“It is,” Alys said, crossing her arms. “But it’s my work, and I get paid for it.”
Annoyance and amusement warred in the pale eyes. Alys steeled herself, feet planted like she’d put roots into the stone floor. The shadows high on the wall flickered, and for a moment, the only sound was the patter of feet outside the high window. And then, faint but unmistakable, a man’s voice shouting Fire!
Andomaka looked up, her eyes narrow. The call came again, and then other voices took it up. Fire, fire, fire. The pale woman grew paler.
“Stay here,” she said to Alys. “Guard her. I’ll be back.”
Andomaka turned and strode out of the room, the guard at her heels. When the door closed, Alys sank to the ground. Sammish, arms still bound behind her and blood sheeting her mouth and chin, met her eyes. “She was going to kill me.”
“Yeah.”
“What a shithead.” Sammish shifted, twisting at the shoulder, and her hands came loose. She wiped the blood on her sleeve. “We’ve got to get after her.”
“Can I wait until my heart stops trying to crawl up my throat?”
Sammish’s grin showed blood on her teeth. “No.”
Alys, to her own surprise, laughed. Sammish stood first and helped haul her up. Outside the window, the traffic of ankles was thicker, and the clatter of horses freed from their stalls joined the chaos of voices raised in alarm.
“Let me take lead on this,” Sammish said. “I’ve been through this place before a little. I have an idea where she may be going.”
“Fine,” Alys said, and pushed the door. It didn’t open. She pressed at it, but it wouldn’t budge. Squinting at the crack where it met the frame, she saw the shadow of a bar. “They shut us in.”
Sammish took the thin knife from her sleeve and held it out to her. “Lift the bar.”
“There’s not enough room.”
“Then we have to break it,” Sammish said, desperation in her voice. “She’s going to get where we can’t find her.”
Alys looked at the bare, sad room. The weary chairs and spindly table. The wooden rafters, still dancing with shadows.
“Can you fit that window?” Alys asked.
“How would I get there?”
“Come on,” Alys said, moving to the table. Together, they shifted it to the wall under the narrow, high window. The calls of fire were louder now, and the wind stank of smoke. Alys took one of the chairs and put it on the table, then clambered onto it. “All right. I’ll boost you.”
“What about you?”
“Come back for me,” Alys said, lacing her fingers together. “When it’s done.”
Sammish looked at her. They both knew how thin that sounded; how much more likely the other outcomes were and how terrible they would be. Sammish put the ball of her foot in Alys’s hands, and Alys strained to lift her. The chair trembled under their combined weight, its legs unsteady and old. Sammish rose, caught the window in her hands, and pulled. Alys felt the burden of her weight lift and pushed her up and out. Sammish writhed, squeezing through the window. It was almost too narrow to pass, but only almost. When she slipped out, Alys grinned.
Sammish’s head poked back in. Her distress was nearly hidden by the shadows. “I will be back.”
“I know,” Alys said. “I trust you.”
And then Sammish was gone, and Alys stepped back down to the floor. The wind that blew through the little window stank of smoke.
A man’s rough cry was first, and then horses. The woman sitting by the statue of the god stood up. The smoke was thicker now, and impossible to miss, even with the wind whipping it away. Great blossoms of it rose, black and greasy, from behind the wall. The carriage gate opened again, though at first no one came out from it. And then, a moment later, a young mare bolted out at full gallop, her eyes starting and wide, scattering the surprised people in the street.
“Fire!” the woman cried, and pointed at the Daris Brotherhood. “There’s a fire!”
The call moved through Green Hill like the ripple on a still pond where a stone has fallen, and panic followed behind it. The woman hid her relief. The plan hadn’t failed. Not yet, anyway.
Far down the street, she saw a group of men in the blue cloaks of the city guard running toward the fire, shoving people aside. Servants and merchants and the litters carrying those of noble blood paused to look, making a barrier of curiosity and flesh around the brotherhood that the guard had to fight to make paths.
At first, the sand-and-water effort was only the servants of the Daris Brotherhood, buckets and bowls in hand, running west to the canal and then back toward their burning stables, but in no more than minutes, others joined in. There were servants wearing the colors of half a dozen families and brotherhoods forming a line like ants to pass buckets up and down the street. Young men with spades and buckets of sand appeared, wet cloth over their faces.
A coachman staggered out of the carriage gate, his flesh bright with blood or burn, and sat in the middle of the road, stunned or dying. The woman stepped forward, heading in toward the open gate. No one stopped her. She reached the line of buckets, bowls, and water, took one that was offered to her, and walked into her enemy’s home as if she were saving it.
The stables, the carriage house and carriages, the feed store—all of it was in flame. The wall where she had thrown her little lantern was a blackness. A solid stretch of char. The heat was assaulting. The wind whipped around her, pushing acrid smoke in her mouth and nose, leaving her choking a little.
It was everything they’d needed and hoped. All eyes were turned to the conflagration. She took her bucket of water, chose a place in the flames, and threw a bright and powerless spray onto it like she was spitting. The fire didn’t lessen.
A man shouted words she couldn’t make out, and the line of water buckets shifted, leaving her alone by a burning carriage. For a moment, she was confused. That all those men and women struggling to tame the fire should leave in the same moment was like something from a dream. But no, they hadn’t left, only shifted toward the main building. She thought, still confused, that there must be a cistern in the house, that they were pulling from it instead of the canal.
Then she looked up through the smoke and sunlight. High above her, two windows fluttered brightly. And then a floor below them, a third.
The fire had spread.
Sammish ran, but that didn’t matter. Everybody was running.
When she’d planned it, she’d imagined herself ghosting along behind Tregarro, who would have seen her for the first time in that moment. She meant to blend in with the servants the way she had before. And she’d imagined Adric at her back. Or Alys. Or someone, anyway. Instead, she was wiping her own blood on her sleeves and chasing alone after the thing that had seen her through Timu’s eyes. And as much as she tried to tell herself she was just looking for her pan or trying to find her cousin or any of the other thousand lies that could have cloaked her, the only thing that would fit in her brain was: I have to find Andomaka.
The private temple was the obvious place for her to go, and it wasn’t that far from where Sammish was now. From where she and Alys had been taken. She crossed a courtyard of flagstone where an apple tree’s branches were studded with tiny green fruit no larger than her thumb. The light was wrong—yellow and filthy. Sunlight through smoke.