Age of Ash, page 17
“Hello,” Sammish said.
“Yes, yes, yes. You’re looking for a woman,” the wild man said. “I know. You keep saying it.”
Sammish opened the sack and started laying the stale rolls out on the snow and dirt. “She isn’t from Kithamar. She might have been hurt.”
“Mm-hm.” The wild man’s eyes didn’t leave the rolls, and his tongue flickered on his lips.
“She’s been in the city since summer. Maybe longer.” She stepped back the way she would have from a dog, and the wild man moved toward the bread. His gaze flicked between her and her offering—hunger at war with distrust.
He grabbed up the first of the rolls and tilted his head. “What would she be here for?”
This was new. It was progress. Sammish pushed down the leap of hope before she started to trust in it. “She’s desperate for something, I think. She was looking for a knife. And maybe a boy. And she doesn’t want to be found.”
“You’re her enemy?”
“No,” Sammish said, and then, because she saw the glimmer of distrust in his eyes, “I don’t know. Maybe.”
The wild man squatted beside her offering, picked up a thick, gold-brown roll, and tapped the dirt from it. His look was challenging. “Why look, if she doesn’t want to be found?”
“Because I’m a little desperate too,” Sammish said. She was a little surprised at her own honesty. It was as if the wild man could see her in a way that most people she met couldn’t. As if he could command a deeper part of her than her own will allowed.
“For what?”
“A friend of mine is in trouble, and I don’t know what the trouble is, except that it involves this woman.”
“And the trouble your friend is in. What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Sammish said, hearing how thin she sounded. How lost.
“Maybe you should stay out of things that could eat you,” he said, and bit the roll. Something red ran down his cheek. Sammish started. He turned the bitten bread toward her, and it was the raw red of living meat.
Sammish cried out, but wordlessly. The voice that spoke wasn’t hers.
“Stop.”
The wild man scowled. The bread was only bread. The blood, if it had been blood, was gone, and perhaps it had never been. “We talked about this. If she can be scared away, she should be.”
“It’s cruel,” the woman said from behind Sammish. “We can kill her if we must, but I’ve had too much of cruelty. What do you want from me, child?”
Sammish turned. The woman stood beside a thin, black-barked tree, and her robes were the color of bone and snow. Her hair was dark, and her skin was brown and dry, and she had a single dark mole. She held a blade in her right hand casually, like a butcher who’d paused in her unmakings to talk for a moment, and her eyes were dark and weary. Sammish thought of pale Andomaka. This woman could have been her shadow. Sammish tried to speak, but nothing came out. After all her searching, she’d given up hope of ever really winning through. Now that she had, the woman seemed too solid and real to hold all the dreams and fears about her.
“You have a friend?” the dark woman said, prompting her. Her accent was thick, but it didn’t hide the words. “I’m supposed to do something for her?”
“No,” Sammish said, and it was hardly a whisper. She coughed, cleared her throat, and tried to stand taller than her fear wanted her to. “But I want to know what she’s folded herself into. And you know.”
“I do?”
“The woman she’s taken work for says that they’re protecting Kithamar, but I don’t believe her. Andomaka, that’s the woman. Not my friend.”
“And what’s your friend’s name?”
“I’m not going to tell you that,” Sammish said.
The dark woman tilted her head a degree, like she was solving a puzzle in her head. “Come with me,” she said.
“No no no,” the wild man said. “This isn’t happening.”
“Goro,” the dark woman said. The wild man sighed and gathered up the rest of the rolls.
“This is a mistake,” he said, and led the way deeper into the trees.
The Silt was smaller than any other quarter. Oldgate towered above it to the north. It was impossible to truly lose her way here, but there was a sense of displacement as they walked, as if the wilderness went on longer than the thin land it grew upon. It seemed however long they walked, the bridges glimpsed between trees didn’t change their angles, that Oldgate showed the same stony profile. It was an illusion of her anxiety and the unfamiliar path they walked. Not more than that. Probably.
The shed they reached was white wood, dry and a little rotten. It was only barely larger than Sammish’s room in the baker’s house. Letters and glyphs were carved into the old wood and colored with wax rubbed into the grooves—red and yellow and a weird, vibrant blue. When they stepped into it, the interior was warm and comfortable. A little table, two beds with fresh straw, an iron stove no larger than a dog’s chest with a fire already burning in it. Sammish remembered the fortune-teller’s rooms. This place felt like what the old man and his mix-eyed accomplice were only playing at. The door closed behind her, and she felt a deep certainty that she would only leave this place if the dark woman and the wild man permitted it. It wasn’t a stone room with an iron door like the one Alys had been taken to at harvest, but it might as well have been. A wave of vertigo rolled through her, or else the earth below them spun.
The dark woman sat by the little stove and fed a bit of wood into it. The flames leapt. “Now, child. Tell me what you know. All of it, except, I suppose, the name of your friend. I’ll know if you leave something out.”
Sammish sat, her hands between her knees. She felt a deep unease, but it was too late to pull back now.
“It began in summer,” she said. “There was a guardsman the day that the new prince took his place.”
She told everything—Alys and her brother’s death, the gold coins and the silver knife, Alys’s cell in Oldgate and the candle that summoned the pale woman, the night they found Andomaka and the way Alys had taken up her brother’s work. She had expected it to all come out disjointed, but it didn’t. She told the tale like she was a storyteller who’d said it all a thousand times over, and the dark woman sat, listening. After a while, the wild man took a paring knife from under his bed and a dry apple from a box and started cutting bits of the fruit into a bowl. The smell was sweet and rich, and it reassured Sammish in a way she couldn’t put words to.
She told of Alys’s errand for Andomaka, the slave house and the boy.
The dark woman sighed then, and it was more profound than tears. Sorrow and despair radiated from her like heat came from the fire. Sammish stuttered to a halt. The man offered up a bite of apple, and the woman wordlessly pushed it away.
“Is that…” Sammish began, and then found she didn’t know what question she was trying to ask.
“I wanted it to be otherwise,” the woman said. “I knew my hopes were thin. Go on.”
Sammish told of finding Orrel, candle-skinned and weak, in the hospital and his story of Darro’s attack and death. It was a surprise that the woman from that tale was sitting before her, but it was a satisfying one, like the last word of a good joke that pulled the whole thing into a new perspective. It brought the whole tale together, as if it had been meant to be this way. As if the gods had planned it. And still, the dark woman didn’t interrupt or speak until Sammish reached the point in her story where she’d gone to Stonemarket and found Alys among Andomaka’s knifemen. When Sammish had lied about finding Orrel.
“Why?” the dark woman asked, and her voice was soft and weary.
“Why what?”
“Why didn’t you tell her about what her brother did to me?”
Sammish shook her head. “I didn’t know what Darro did, not really. I still don’t. I mean, was it your knife? Was Orrel telling the truth about you making him ill? Maybe it wasn’t even true.”
“No.”
Sammish shook her head, not certain what the woman meant. The dark woman lifted her eyebrows. “I told you that I would know. That isn’t why,” she said. “Try again.”
Sammish looked away. The wild man, cross-legged on his bed, scratched his bushy beard. Sammish felt a blush rising in her throat and cheeks. “I didn’t want Andomaka to know. Alys told me that she’d pass it along, and I didn’t want that.”
She realized a moment too late that she’d called Alys by name, but neither the man nor the woman commented on it.
“Closer,” the dark woman said instead. “But try again.”
In the stove, the wood popped and crackled. A breath of wind shook the door. It was already dark outside. Sammish didn’t know how long she’d been talking.
“I want to help her the way I know her,” she said. “I don’t want to help who she’s become.”
“Yes,” the dark woman said. “I understand.”
“It may not be as bad as it sounds,” the wild man said, and Sammish knew he didn’t mean Alys.
“They have the knife,” the dark woman said. “They have Timu. I have nothing.”
The wild man hung his head and sighed, but he didn’t disagree. She opened the iron stove and fed in another stick. By the light of the fire, Sammish saw that there were tear tracks streaking her cheeks. She didn’t know how long the woman had been weeping. She hadn’t given any other sign.
“The moment I kissed that man,” the dark woman said, “this was inevitable. I was young and foolish and caught up in things I didn’t understand. The world is rarely kind to people like that.”
Sammish tapped her fingers together to draw their attention. The dream of her story was gone now, and she was very aware of the naked sword that still rested at the woman’s side and the short knife in the wild man’s hand. She should have felt fear, but she didn’t. “Are you going to kill me?”
“I wouldn’t ask,” the wild man said. “You’re into this deeper than you can swim already.”
“I know,” Sammish said. “But I still don’t know what it is.”
“What more can we lose by telling her?” the dark woman said.
“You? Nothing. I still have things worth living for,” the wild man said, and the regret showed as soon as the words were past his lips. He ran a liver-spotted hand through his hair.
The dark woman gathered herself. “The thread of Kithamar your friend spoke of is real,” she said. “But it is not a thread.”
“This city,” the wild man said, “is a shell around a particularly nasty crab. Only someone’s played a trick, and it’s not all safe in its armor anymore. That blade is what keeps it safe. All those people out there drinking their usual wine and eating their day’s bread don’t know it, but this city is on a knife edge.”
“Thank you,” Sammish said crossly. “That makes everything clear.”
The wild man laughed and tossed her his bowl. There were still strips of dry apple in it. She ate one.
“Ask what you want,” the dark woman said. “I will answer what I can.”
Sammish thought of the thousand questions that had haunted her. “What’s your name?”
“I am Saffa Rej of the Bronze Coast, priest of the six, and sworn of the spirit house.”
“Who is that boy?”
“He is my son,” she said, “and the son of Prince Ausai. By blood, he is the heir of Kithamar.”
The Khahon ran south from the city, flowing wide and slow as it moved toward the sea. Other, lesser rivers lost themselves in it, eaten by the broad water. It passed through Mastil and bent in a lazy S around Haunamar. Dozens of villages clung to its side, using its water to drink and irrigate and run little mills. And when that didn’t sustain them, they took coin from the boats that tied up for the night at their little piers and the oxcarts that worked the towpaths. Far in the south, it broadened into a rich delta, its water lost in the vastly greater expanse of the sea.
To the west of the delta were the black-soiled islands of the Iustikar—Caram and Imaja and the plague-struck ruins of Lithou. To the east, the land curved gently, cupped by high, cloud-forested mountains. The great cities of Dulai and Ghan marked the beginning of the Bronze Coast. Kithamar the cold, city of wood and stone, sheep fat and forge smoke, was as exotic in the courts of the Coast as the beetle hunters and night markets of Dulai were to the citizens of Longhill. The stories of the northern city’s wealth and power, its bloody past and the beauty of its men, were half enticement and half threat. Kithamar, seen from so far away, seemed to have only one face, and it was as sinister as it was enchanting. To a girl born to the warm waves of Ghan, it was only slightly more real than the drowned jade-and-gold cities that were supposed to house the spirits of the first people and the king with eight bodies from before the sky was broken.
The sky was broken? How was the sky broken? asked Sammish, and the wild man put a finger to his lips. She went quiet.
It was of no particular importance to be a priest of the six. Nearly every household had someone who had attended the rites, drunk from the cup, and spoken the oath in the grand circle. It had a cost, but not one so high that any but the poorest couldn’t find a way to save the temple’s fee. Only priests of the six could sit on juries, speak before the council of elders, or contribute to the fires that marked the end of the season of rain. Since many people wanted the things that came with the priesthood, many accepted it and then went on to ignore it for the rest of their lives.
To be sworn of the spirit house was another thing altogether.
Unlike the brotherhoods and petty temples that had their houses in every city, the spirit house belonged to the Bronze Coast and nowhere else. Every initiate was a priest of the six, but more than that. They had to have been in the world. The keepers of the spirit house had all known lovers. Many had borne children and had families. Some had cared for their parents as they died. The spirit house was a place people came to find peace from the world. Saffa had watched her young husband die of a bloody flux. She had carried his body to the fire without even a sister or brother to help her with her burden. The peace that the spirit house offered and its teachings of loving the world but not engaging with it called to her as if by name.
Even so, the keepers had not been convinced that she belonged. She was young, for one thing. And her grief had been fresh. It is easier to renounce those things with which you are already weary, and they had feared that as her hurts healed, she would find herself restless in the house. In the end, she had convinced them.
Young, hurt, and turning her back to the world. Looking back, it was clear what Ausai a Sal, prince of Kithamar, had seen in her. What he had thought she was, and why he had chosen her.
The news that the prince of Kithamar was coming to the Bronze Coast had been a curiosity and a wonder: the ice and dark of the northern waters walking the roads and sitting in the sun of the coast. The council of elders remained placid and calm, but that was their job. Everyone else quivered and fidgeted like children waiting for permission to eat their honey sticks. Or that’s how her memory had it. Knowing truth from the story she made after seeing the ending was difficult, if not impossible.
It was the middle of the dry season, which meant it only rained once or twice in a week. The ship that came in from the delta was tall, and its wood was dark and intricately carved. It cast anchor in the bay of Dulai. The council of elders had arranged for representatives of all the factions to gather on the wide, white sand as skiffs carried in the honored guests. Prince Ausai himself stood in the first skiff to shore. He wore a shirt of black and indigo. His head was shaved to the skin. Saffa had expected him to wear jewels and gold, but he walked to shore unadorned and accepted the welcome of the Bronze Coast as casually as a fisherman cleaning his catch. The white-haired, ice-eyed man who followed him was larger, stronger, and still seemed like a child beside the prince. That had been the prince’s brother-by-law, Drau Chaalat, and as much Saffa’s downfall as Ausai himself.
Who? Sammish asked.
Drau Chaalat, the wild man said. Husband to Ausai’s sister, Hanan, and father of your pale woman, Andomaka. How do you not know these things? These people have the power of life and death over you.
Does knowing which of them married who make my bridge tolls cheaper? Sammish snapped.
Seen in retrospect, the seduction was expert. Prince Ausai’s attention to her had been casual and polite at first, and then more aware. Nothing more than that at first. If he had expressed his desire for her as a demand or a point of diplomacy—these things happened—she would have refused him, but he didn’t. He invited her to his dinners and laughed when she made her little sallies into the conversation. He appreciated her as a man appreciating a woman. He was beautiful in his way. He was older than she was, but not an elder. He moved with the careful grace of a strong man who knew how to use his strength. He was a man of overwhelming importance and some mystery who had noticed her. If she didn’t believe all his little admirations, she did believe that he thought her worth flattering.
Above all else, he was brief. In only a few weeks, he would return to Kithamar and be gone from her life. Nothing permanent was possible with him. Any dalliance between them would turn with the season and be gone. The stakes had seemed low.
His brother-by-law, Drau Chaalat, joined them some nights. He was, Saffa learned, the priest of the Daris Brotherhood. She recognized that it was a position of status. She didn’t know its mysteries, and he didn’t offer to tell her. He performed a few little cantrips after their dinner, no more than a fortune-teller on the street might offer, and she’d pretended to be impressed. And then he would leave them alone together.
Those nights had been sweet and left her with a sense of the expansiveness of life and of her own body. It made all that came after a deeper betrayal.
Ausai left, as she’d known he would, with fondness and respect and no empty promises. Drau Chaalat, on the other hand, had stayed on some unspecified work of the brotherhood. She hadn’t suspected that his errand was her.
