Alys started screaming. She clambered up the table and chair, cupped her hands around her mouth like a horn, and shouted. I’m down here! I’m locked in! Let me out! If anyone heard her, they didn’t reply. A thousand childhood nightmares flowed into her. Stories of the times the wooden houses of Longhill had fallen, of the bones in the ash. But this was Green Hill. They built with stone. But the heavy wood above her would burn. The carpets. The shutters. The stones would fall, and she’d be trapped in them like a cat.
Her voice grew hoarse, and the shadows of running legs vanished. Another kind of flickering took their place, and the air began to grow thick and choking. Wisps of pale smoke began shifting along the dark ceiling above her like ripples on water, and she found herself gasping, fighting for air that the fire wanted.
When a scraping sound came from the door, she didn’t know what it was. The frame shifting, maybe. Wedging itself further in place or preparing to collapse. Then it came again, and the clatter of a bar falling to the floor on the other side. Sammish pulled the door open and stepped in. The blood was mostly gone from her face, though her nose looked thick and bruised. Her forehead and cheek were smudged with soot.
“Did you get it?” Alys said. “Where’s Andomaka?”
“I didn’t, and I don’t know. We need to get out of here.”
Too close by, something large collapsed, the cacophony of stone followed by a wave of voices calling out in alarm. Sammish took Alys’s hand, turned back to the smoke-filled corridor, and together, they ran.
Alys didn’t know the way. By herself, she would have been lost in the wide, dark halls. Sammish tugged her forward, and the only choices were follow her or die here. The roar of the fire seemed to come from just overhead, and her chest was working like a forge bellows. When they tried to run, she grew lightheaded and began to lose herself. The world became Sammish’s hand in hers, and the next step forward, and nothing else.
She tripped on the stairway before she knew they had found stairs. It wasn’t the way they’d come down. These were thin and wooden, crawling up inside the walls of the brotherhood like a secret. Servants’ stairs. The top of the flight was lost in thick grey smoke, like an inverted river.
Her panicked mind tried to find the words If we go up there, we’ll drown, but her tongue didn’t work. Sammish dragged her up. Expecting death, she followed, and the smoke took them in. It was hot and choking. She thought she heard Sammish weeping, but she wasn’t sure.
And then Sammish kicked open a door, and they stumbled forward into fresh air, and collapsed.
Alys retched, crawled a little forward, and rolled onto her back. Above her, the Daris Brotherhood bled fire from every window. Smoke rose up into the wind and made the blue sky a filthy grey.
“Where are they?” Alys said, her voice thick and gravelled. “Why aren’t they putting it out?”
“It’s gone too far,” Sammish said. “They’re just stopping the spread of it. If they can.” She sat up, levered herself to her feet. “We have to get to the street.”
Alys forced herself up and followed. With every clean breath, she felt her mind returning, and each bit of coming back to herself was a shock at seeing how far down she’d been. Another few smoke-poisoned breaths, and she and Sammish would have died in the darkness. Or worse, the light.
A line of bluecloaks stood in the street, keeping a crowd of onlookers from approaching the spectacle. And there was red among the blue. The palace guard. They let Alys and Sammish pass, and as soon as they had, a familiar face swam up. Saffa took Sammish’s shoulder and pulled her into a tight embrace. Alys stepped back.
“We didn’t get it,” Sammish said. “There wasn’t time.”
“It’s all right,” the Bronze Coast woman said. “It wasn’t worth dying for.”
“I was so close,” Sammish said, and the grief in her voice hit Alys like a blow. She looked away, back to the fire. The street was slow with people pausing to stare. Hundreds of eyes turned toward the burning brotherhood.
And one pale head, turned away.
Alys hauled Sammish out of the crowd, pointing. “That’s her. Andomaka. She’s right there.”
Andomaka walked alone, heading south and up toward the palace. Her stride was deliberate, neither running nor spent. She wove her way among the spectators, not looking back, her whole mind on something that was still before her.
“What do we do?” Alys said.
Sammish shook her head, then looked down. In her hand, she held her little knife.
“If you kill her in the street, you die with her. The guard will cut you down,” Saffa said, but Sammish didn’t seem to hear her. Sammish’s lips moved as if she were speaking to herself. Talking something through. When she smiled, it was tight and hard.
“Saffa, you stop her,” Sammish said. “Make her turn back. At least make her pause. Do it now!”
Alys saw Why? in the older woman’s eyes, but it didn’t reach her lips. Instead, Saffa nodded, turned, and trotted away quickly after Andomaka. Sammish covered the blade with her hand and turned to Alys.
“You go right. I take left,” Sammish said. “Keep eyes on me. I call the go.”
It walked calmly and steadily, but its mind was stretching four moves ahead.
Tregarro would have heard. He would still be in the palace kitchens. It would find him there. Or if not, there would be other guards from the brotherhood. Or if not that, Andomaka was still a child of Chaalat. The family had its own places in the palace and without. There was little pleasure in going begging for shelter in its own city, but it would find a place that could be protected.
The voice that called its attention back to the world was a woman’s. Loud, even above the catastrophe, and buzzing like a hive with rage. The name she shouted was Ausai.
It turned, and there she stood. Saffa Rej, of the Bronze Coast, not twenty feet from her. She wore a servant’s robe and belt as plain as a mendicant’s, but she wore it like battle armor. She carried no weapon, but her chin was high, proud and arrogant. The brightness of the flames behind her made her seem darker by contrast.
“There is no Ausai here,” it said, in the tongue of the Bronze Coast. “He was a man, and as all men, he died.”
“As did our son,” Saffa said.
It felt a passing melancholy. The memory of getting that boy-child on her was still fresh, even in this new body. It remembered Saffa as she had been when they had been lovers. The touch of her skin. The pleasure they had shared. If it hadn’t been for the plot against it, that would have been all they were to each other. A few intimate moments. Her son would be alive and swimming in the warm waves far to the south. Whoever put Byrn a Sal on the throne, they couldn’t have known how far the price for their crime would carry. How many innocent lives they would scar by trying to cut the thread.
“As did yours,” it said, and gestured back toward the fire. “This was you, then?”
“You will die for what you have done.” She did not approach.
A man with a mule rushed past them, oblivious. Someone cried out that the fire was spreading, someone else shouted back that it wasn’t. The thing that called itself Kithamar spread stolen fingers, palms facing the sun. The wind whipped its robe and hers. “I will never die,” it said, still in the tongue of the Bronze Coast. “And if you dreamed to break my power, you should have woken before this. Now, it’s too late.”