For a moment, she wasn’t sure her mother had heard her. A moment of fear, brief and bright as a falling star, went through her that something was wrong. That her mother was sick or lost in drink or that age had eaten her while Alys was away. Then the old woman shrugged and turned back to the darkness of the house. She left the door standing open. Alys waited for a moment, uncertain, before following her in.
She didn’t play, you know,” Tregarro said. “Andomaka, I mean. She didn’t play.”
“She may have picked up an interest,” it said with her mouth. “I have stepped into lives before this one. Still no sign of Elaine a Sal?”
Tregarro shook his head. They sat in a drawing room that overlooked the courtyard. The carved wood walls glowed with borrowed sunlight, seeming deeper than they were. Outside, birds sang their courting songs, and inside, the board between them was clear. It put the red beads on the starting places on its side, the clear ones before Tregarro. The captain of the Daris Brotherhood’s guard and initiate to its secrets waited for it to be done, then made a standard opening move. The thread of Kithamar considered whether to follow the old pattern or risk something new. After a moment, it refused the sacrifice, staying with the old strategies. A change in one thing might tempt it to change something else.
The scarred man was interesting. It had known him when it was Ausai and Tregarro an initiate from the east with a ready sword and a deep loyalty to the brotherhood. He had no roots in the city, and so his loyalties could be pure. While it had been the Bronze Coast boy, Tregarro had seemed much the same. It was only now that it was Andomaka that the guardsman had begun to seem different. Softer, with a mordant humor that he tried to keep hidden. Tregarro had become a strong and melancholy man. It didn’t know whether that was because Andomaka saw things like that more clearly in the same way her tongue changed the taste of salt, or because Tregarro had treated her differently than he had Ausai and the boy and now couldn’t change the habit.
“If we must find Elaine, though,” Tregarro said, “I know how to bring her out. She’ll have to come to her coronation.”
Was he showing off? Maybe. People often built dreams of and even love for those forbidden to them. If Tregarro had put a handle on the back of his head, there was no reason that the thing that called itself Kithamar shouldn’t use it. It canted its head forward, flirting with him, and looked up at him now with a half-smile. “You’re thinking the next step is to unmake Byrn a Sal?”
“Hear me out,” Tregarro said, pushing a bead. “I know you counsel patience. I understand it. But the Longhill girl was in here. She was at the altar. You held her by the hand, and she held yours. The boy’s mother was in the city, and there’s no reason to think she’s gone.”
“I have enemies. I’ve always had enemies.”
“And you’ve had the city to protect you. Now you only have me and mine. And if that is not enough, I will have failed in my sacred duty. If Byrn a Sal dies, Elaine will walk at his funeral and sit her coronation and we will know where she is, or else when he dies she’ll have vanished and you will be in the palace where you should be.”
There was something in its new-acquired breast that leapt at the idea. It let the smile widen a degree. Enough to show amusement, but not permission. It pushed a bead to block. “That’s blowing hot and cold out of the same mouth. The palace keeps its prince safe or else it doesn’t. Byrn has all the protections you’re offering me. Why do you think taking action is a better strategy than waiting for him to make a mistake?”
“I have a… thought. A plan. And even if it fails, it will only cost my life. Not yours.”
“Tell me.”
As they played, he spoke and it listened. Its mind shifted between the layers of what it heard: the plan itself and also how it was presented, the way its servant leaned forward as he spoke and the words he chose, the play of violence and politics as inevitable as the grooves in the board where the glass beads shifted. It might have been the lingering intoxication of danger or the impatience that came from feeling exposed or the echo of the trust Andomaka had had for this man, but it found itself being persuaded.
It shifted a crimson bead, closing the trap against the last clear piece, as Tregarro’s proposal reached its ending. The coincidence felt like an omen, and it caught a stray memory—a scrap of Andomaka that still remained in the labyrinth of her flesh. Shau the twice-born, walking the streets of the city in two girls. A bit of dream that hadn’t faded with daylight, meaningless.
It leaned back in the chair, the wood creaking under it, and for a long, quiet time it thought. Tregarro pressed his lips tight at first, anxious and uncertain, but with time the man’s emotions settled and the city’s did as well. It waited to see what it thought. It was safer now that it was in Andomaka’s flesh, but that didn’t mean it was safe. If the line of a Sal could be ended, and ended before Elaine found herself carrying some new babe it would have to kill along with her… It rubbed its new lips with the back of its new hand.
“There is some virtue in that,” it said. “But if you are captured, a Sal and his men will look to the brotherhood.”
“If I’m captured, I won’t be questioned,” Tregarro said. He meant he would die before he betrayed the brotherhood. It believed him.
It went through the connections of court like it was recalling the players in its favorite poem. Which of them would suspect that the sudden deaths of the prince and his daughter were more than mischance, and of those what fraction would care. It carried generations of intrigue in its mind. There would be ripples, complications, changes that it would need to make. It all would have been so much simpler if it had been able to take Byrn a Sal’s flesh instead of this.
It wondered now, looking back, at all the trouble it had had fathering a child when it had been Ausai. Apart from his secret bastard in the Bronze Coast, none of the women it had cultivated had managed a child. Had that been planned too?
“Ah, Tallis,” it said to its dead son and brother, “what did you think to win?”
It reached out and started putting the beads back in their starting places. The glass made soft, soothing ticks against the wood.
“Another game?” Tregarro asked.
“No, not now,” it said. “After the prince is dead.”
Adric had a long, horsey face for an Inlisc. His hair was black and curled, and he wore it pulled back in a way that he probably thought made him look dashing. He was also older than Sammish by a couple of years, which didn’t matter much now except that he might still think of her as too young and inexperienced to set her own pulls. At least, that was her fear.
She was on the street when she caught sight of him in the shadows under the canal bridge in the heart of Seepwater where the stoneworks met the water. Flatboats passed, poled by men without shirts who shouted casual obscenities at each other as they negotiated rights of way. On the bridge above him, a prison cart was preparing a load of shit, debris, and dead animals to toss into the water as they did every week. A few people braved the stink in hopes of seeing a boatman drenched in it. It happened sometimes. A pair of ruined leather shoes were nailed to a pole at canal’s edge, taken from a drowned corpse and left there in case anyone could recognize them and identify the dead. Sammish didn’t know them, though they looked well made. Kithamar might be up to its tits in thieves and corruption, but no one stole clothes from the drowned. There were limits.