“You paid for his rooms?”
“And his jaunty clothes and his boots. And probably his whores and pork bowls and beer. What’s worse? I borrowed sometimes to do it. I thought it would be better. Someone gets a young man like that in debt, and they can make him do things to come even. The kind of things that puts a magistrate’s rope around your neck. If there was going to be a burden carried, better it be mine than my babies’.” She shook her head in disgust. “Go ahead and laugh. I’m funny.”
“That’s not truth. He worked. He made his own pulls.”
“He was better at spending than working. He was looking for the one grand gesture that squared everything. Only when he found it, he died and gave it all to you, didn’t he?”
“I was doing what he did,” Alys said.
“If you had been, you’d have been begging me for money, not shaming me to everyone on the street. Not attacking me at my son’s wake. Not turning away from me every time I saw you like I smelled like someone fresh from the shit carts.”
Alys didn’t know she was going to shout until she was already shouting. “I was keeping him alive!”
For once her mother didn’t flinch or even turn away. “How did that go? Is he living?”
“There’s more of him here than if you’d been left to it alone,” she said, but the words had no weight. She sounded petulant and young, even to herself.
“Some days, I think Caria was the best child I had,” her mother said. “She didn’t live long enough to treat me like you two did.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Who gives a shit? Who promised you fair? I didn’t. Fair is good people get treated good, and bad people get the bad. That sound like anyplace you know? I’ve never been there.”
Her mother’s cheeks were shining in the dim light, wet with tears Alys hadn’t seen falling until now. There was no thickness in her voice to announce her sorrow, just the vast weariness of rage pithed by hopelessness.
Alys sat on the other cot, old wood creaking under her weight. The noise and storm had gone from her mind, and what was left was calm and empty and exhausted. She felt still—really still—for the first time she could recall. “I want him back.”
“I do too. But we can’t have him. So we have to let him go.”
“I don’t want to. I’m not sure I can.”
Her mother shook her head slowly. “Then he’ll drag you with him.”
Alys leaned over and put her cheek on the folded blanket. The roughness of the wool should have itched, but giving her weight over to it felt so comfortable she could ignore that little part. Across the room, her mother tilted her head and lay down too, looking across the little gap, eye to eye with Alys, like they were still upright and the whole world had turned around them. Alys felt other words rising at the back of her mind: I’m sorry and I’ve made a mistake and I’m so tired of being myself. None of them seemed urgent enough to say. Her mother’s gaze was steady and passionless, but the judgment was gone from it. She reminded Alys of an old frog sitting in the spray of a fountain. She reminded Alys of the woman who’d been her mother when she had been a child—someone who’d looked like this, but with darker hair and smoother skin and less weathering around her eyes.
She didn’t feel herself falling asleep, but she must have, because a moment later the room was dark and her mouth tasted stale, and her mother was opening a little safe cache and lighting a candle. Andomaka and Tregarro and Ullin and the girl in the garden all seemed like something from a play she’d seen down in Seepwater. Not real people, not the things she’d shaped her life around for months. They were all Green Hill and Stonemarket. She was Longhill.
“Got to work,” her mother said. “Coul and Thin Maddie should be here quick. They’ll want to sleep.”
Alys nodded, rose, and took up her club. In the candlelight, it looked gaudy. Too expensive for a stick and a lump of lead. Her mother stepped out to the street, and she followed. They walked together through dark streets and alleys, their steps finding each other’s rhythm. They didn’t speak. If her mother was surprised by the company, she didn’t say it. They stopped at the common trough outside a taproom where a tin pail overflowing with old piss was waiting. Her mother took it by its handle, and they walked on. Another trough in a square, another pail, and Alys took this one. It was heavier than she’d expected, but she didn’t complain. They stopped at two more places as they passed through Seepwater to the bridge. The night was full dark, and almost moonless by the time they reached it. The Khahon flowed black under the southernmost bridge. The yellow stone and black mortar were only different values of shadow. Cold piss spilled over the lips of the pails. Alys got it down the side of one ankle bad enough that her boot squeaked, but she didn’t complain. It was the work. If it wasn’t filthy, degrading, disgusting, then it wouldn’t pay.
The launderer’s yard was at the edge of the Smoke, and bright with lanterns. The air stank of the forge, and the fat, squat man at the side door greeted Alys’s mother with a nod that wasn’t unfriendly. He sniffed at the pails to make sure they weren’t just river water being passed off as the real thing, then waved them in. Her mother poured the buckets into a tank, and Alys did the same. As they carried their empty pails back out, the squat man handed them each a bronze coin old enough that the face of Prince Ausai had started going a little green with verdigris. Alys passed hers to her mother.
“Against the eighteen silver,” she said. They were the first words they’d spoken since they left her mother’s room. They walked back across the bridge, the empty pails clanking, and headed to other places where men and women drank and ate and shouted and slept and begged and threatened, seeking out the ones whose keepers and guardsmen cared enough to leave a pail out for the rats of Longhill to carry away. It left the streets of Seepwater smelling a little better, and it was a charity to let the poor Inlisc bastards scrape up a little coin. Twice more, Alys and her mother crossed the bridge and came back. The stars shifted above them like a vast audience of gods and spirits, looking down at the show.
The third time, Alys kept the squat man’s coin. As they reached the Seepwater side of the bridge, she leaned over and kissed the side of her mother’s head. The older woman patted her shoulder. Alys turned a corner by herself, and her mother was only the sound of soft footsteps moving away in the night.
She made her way up the steep black stairway and into her room—Darro’s room—in the blind darkness. She remembered leaving there in the morning, possessed by confusion and shame. It seemed like longer. It seemed like someone else’s memory.
She stripped off her fouled clothes and found something cleaner. By the time she pulled her boots back on, the sound of birdsong was shouting through the still-dark streets. She opened her shutters and looked east, but whatever light the finches and sparrows and pigeons were celebrating was still too dim for her eyes. She stopped at Darro’s box and ran her fingertips over the wax-filled cuts of his deathmark. Sorrow still flooded her heart, but it came up slowly, like the river rising inch by inch, and not the crushing impact of a wave. She didn’t know what it signified, except that something had changed. And since Darro couldn’t change anymore, that meant she had.