The scarred man—the one Alys had called Tregarro—made his soft way to the guards, and the swordsmen went stiff with fear. Sammish became very aware of how easy it would be for the captain of the enemy guard to glance over at them. She wondered if he’d ever seen Saffa before, or drawings of her.
A merchant’s cart clattered down the street, heading toward her, a great grey mare stepping proudly before it. The scarred man turned his gaze to the street just as Sammish’s foot caught a loose stone, her ankle rolling. She stumbled just when he was looking toward her, and for a few knife-bright heartbeats, she was sure he’d seen her for what she was. Saffa took her arm.
“What’s wrong?” the woman muttered, but as she did, the guard captain looked away. Sammish felt the fear in her throat like she was going to be ill. She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak in case she did something else stupid that drew attention to them. Sammish tried to keep her body from trembling, but the shock added to her own hunger made her weakness hard to conceal. Saffa said nothing, but her face hardened.
“We should go around once more,” Sammish said.
“We should get food and a place to rest,” Saffa said, and this time Sammish didn’t fight. She only wanted to walk the compound’s perimeter again because she hadn’t seen the flaw in it that she needed. She’d had the chance to slip into the enemy’s rooms once, and she had wasted it. No matter how dearly she hoped to find a chance to do it again, it wasn’t there. She let Saffa turn her away from Green Hill and the palace and trudge south toward Stonemarket, where they would attract even less attention.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said as they turned into a slowly curving street that led toward the cistern. “I should eat. I’m not thinking straight.”
They stopped on a bench near the market square, but not in it. Saffa left her for a time and came back with little bowls of oats and egg. They weren’t seasoned, but Sammish ate it all down to the shine all the same. A girl with a handcart sold them fresh water with crushed mint to wash it down. Saffa paid with a bronze coin going green at the edge.
“I’m sorry,” Sammish said. “You shouldn’t have to do that. It’s my city. I can feed myself.”
The Bronze Coast woman didn’t answer. In the afternoon light, she looked old. The creases by her mouth were like bloodless cuts in her flesh, and her eyes were thick with fatigue. Sammish guessed that her own were too. It had been a hard year.
Around them, the traffic of Stonemarket flowed—carts and sacks and wagons. A yellow cat dashed by with something in its mouth, and Sammish noticed how much her city had grown in the months since Byrn a Sal had taken the throne. Her life had been Seepwater and Longhill and Riverport. The Temple had been outside of her private Kithamar, and Oldgate practically a foreign land. Now she was planning a pull in Green Hill and sitting on a Stonemarket bench among the Hansch without so much as feeling odd about it. Strange how things turned.
She thought of Alys, and sighed. Strange how things turned.
Without preamble, she said, “That was disappointing.”
“Yes,” Saffa agreed. And then, “What are your eyes seeing?”
Sammish leaned back and the springtime sunlight pressed itself against her eyelids as she spoke. “They’re watching. It makes things hard.”
“Possible, though,” Saffa said. “It has been done before.”
“That’s not what makes it possible. Someone put hands on the blade before, yes. But they’re like me.”
“How?”
“They did it and they got caught. Have you ever seen a street player doing false magic? Hiding a stone in his fingers or making birds come out of a girl’s skirts? Once you find the trick of it, that’s all you see. So it has to be something new every time. What the other ones did before, even if we knew it, it wouldn’t help because those fuckers know it too. If I’d slipped in and out before without them catching wise, I could get in that way again. But since they know, I have to find something else. If it were a normal pull, we could switch target. But these are the only bastards who have what I want.”
Saffa let the silence between them stretch, and Sammish felt her mind starting to come together. Whether it was the food or the rest, she couldn’t say, but she felt clear and solid.
“What we have against us is that they know to watch for us. More guards, more discipline. And they have power. Coin alone would be bad enough, but they’re like you. They know mysteries we likely don’t, and if there’s something sacred in that space, it’s sacred to them, not me.” She opened her eyes and turned to Saffa. “You don’t have anything you can do? Like with Orrel, or the plague street?”
“Ausai and Drau Chaalat knew me. This is the heart of their power, not mine.”
“Figured as much,” Sammish said. “That’s all right.”
“Is it?” Saffa said. “It sounds like doom.”
“That’s just what’s against us,” Sammish said. “There’s for us as well. There are house mice in Longhill we can go to if we need to. Calm Biran and Adric Stone. The compound’s large. Something that big is hard to watch. That means there’s more people.”
“That’s bad.”
“It’s good. We only need one hole to flow through. Each of those guards is a chance for the enemy to slip. And…” Sammish rubbed her fingertips together, feeling the grips of her fingers catch against each other. There was something else. Something at the edge of her mind that she hadn’t put words to before. Now the words came. “And they’re scared. Frightened. It puts them on guard, but it tempts them to make mistakes.”
“What mistakes?” Saffa asked, but Sammish didn’t hear her. Not really. Her mind was running ahead. If they couldn’t pull away, push in. They were on alert. How could she control that? They were afraid. How could she frighten them?
“The captain. Tregarro,” she said. “Do his scars look to you like they came from fire?”
Where is she?” Alys asked.
“Sammish?” Little Coop said. “Should I know? Sammish is more your friend than mine.”
It was still too cold for the shutters of the Pit’s common room to be open, but open they were. The keep’s hunger for the coming season drove him to pretend the warmth that had come was enough, and the drinkers and thugs and street rats of Longhill played along, throwing a little more wood into the grate and keeping their jackets around them. Some took their cider and beer out to the street to stand in the sunlight, where the spring had more nearly come. Finches no bigger than Alys’s thumb buzzed through the open windows and out again, chirping to one another. Lanna’s Hoel had returned from a winter’s contract clearing ditches for a farmstead east of the city, and was spending his bronze like he’d never run out.
Alys leaned forward, elbows on the scarred wood of the table. She scowled the way she would have around Ullin’s friends in Stonemarket to show that she was a woman to be feared, but Little Coop had known her on and off since they’d both been digging the edge of the Silt with Grey Linnet, and he only shrugged.
“Last I heard she was talking about some kind of pull with Adric Stone,” he said.