Age of Ash, page 16
She turned toward her mother’s house, her teeth clenched.
The first nameday celebration she’d been to after someone had died, she had been too young to understand. It had been for Coward Holt, the long-faced man who had lived across the street from them back then. A fever had taken him in the height of summer, filling his lungs with water, like the river stealing in and drowning him from afar. Alys hadn’t liked or disliked the man, but her mother had forced her and Darro both to go to the funeral. It had confused her then when, just after harvest, her mother had told her to plait her hair and put on her good skirt, that they were going to Coward Holt’s nameday. She’d done as she was told, thinking that maybe there had been some mistake and the old man hadn’t really been dead. Or that he had, and death wasn’t as irrevocable as she’d thought.
In the event, it had been the dead man’s son and widow welcoming people who’d known Coward Holt, giving them cheap beer and stale cake. Instead of nameday gifts, the guests brought what the dead man was owed: the leather punch that Coward Holt had loaned to Fat Stanni, a few bronze coins with Prince Ausai’s likeness going a little green for want of polishing in payment for the door Coward Holt had fixed for Ibdish, a wool coat to replace the blanket that Tamnis Couard had taken from him and lost. Alys’s mother had owed the old man nothing, but she took a handful of thistle bound in ribbon as a token and a jar of salted fish. Whatever you think you owe, give a little bit more, her mother had said. We’re Longhill and we’re Inlisc, and it’s how we take care of each other.
In her memory, Alys had been surprised to hear that they took care of each other at all, but that might not have happened. It had been years ago, and she had been a child.
Alys hadn’t seen her mother since the day she’d seen Darro dead and learned that the woman hadn’t been willing to pay the full rites. Her mother had moved since then, but only a few doors down, where she seemed to be sharing a thin-windowed, one-storied converted storeroom with two other women her age. Alys might have walked past it without knowing what it was, except for the symbol drawn in black over the doorway. She’d spent hours looking at that same symbol herself, where it was carved into the box of ashes and filled with wax. She was almost surprised that her mother had bothered to learn Darro’s deathmark.
She went in with a sense of resignation, like a prisoner who had failed to win the mercy of the judge. The group within was smaller than the one that had gathered at the news of Darro’s death, but the faces were all familiar. Damnis Oltson. Nimal. Sarae Stone, with a baby on her hip that must have belonged to her. Ibdish and his wife. Alys looked for Sammish and was surprised by her absence. Her mother’s reed-thin lover was also gone. He’d left her, or her mother had told him to go; it made no difference. Her mother was sitting on a high stool, her hands folded on her lap, leaning close to Aunt Daidan the better to hear her old friend’s thin, watery voice saying, It’s so hard losing them young, isn’t it, Linly? So very hard.
Her mother caught sight of her, and for a moment fear bloomed in the old woman’s eyes. Then maybe relief, and at the end a shyness like a girl at a taproom finding the courage to talk with a beautiful man. Her mother had lost weight in the last months, even with the fullness of the harvest. Her cheeks looked deflated and papery. She motioned Aunt Daidan aside and stood. Alys took two short steps and was at her side.
“Mother.”
“Alys. I wasn’t sure if you’d…” She trailed off, then tried a smile. “You’re looking well. You look…”
Like him, Ullin finished in Alys’s memory, and she stood a little straighter. “I’ve been busy.”
“Yes, of course. Of course you have. It’s so good to see you.”
Alys nodded, acknowledging the words more than responding to them. Her mother’s gaze cut away. They stood neither together nor apart for a moment. Alys felt a sudden overwhelming sorrow, as crushing as it had been in the first days after Darro’s death, and then a rage she could barely restrain. She kissed her mother’s cool cheek and walked to the wall, leaning against it with her arms crossed. Sarae broke the silence, turning to an older woman and praising the wooden rooms. Ibdish moved across to Alys’s mother and murmured something as he pressed a cloth wallet into her hands. The rituals and ceremonies of Longhill found their feet again after Alys had tripped them, and she watched with a storm in her chest that she could not name.
Damnis left. Pocked Chelle and Bastard Leah arrived. Linnet took Aunt Daidan’s place at her mother’s side, and started telling a long story about when Darro had been a boy out on the Silt with her, and the day he’d caught a fish with his bare hands and tried to use a stick to gut it. The story should have been funny, and Linnet told it with a warmth and affection that had the others laughing and weeping, but not Alys. More people came, and the heat of their bodies began to warm the room, but Alys still felt the cold against her back. Ibdish’s wife went to Alys’s mother, took her by the hand, and talked quietly about how hard it had been when her own son had died. He hadn’t gone to the river as Darro had, but slipped off the top of a building where he and his friends had been daring each other into more and more dangerous tricks. His neck snapped against the cobblestones, and he’d died before anyone could bring her word. The two mothers shared their grief, and Alys watched them like they were beetles with particularly eerie shells.
Alys was born to Longhill. She’d lived in its streets her whole life, almost, only leaving for beer or to work pulls. It was only since Darro’s death that she’d slept her nights in Oldgate and Stonemarket, visited Green Hill. Not half a year had passed, and yet it was enough that she looked at this last celebration of Darro’s life and felt herself out of place. She’d always known that the other quarters of Kithamar looked at Longhill with contempt, but she never had until now. Nor could she put a name to what had changed, except that every time Grey Linnet laughed or said some empty platitude about the brightness and dark of life, Alys felt embarrassed for her.
She stayed there as long as she could stand it, then, between one heartbeat and the next, the warmth of the bodies and the air just spat out from other people’s lungs made the room feel like she was buried alive. She lurched for the door, and then out, stopping on the street and turning her face to the white winter sky. The cold bit her, and she welcomed it. She gripped her new club in her hand like she was drowning and it was the last rope. An emptiness she had let herself forget opened in her.
Once, when she was very young, she’d known a girl who had been cut by a fish knife. She had seemed on her way to healing, but then the scab split open, and the pus and blood were worse than the fresh wound had been. She felt like that now. She’d thought she was happy. She’d thought she was doing better. Now, every bright feeling she’d had—every triumph, every laugh, every good night—seemed like a cheap song bellowed out to cover the weeping. A small voice in her mind calmly said This is only a hard moment. Ever since it happened, there have been hard moments. This one will pass too. But she didn’t believe it.
She didn’t notice that her mother had followed her until the old woman put a hand on her elbow. Alys wiped away the tears freezing on her cheeks like they’d betrayed her. She expected to see pity in her mother’s eyes, or need, or something. The uncertainty and fear that had marked her inside were gone now. Alys could almost imagine this was a wholly different woman.
“What?” Alys asked.
She thought her mother wouldn’t answer, that the two of them might stand in the cold Longhill street until night fell. When she did speak, she sounded the way exhaustion itself might have, if it had its own voice. “I’ve lost two of my children. I can’t stand it again.”
“I’m fine.”
“So was he, until he wasn’t. If you’re walking in his footsteps, you’ll end where he ended. Be careful with yourself.”
Alys scowled and stepped back. Her mother didn’t try to hold her. Instead, she seemed to grow smaller and greyer, her face losing what little expression it had, before she turned to her rooms and trundled back under Darro’s deathmark, closing the door behind her. Alys closed a fist around her club, squeezing until her knuckles ached. She didn’t know what she wanted to hit. She turned out into the bright, ice-bound streets, and as she walked, she raged.
The focus of her anger shifted. Between one intersection and the next, she imagined herself shouting down her mother for treating Darro’s death as another way to get a few cheap coins to spend on drink, never mind whether it was tradition or no. Then for half a block, it was Sammish, who could have been there, could have warned her, could have stood by her instead of being off wherever she was doing whatever she did. Then Grey Linnet for acting like she had a right to grief. Ullin for living on the ass end of the city where Alys had to walk half a day to see him, like all the gods kept him west of the Smoke unless Andomaka was paying him to go. And all of them at once, down to the last breathing soul, for treating Darro like he was dead. She muttered to herself and swung her club. Dammis Ragman passed her going the other direction, and gave her a wide berth.
Nothing she felt was justified, all of it skirted the edge of madness, and she knew it. But knowing didn’t dam the flood.
She reached the corner where her room waited and hauled herself up the thin, dark stairwell, taking the steps three at a time. When she undid her lock and pushed her door open, she was almost warm.
The shutters were closed, but a ray of milky light came through the crack where the hinges were. Dust motes floated in it like snow that wouldn’t fall. She sat at the table, shaking. In the niche across the room, Darro’s ashes stood. There was dust on the box, and the deathmark was little more than a few lighter bands of shadow. A vast guilt washed over her for leaving him alone so often and so long. She embraced the pain. That Darro was past caring whether she was there or not was sharper than her self-reproach.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Nothing replied.
The winter hours were short. The sun would drop behind Palace Hill soon, and the long, frigid night would come. There was no trekking back to Stonemarket, and the prospect of an evening shoulder to shoulder in some Seepwater taproom made her flesh crawl. Staying here in the dark with Darro conjured back those first days after he went: her cell in Oldgate, and the numbness she longed to have back again and also feared.
She didn’t open the shutters, finding the safe cache by touch alone. The coins were still there, though there were fewer. She had to be more careful how she spent them. They had to last. She lit the candle, and the little room filled with a warmer light that turned her breath the color of honey. The flame shifted as it always did, and the smoke from it gathered. Alys felt herself reaching for it, willing it to take a solid form. Even the scarred, caustic Tregarro would be better than sitting alone.
But the smoke thickened and wove, and Andomaka was sitting across from her. The woman’s pale hair was tied back and wet, as if she’d just risen from a bath. Alys wondered whether the noble houses of Green Hill had their own private bathhouses. She had to think they did. Andomaka’s robe was formal, though, and her expression vague. Maybe drunk.
“Did I call for you?” the pale woman asked, and didn’t seem to know the answer.
“No. I’ve been away. I thought there might… I thought you might have wanted to talk with me and I wasn’t here. So…”
“Oh,” Andomaka said. “No.”
“If there were something. Is there anything?”
“Are you out of coin, little wolf? Because—”
“I’m not. I have money. I need something to do. I need work.”
“Work?”
“I need anything,” she said.
The city changed for Sammish when her questions did.
When she had haunted the ports and gates, the marketplaces and taprooms to ask about the mysterious foreign woman who’d pay gold for a silver knife, the question that drove her had been Where am I most likely to find someone who knows something? and she’d been asking it with Alys in her mind like wine fumes. Now, she asked Where would you go if the man who tried to kill you had been wearing a blue cloak and a guardsman’s badge? and she asked it for herself.
It led her to very different places.
Dawn came late and bitterly cold. The crook-tailed cat that haunted the end of the street had decided that Sammish was sleeping in his bed, and she didn’t mind the company. She rose carefully, so as not to disturb him too much, dressed herself against the winter’s chill, and went out into Kithamar. The long, frigid hours of the winter night held sway over the streets even after the light came. Frost glazed the cobblestones, and icicles as thick as Sammish’s wrist hung from the eaves where no one had knocked them down yet. The baker’s oven was warm, though, and the smell of raisin tarts still hung in the air.
The baker had left her a cloth sack of stale rolls, and she set aside an extra coin to pay him. In other times, she might have carried them to taprooms and houses, tried to sell them on the cheap to people who didn’t want to brave the cold: the sick and the elderly and the sadly hungover. It was a small profit, but it was reliable. It wasn’t the work of that particular day.
Instead, she put the sun at her back and headed west as the winter city hauled itself to wakefulness around her. She had heard stories of the towns out in the countryside where nothing might happen at all in the long, dark snowbound months. Maybe the dark and cold meant a kind of weeks-long sleep elsewhere, but Kithamar was a city, and cities were restless.
By the time she reached the edge of Longhill, carts lumbered, and the horses that drew them sighed out great white plumes beside her. Children ran in packs, screaming and jumping and keeping the cold at bay through boundless energy and will. She passed a Hansch lightman pulling a handbarrow stacked with finger-thin wax candles wrapped in grey paper and a huge tin jug that stank of lantern oil. He didn’t notice her, because she didn’t want him to.
It was Longest Night, and so it was also the shortest day. There were families all through the city that would be celebrating their rites, depending on which gods and icons they worshipped. She passed doors with the evergreen pine sprig of Lord Kauth and the yellow smear of the Pajanic Rite. Some corners had old men, shirtless and blue with cold, declaiming the chant against the darkness that was supposed to turn the year back on its path toward summer. Sammish gave one of them a stale roll for free. She wondered whether, if the men of faith ever chose not to stand on their corners, the world would really slide into permanent night. She didn’t think it would.
It was midmorning already when she reached the river. The river was ice stretching south of her and forward into the northwest, flatter than a road. Far ahead by the piers, she saw the bright figures of Riverport skaters gliding over it. Sunlight glittered from the blades on their boots, and their embroidered jackets reminded her of the spring flowers that wouldn’t bloom for months. She walked carefully down the quayside to the ice, the cloth sack over her shoulder, even though there were no guardsmen on the bridges. There was no point collecting tolls, after all, when anyone could walk across the Khahon. Sammish kept on, placing each foot down squarely so she wouldn’t slip and trying not to think too much about the vast dark water that flowed invisibly beneath her. Across the ice, the thin, bare trees of the Silt reached up toward Oldgate or Palace Hill or the sky.
It was days since Sammish had even seen Alys. At a guess, she was gone off to Stonemarket again, to smoke and laugh with the other hired knives. Or maybe the pale woman had set Alys some other violent, risk-drunk errand. Either way, Sammish was almost pleased. Not because she wasn’t aching with jealousy for whatever had captured Alys’s attention, but because what she needed to do now, she needed to do alone.
And worse—or stranger, anyway—she felt herself changing. At night, she still dreamed of Alys. Alone in the darkness, she studied the marks for the brewer’s board, as she always did, and imagined that she would wake in a house of her own, and in the circle of Alys’s arms. But something about her dreams had shifted. It felt like the subtle greening of early spring bark, or the first yellow leaf on a summer tree. She saw that it meant something, but she couldn’t yet say what. There was joy in it, though. And fear. Whatever the change in her was, she walked with it to the Silt again, as she had every day for almost two weeks now.
Every quarter of Kithamar had its streetbound. Sammish had spent more than a few nights in niches or under the bridges herself, when she was younger. The few who made their camps on the Silt had chosen to live with danger. A river flood could wash away a sleeper before the warning came. A fire among the trees—which happened sometimes—would bring the bluecoats to the walls with pails of sand ready to tamp out embers that came down on the better quarters, but no one would bother trying to save the Silt. It was the wilderness within the city walls. The only ones who lived there were the wild, the desperate, and the mad.
And, perhaps, those who had reason to fear being elsewhere.
Sammish reached the shore where the shallow ice creaked under her, and when it broke, there was sand beneath it, not water. At the edge of the trees, she paused and looked back. The sun hung in the sky not far from the Temple. Plumes of smoke rose from a thousand hearths. If she closed her eyes and turned her face to it, the sun gave her some warmth, but not as much as winter air took away. She walked into the trees, and the city disappeared around her.
Another few steps, and the wild man was there.
It was, she told herself, like trying to make peace with a dog. Be friendly, be patient, be kind, and be ready to kick it in the jaw if it decided to try being her enemy. She’d made a habit of coming with her gifts. Sometimes no one met her and she left the bread for the first person to come or else the birds. Sometimes there were a few. The wild man was the one she saw most. He had hooded eyelids and dirty grey hair. His robe was filthy, but it was wool. He wore sandals as if the cold couldn’t touch him.
