“Thanks for that.”
“What happened to her anyway?”
Sammish shook her head. “She lost someone,” she said.
Alys waited for a moment, uncertain, before following her mother into the gloom of her house.
The stink of wine was stronger inside, and with it the smell of dust and sweat. Her mother seemed to sink into the dimness like a fish swimming down in murky water. Before Alys’s eyes could adapt to the darkness, there was a clatter of wood against wood, and her mother opened a thin set of shutters. Daylight spilled in, thin as milk water. The room was small and narrow, and the wood it was made from was dark with age and old smoke. There were two cots, one against either wall. One was clean, with a wool blanket folded neatly at its foot. Her mother sat on the other one. The floor was old earth, doused with steer’s blood and pounded until it was nearly hard as stone. A handful of rushes were strewn on it, but they didn’t look fresh. The only decoration was a length of yellow cloth nailed to the wall with a prayer written on it that Alys didn’t recognize.
Her mother saw her looking at it. “It’s not mine.”
“No?”
Her mother yawned and shook her wide head. “Thin Maddie prayed to the Faceless, and apparently it came through, because she’s gone all pious. I share the place with her and Coul. Rennie’s Coul, not Big Coul.”
“You’re a bed short.”
“They’ve got work in the days,” her mother said. “Thin Maddie’s cleaning for a couple families in Seepwater. Coul’s got a place on a flatboat, if he doesn’t show up late again. The pole man’s Hansch, and he don’t like Inlisc on his water. But the coin’s good.”
“What about you?”
Her mother heaved a great sigh. Her smile was joyless. “I’m hauling piss from the open troughs to a launderer’s yard in the Smoke. Half a bronze for every jug of it. They use it to keep the white cloth brighter. When that’s not work, there’s a butcher that lets me pull feathers off the birds. The piss money’s better, though. Things are harder since Timor went back south to the river villages. He could pull in enough coin we didn’t need anyone but us.” Timor. The thin man Alys had shouted down the day that Darro died.
“Why didn’t you go with him?” Alys asked, and it didn’t come out as harshly as she’d meant it to. It sounded almost like she cared. The thickness in her mind was still loud.
“I’m Longhill,” was all her mother said.
A silence fell between them. Alys felt it like a hand on her shoulder, pressing down. She crossed her arms and squared herself. Her mother’s glance down and up along her felt like a joke she wasn’t in on. “I’m looking for Sammish.”
“You said.”
“Have you seen her? Did she come talk with you?”
“What do you want her for?”
“She betrayed me.” She hadn’t said the words to anyone until now, and they were like opening a door. She clenched her fists until they ached, trying to steady herself, but the fog and confusion that had been spinning her around like a dancer at a masquerade had lifted its mask. Now that she knew it was sorrow, she could no more stop feeling it than will her skin numb. Fat tears dropped from her eyes. She tried to put rage in her voice, but what came out was the wail of a child. “She said she was helping me, but she found Orrel weeks ago. Months ago. And she didn’t tell me. I did everything. I almost killed a girl because they told me to, and all this time, Sammish knew. She knew what happened to Darro. She probably knows who killed him and she…”
Didn’t tell me was lost in a cough and a sob. Alys’s club dropped to the ground with a soft clatter, and she closed her eyes, willing her body to stop. Demanding that the vast sadness tearing through her go back to its cage where she could forget it again.
Everything seemed to bleed together. Darro’s pale body on the altar and Ullin’s blood-soaked face, Sammish’s unexpected contempt, and Nimal talking of Orrel and the girl Alys had been meant to kill but didn’t. Everything stood on everything else, until she didn’t know what she was mourning for except all of it. She was overwhelmed by a storm she couldn’t see, but felt it beating at her from every direction.
She turned her back on her mother, wrapped her arms tightly around her belly, and stood as still as her weeping would allow. The tears felt like she was vomiting out a black river that would never end. Her face was hot. The corners of her mouth pulled down fish-like and hurting. Her nose was running like she was sick, and she ached at the core from belly to heart.
Some timeless hour later—a minute or a day—she heard her mother shift, and expected to feel soft, enfolding arms pulling her into an embrace like she was still small, but when she looked over, her mother had only pulled one foot up onto the cot and leaned against the wall. Sad Linly watched her with the same impassive calm a butcher might have for a pig being led into the slaughterhouse.
“What?” Alys spat.
“Darro killed Darro. Anyone holding the blade was coincidence.”
Alys felt her jaw slide forward. Her body felt raw, like her skin had been stripped away and even a breath of air could sting her like salt on a wound.
Her mother shrugged. “It’s truth. I loved my boy to the stars and down again. It broke me, him dying. But it wasn’t a surprise. He was too much of his own. He thought he was cleverer than everyone else put together. As soon as he moved away from me, I saw how it would be. I hoped I was wrong, but I wasn’t.”
“Take that back,” Alys said.
“Or what? You’ll beat me?” Her mother leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and shook her head. “I loved my boy, and I mourned him. I won’t be done mourning him ’til it’s my turn on the pyre. But I know what he was. Thought he was better than everyone else, that his shit didn’t stink. It got him in trouble, and not just this last time.”
“He was…” Alys began, and then realized she didn’t know how to end.
“He looked out for you,” her mother said. “And he dreamed big. Give him that. If he’d stolen the moon one night, he’d have been scheming against the sun come morning.”
“He was helping to save the city,” Alys said. “Not just Longhill. Everything.”
“Did he tell you that? Or was it his puppeteers up in Green Hill?”
Alys reached for an answer and came back with silence.
Her mother pointed at her with a rueful smile, taking the silence for a reply. “He sang the song for them, but all he wanted was the coin and the chance at something bigger. Broader. Grander. He was never going to make it there. He was their hired knife, and they were never going to let him be more.”
“His rooms were better than this,” Alys said, gesturing at the hovel around them, and her mother laughed.
“How do you think he paid for them? The sweat of his honest brow? His cunning and stealth?” Her laughter was serrated. “Every few weeks he came by with that sad smile of his and a story and promise that he’d get it all back to me. I should have cut him off. Should have told him that if he wanted help, he could bring a bedroll and take a spot on my floor. Save up his coins until he could do whatever it was this time. But he was my boy, and it would have humiliated him, so I gave in. When he died, he owed me eighteen in silver. You know what I could do with eighteen in silver? Not share a cot with Thin Maddie for one thing.”