the idea that anything could turn the avenging blade of the Daris aside seemed impossible. If the price of that was that he wouldn’t find Andomaka kneeling over dead feathers in a springtime courtyard, it was what he’d sworn to suffer. He would be fine with it.
He made his solitary way around the perimeter of the house compound. Half a dozen buildings from the great central house to the carved granite toolsheds. Some were connected by covered walkways, some by buried passages, some not at all. They made up his little nation. Kithamar was bounded by its walls, by custom and status and its boughs and branches. The Daris Brotherhood was bounded by Tregarro’s will, and it had been breached once already. It wouldn’t happen again.
Turning the corner at the eastern edge, he found two of his guard leaning against the wall, scowling at the traffic on the street. Their narrowed eyes and casual posture, the hands they rested on the pommels of their blades, made them look like a weak man’s idea of strength. Tregarro’s half-formed sorrows shifted easily toward them, and he strode along the edge of the street. His guards’ eyes were dazzled with servants in the colors of half a dozen houses, carts piled high with flowers and vines with black soil clinging to pale roots ready to be planted in the kitchen gardens of the powerful, and a small company of redcloaks marching in north from the palace. Tregarro was fewer than a dozen steps from them when his slouching guard caught sight of him and straightened.
He stopped before them, waiting with the same calm, silent attention a houndsman might use to scold a pup. The two men tried nodding their salute, then a more formal raising of their hands. Their eyes were bright and anxious, and their relief was unmistakable when he returned the gesture.
“Anything?” he asked.
“No sir,” the senior of the pair said. “Nothing of note.”
Tregarro let his gaze move along the roadside. His gaze lingered for a breath or two on the retreating forms of the palace guard. If Byrn a Sal knew for certain the secrets and intentions of the brotherhood, he wouldn’t be seeing the redcloaks from the back. They’d either be facing him or they’d be as invisible as wind. He allowed himself a thin smile. Other than that, a servant girl who stumbled and was steadied by her mother. A merchant’s cart pulled by a beautiful grey mare worth more than everything she hauled. A flight of geese, high above the city, honking and calling in their ragged line. One of his guards swallowed uncomfortably.
“Well enough, then,” Tregarro said. “But stay sharp. You’re not a pair of taproom knives. You’re the face of the Daris Brotherhood.”
A flicker of shock passed through the young one’s eyes, as if Tregarro’s scars made even the mention of the word face a dangerous choice. He was sorry he hadn’t been harsher with them, but changing his course now would seem petty. Would be petty. Would seem petty because it was.
“Report in at the end of your guard,” he said. “I’ll want a full account.”
“Yes sir. Of what, sir?”
“Make it as full as you can,” he said. “I’ll tell you whether it was enough.”
He turned on his heel and walked back the way he’d come. Well, fine. Just a bit petty after all.
Sammish didn’t change her stride when the scarred man came around the corner, but her heart sped up. It was their third time around the brotherhood’s house, this time with Sammish dressed as a servant girl and Saffa as her mother. Before, Sammish had been blind and Saffa led her. Before that, they’d been hauling sacks of laundry. No one had taken notice of them as Sammish had made her study.
The change in the brotherhood’s compound was the difference between sleeping and wakefulness. Where she had walked into the Daris Brotherhood before, there were double sets of guards now. And worse, the guard had the too-sharp manner of men in the shadow of the whip. Any cutter worth salt would call off a pull when they saw the intended victim come alert. It was madness not to. And if the compound had been complacent before, it was sharp as a needle now. The side door that had stood open with servants gossiping through it was closed. The watch stations where men had played dice and traded jokes had no games in them. The brotherhood had even put mercenaries on the public street. If a house in Longhill had changed its demeanor so much, everyone from the southern gate to the Temple would have known there was trouble brewing, but Green Hill seemed to think that noticing such things was beneath its dignity. Or maybe they smelled trouble differently than Sammish did.