“I am wondering what treasures the good river brought us today,” she said, then rubbed her hands together. “And I am just gid-gid-giddy as a pony to find out!”
The children shrieked and ran across the wide bridge. Grey Linnet laughed because she always laughed and followed as if she didn’t dread the clamber down the stones.
If she had known then what she would find, she’d have turned back.
“What was it like?” Sammish asked.
Alys shrugged. “They put me in a tunnel, took my money, and gave me food and water and places to sleep and shit, and a half dozen whores to play cards with when they weren’t sleeping or working. It was fine.”
“You’re back, then?” Sammish asked.
“I am,” Alys said. “I have to be. I’m out of money, no thanks to Orrel. Need to talk to him.”
It wasn’t entirely true, but it was nearly so. She still had one of Darro’s silver coins. It would have bought her another day or two, but after a week underground, she’d been hungry for sunlight.
“Haven’t seen Orrel since the day,” Sammish said, and her tone made it commiseration.
“He owes you too?”
Sammish shrugged. Alys sat next to her on the thin wooden bench, plucked up a clod of maybe-mud, maybe-manure, and tossed it at a flock of pigeons that rose into the air: black bodies against the white haze.
“Your brother was looking for him,” Sammish said.
“If Darro found him, that may be where our money is. What have I missed while I was gone?”
Sammish leaned back, laced her hands behind her head, and recounted the gossip. The prince had called a council of the high families—“everyone of noble blood,” they said—and then canceled it before they could meet. There had been a fight in Riverport and a bluecloak had been killed, but no one was sure who exactly had been involved, and no one from Longhill seemed to have had a blade in it. Someone had stolen a bolt of Gaddivan silk from a house in Newmarket, and Sammish had taken work from a pawnbroker trying to find who’d taken it and offer prices. So far, it hadn’t turned up.
Sammish warmed as she spoke, and the color in her cheeks almost made her pretty. When she shrugged to say that was all she could think of, Alys pulled the last silver coin from her belt. Sammish looked hopeful, and Alys wondered how long it had been since the other girl had eaten.
“Pay me back when Orrel shows his face?” Alys asked.
Sammish grinned.
At the south gate, street traffic was thicker than usual with carts and mules hauling in crops from the farmlands: beets piled up as high as a standing man, smelling of fresh dirt and bruised leaves; peas and beans by the sackful, bouncing against the shoulders of haulers; even a few green-black melons, skins shining like they’d been polished, in the bed of a rough wooden cart.
The greater crop would come soon, and Kithamar would celebrate with pies and cakes and the slaughter of animals. Everyone would try to get fat enough to live through spring.
The wide lands outside the city tempted Alys, but guards stood by the gates, counting the carts and charging the tax. They wore blue, and while she didn’t recognize any of them as the man who’d chased her to Ibdish’s doorway, she wasn’t sure enough to risk it. They went to Seepwater and the university instead.
Tuns of beer cooled and bumped against each other in the sluggish water of the canal. Strips of spiced meat cooked on a street kitchen’s iron grate, the fat sizzling and calling up little bursts of flame. They sat at the canal and listened to young men with clipped, affected accents argue about whether nature could intend anything. None of the words meant much to Alys, but the boys who spoke them were pretty.
Alys had meant to keep back half the coin’s value, but the sun hadn’t touched the top of Palace Hill when the money ran out.
“Glad you’re back,” Sammish said with a slightly boozy, slightly overfed grin.
“Where else would I go?” Alys said with a smile only a little soured by the money she’d let herself waste.
“Good,” Sammish said, leaned forward, and hugged her like they were sisters, then tottered back north, vanishing into the street before she had gone a dozen steps. Alys sat alone at the canal for a time, trying to enjoy it by herself, but without someone to look up to her and be grateful for her brother’s money, the afternoon lost its salt.
Early as it was, her mind turned to where she’d be sleeping when the night came. She’d been gone long enough that her place at the common house would have gone to someone else, and it was late in the day to put her name in the queue. She couldn’t go back to Darro without him asking why she wasn’t still with Aunt Thorn. It was warm enough that she could pick a corner and sleep in the open, but if rain didn’t soak her, dew would. Her mother’s room meant Alys would have to put up with her mother’s musky tea and her sometime-lovers. It seemed the least unpleasant of her options.
Since last winter, her mother’s place was in a canyon of buildings, each sharing walls with those at its side. A rat could run across the street from corner to corner and never come closer than twelve feet from the ground. She walked there with the slow step of someone lost in her own daydreams and speculations.
Where the narrow street made its last curve, her mother was standing outside the thin, red-washed door, her mouth as slack and dismayed as a fish. Grey Linnet stood beside her, eyes red from crying. Alys felt her footsteps slow. Her mother saw her, and Linnet turned, pressed a palm to her old, worm-lipped mouth, and cried out.
“Alys! Oh, Woodmouse. I’m so sorry. We found him by the water. I’m so, so sorry, child. I am.”
In death, Darro didn’t look like he was sleeping. He didn’t even look like Darro.
His skin was paler than it should have been; his lips and his skin were the same shade of colorless, like they’d been carved from a single block of wax. His arms and legs, water-swollen, were thick and less defined than the ones she remembered. Only his hair looked right, even if it grew from the wrong head. Like a child’s clay doll, the corpse only resembled her brother.
The river did that.
His wounds were only little changes in texture. There was no blood. A few pale ovals marked where fish had bitten him. The cut that had killed him was easy to overlook, even though it was on his chest. A thin line where the skin had pulled back and not as long as the first knuckle of her thumb just to the left of his breastbone. Alys had seen sword wounds before, but they had been live ones, with blood still spilling out or mangled by clots and bandaging. This one looked too clean to be real and too small to let a man’s life out. She had the perverse urge to put her finger into it and see how deep it went.
They killed him, she thought, but with a distance, as if she were only trying the idea on for fit. She didn’t have a they, but that was small. Hardly an annoyance. Killed him was the part that was too wide, too airy, too empty somehow to fit inside her. It was like They unmade the color green, or They murdered shoestrings. It was nonsense.
They killed Darro.
The priests had laid him out in a small temple near the river. The doors were red cloth stretched over frames of thin pine. Incense by the handful tried to cover the smell of death. The clove-and-rose smoke was so thick it was a taste. Candles and butter lamps filled the room with a soft yellow light and a pressing heat. The icons of the gods were all bronze or carved wood, and they came from every tradition: the Three Mothers, the blind god Adrohin, Lord Kauth and Lady Er, a dozen more. The priests had arranged them to look toward the altar, as if the great powers of this world and the worlds beyond were all sharing in the grief. Only Shau, the two-bodied Hansch god who guarded the gate between justice and mercy, looked away out the window as if to say What you are seeking is not here.