“Like I said. After harvest. Just before your brother’s nameday.”
If he’d slapped her, it would have stung less. She and Sammish had hunted for Orrel together, but Sammish had found him and kept it secret. She found herself touching her wallet like she was making sure it was still there. Like she was seeing whether she’d lost something.
Nimal drank the last of his beer, handed the cup back to the boy at the brewer’s stand, and looked at her, tilting his head. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Look, it’s none of mine. Your work’s yours. But is this about what happened to Darro?”
It was. It had been. It had all been about Darro, about losing him and the pain of his being gone. About making it right. Why won’t you look at my face? The buzzing was louder than the crowd that cheered the tumblers. The spring sun was too bright and too hot. She turned her back and stalked away, not caring what Nimal thought. Not caring about anything but the tightness in her chest and the trembling in the world. She bumped into someone as she passed through the crowd, and didn’t look back to see who it was.
She walked toward Longhill. The afternoon sun shifted toward the palace. The streets reeked. Her hands ached, and she forced herself to unball her fists. She had been angry for weeks, it felt like. She couldn’t remember not being angry; even if there had been stretches when she’d forgotten it, the rage had always been there at the back, hadn’t it? It didn’t seem possible that she could be so consumed by it now if it hadn’t always been there, waiting in the dark of her soul and growing.
Sammish had betrayed her. Sammish had known where Orrel was, had gone to speak with him, and kept whatever he’d said from her. Well, she’d find Sammish and whatever plot Sammish was working, and she’d turn it over to Andomaka like a shovel turning up grubs. She marched to her room, climbing in the darkness, unlocking her door. She would grab the candle, reach back to Tregarro and Andomaka, and tell them all she knew and hadn’t said about who and what Sammish was. They would set the dogs on her.
Darro’s ashes stood where she’d left them. The yellow wax of the deathmark caught the sun that pressed in through the cracks in the shutters. She went toward her safe cache, but the storm in her head and the presence of her brother’s small, dark box distracted her. She sat on the bench by the little table. Her breath was ragged, and she didn’t know why.
But Andomaka had set the dogs on Sammish already, hadn’t she? That was Alys. Green Hill might call her little wolf girl, but what they meant was dog.
“I’m angry,” she said to the darkness, to the ashes, to Longhill all around her. “I’m so angry.”
But she meant a hundred things more than that. She was angry and confused. Angry and embarrassed. Angry and, though she couldn’t think why, ashamed. The urge came upon her to lash out at Darro’s box, shatter the wood under her club and spill the ashes onto the floor. She’d cocked her arm back before she reined the impulse in. She bared her teeth at the deathmark instead.
“Fuck you,” she growled at her dead brother. “Fuck you.”
She went to the safe cache, but not for the candle. She took the coins instead. All that was left of them. She would spend them all if that’s what it took to find Sammish. If that was what it took to throw a wet cloth over the fires burning in her head. She’d find another way to pay for the room, or if she didn’t she’d leave them. Nothing mattered now but making this right. Making it stop.
She went back down the chimney-dark stairs, swinging her club against the walls as she went, taking pleasure in the violence of the sound and the jolt in her hand. There was a way. There was a path through the city that began with her and led to Sammish, and all she had to do was find it.
The spring streets were fuller than the cold of winter or the steam and sweat of summer would allow. A few mule-drawn carts, but mostly the men and women and children and dogs of the quarter filling the narrow, curving streets. The voices and wheels made a murmuring like the river’s. She passed the turn that led to Ibdish’s, and for a moment she was the girl who’d fled there on coronation day, a city guardsman with bare blade and violence in his eyes at her heels. It seemed like something from a dream.
A wide-faced, thick-shouldered girl not more than ten years old squatted against a wall. A thin, white-haired boy sat at her side. Big Salla and Elbrith, trading something back and forth between them with the seriousness of gamblers at the brewer’s window. Big Salla looked up at Alys as she passed, the young girl’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. Alys ignored her and kept walking.
But she was aware in a way she hadn’t been before of the richness of her cloak, the worked leather of her belt. Even the stitching on her boots spoke of money spent, of status, of power. She’d known that when she bought them. It was what she’d wanted. What she’d paid for. It felt like a costume now, and she became aware of how much gold was in the little wallet folded at her hip. If someone had been foolish enough to walk past her with that much coin when she’d been Big Salla’s age, she would have made a try for it, crew at her back or no. If the little girl came for it, Alys would crack her skull and be grateful for the chance to. She didn’t know what that said about her, only that it was truth.
She imagined Sammish appearing in the street before her. Why not? Longhill was her home too, and there weren’t so many streets and alleys that finding each other by chance would have been odd. The baker’s house where Sammish kept her room was only a few corners from where Alys was now. If she didn’t want to talk to anyone, to ask anything, she could just pace these streets until the inevitable happened… and then…
And then she wasn’t sure. Grab the girl and march her to Green Hill? It was a long way. Beat her until she broke, and haul her back to Darro’s ashes where she could use the candle to summon Tregarro and his swords? Maybe that. The details hardly mattered. She’d find Sammish.
And do what Darro would have done?
The thought came through the blare and haze like someone had whispered it in her ear. In truth, Alys didn’t know what Darro would have done in her place. She couldn’t picture him in it, and that as much as anything frightened her.
She turned down the street she’d been going toward, only realizing as she did that she’d had a destination in mind. She walked down the street she hadn’t passed since five days before Longest Night. The ice and snow that had been there then was melted and gone and forgotten.
The door was narrow, and it hadn’t been oiled in years. The pegs had been bored out and replaced, and the latch was old iron that streaked its rust down the wood. Alys hefted her club, feeling its weight in her hand as she readied it to knock. She hesitated, put it back down, and used the back of her knuckles.
A voice came from within, but there were no words in it. A grunt, maybe, or a muttered curse, then footsteps. Her mother opened the door and met Alys without expression. There were red marks on her cheek where she’d slept too long without moving. The room behind her was dark, and the air that came from the house smelled of old, stale wine.
“I’m looking for Sammish. I thought she might have come to speak with you,” Alys said. “I didn’t know you were sleeping.”