“Where is she?”
“Leaving. Going back south,” Sammish said with a harsh laugh. She sobered. “I’m going too.”
Alys sat back. Of the thousands of things Sammish might have said, this wasn’t one she’d imagined.
“You’re leaving the city?”
“I wanted to find you first. Make sure the knife was done with. And say goodbye.” When Alys didn’t answer, she shrugged. “I wasn’t really thinking past the pull. Everything was toward that, and now it’s done. When Saffa and I met up, we started talking about how to get her out. And I was just planning like it was both of us. Me and her. It just made sense.”
Alys didn’t understand the sting she felt at the apology in Sammish’s voice. She shook her head like she was trying to come back from a hard thought. “Where are you going?”
“Bronze Coast, I’m thinking. Back home for her. Someplace no one will be looking for me.”
Alys coughed out a laugh. “It is harder to seem like you’re under the ruins in Green Hill when you’re walking around in the Seepwater streets, isn’t it?”
“That’s a reason.”
Alys looked away, and the one-eyed man lifted his chin in query. She motioned him back. She didn’t need more food or drink.
“How long until you come back?” Alys asked.
“I don’t know,” Sammish said, but the way she said it meant never. “The things she talks about there? The spirit house? It might be something to look at once I’m there.”
“Following gods? So a religious pull?”
“Maybe not a pull. Maybe just something. I don’t know. Can’t know until I get there. But the way she talks about it, it sounds… they understand grief there. I’d like to do that too.”
“Grief?” Alys said. “You?”
“Lost someone I loved,” Sammish said with a wry smile.
Alys tried to hide her surprise, but Sammish saw it anyway. “I’m sorry for that,” Alys said. “I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t talk about it,” Sammish said.
“All right, then. Give me a day to get ready, and I’ll come too.”
“No,” Sammish said, like she was closing a book. When she spoke again, she was gentler, but the effort to be gentle was obvious. “Better we don’t travel together. Two of us is a risk enough. All three, and word could get back. You should stay here and keep your head down, or go west. Someplace where an Inlisc girl won’t stand out.”
“You’re Inlisc.”
“I never stand out.”
“You do sometimes.”
Sammish took her cup and drank her cider to the pulp and grit at the bottom, then put it back on the table gently. As if it were delicate and might break. She stood up, and Alys stood too.
“You did good work,” Sammish said.
“You too. Be careful out there.”
Alys stepped in and embraced her. Sammish stiffened and started to pull back, but then paused, seemed to make a decision, and softened. They stood for a long, warm moment, and Sammish rested her head on Alys’s shoulder as gentle as a cat curling up to sleep. She murmured something like It would have been good but Alys didn’t want to break the moment to ask what she meant.
After a few long breaths together, Sammish pushed her away and stepped back. They looked at each other for another moment before Sammish turned and walked to the door and the street and the world. Alys sat back down.
The old man trundled forward, and Alys gave him Sammish’s empty cup. She sat alone for a time. She still had a little money left. She felt a little bad that she hadn’t given it back to Saffa, after all the Bronze Coast woman had been through. But Longhill was hard for a girl with no coin, and Alys still had to eat. The common pot had barley and pork and something that had probably been trout, and it tasted fine. She ate slowly, and she ate alone.
She could tell when the funeral had passed from the sounds on the street. The eerie silence gave way to footsteps and hooves, the clatter of wagons and carts. Some laughter. A man berating a woman for flirting with someone that wasn’t him. Alys waited.
The first crew to come to the Pit was Nimal, Little Coop, and two others. Alys nodded to them, but they were older than she liked, skilled at what they did, and too likely to use any opportunity she gave them to their own advantage. She waited, pointedly ignoring them while they split their morning’s take. The regular keep came in next with a sprig of funeral flowers behind one ear and a dolorous expression. The one-eyed man left, and Alys wasn’t sorry to see him go. The next crew that came was younger. Dark Aman was among them. It had to be one of the girl’s first pulls, and her cheeks were dark and flushed with the pleasure. Alys waited until the younger crew had done their cut, then waved the girl over.
“Good day?” Alys asked.
“Did all right,” Dark Aman said, wanting to brag and not wanting to announce that she was carrying coin. Smart girl.
“Want to get an extra bronze?”
“For what?”
“An errand for me. I need some things from my old room. Someone might be looking for me and I don’t want to get found. Since you’re not me, you could get in, get out, and bring my things to me here.”
“For a bronze?”
“Two if you hurry.”
The girl licked her lips, caution warring with avarice. “What do you want me to get?”
“A couple robes. A satchel. A wallet, and I know how much is in it, so don’t think to help yourself. And a box.”
“What’s in the box?”
“Ashes,” Alys said. “Just ashes.”
There was a name for that night. Gautanna. It was an old word, from back before the Hansch had come. It meant the moment of hollowness, or the turn from effort to release. From fighting for air to letting a breath flow back out into the sky. Kithamar, that night, had no prince, and things that were impossible at other times became possible then.
Or that was the story people told. Maybe it was only a way to paint over the unsettling times that came when a prince died. Maybe playing at there being gods in the streets was enjoyable. An easy thrill that no one had to pay for. The last time hadn’t quite been a year ago, and Alys had spent the dark hours with Orrel and Sammish, planning for morning and the drunkenness and joy that followed the coronation. She hadn’t felt anything then but the bright anticipation of a good day’s take. Now Orrel was dead and Sammish was gone, and the idea of the world growing thin and gods on the streets, of cold and deep magics stirring in uneasy sleep, seemed too plausible.
Her mother was waiting for her. The old woman was on a stool outside her door, smoking a pipe and looking up at the clouds as the sunset turned them to gold and blood. She smiled when Alys squatted down beside her.
“All well?” her mother asked.
“Well enough. Did anyone come asking for me?”
“No one.”
“And you still have it?”
Her mother took a long, thoughtful puff of her pipe. “I do.”
“Did you look at it?”
“I didn’t. You told me not to, and so I didn’t.”
“Are you lying?”
“Oh my, yes. But only about looking. All the rest’s true.” She grinned, shifted her weight, and took a grey rag out from under her thigh. Alys unwrapped it to see the leather sheath, and drew the blade to check the markings along the silver. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust her mother. It was that she knew her mother was Longhill. If the old woman took offense, she didn’t say it.