Age of Ash, page 19
“You could get away,” the boy said. “We could both get away. Please.”
She wiped the blood from the knife with a square of cloth that had never been touched by sunlight, then dipped the knifepoint in water. She knew the boy’s name because Prince Ausai had taught it to her. She wrote it—Timu—across the deathmark, blackened blood and pale water flowing into each other. Like the wake of a huge fish disturbing the surface of a still pond, something moved the smoke. The boy’s eyes widened in pain and alarm, but only because he had never been prepared. He cried out, and when he drew in his next breath, he wasn’t the one breathing.
“Andomaka,” Ausai, dead prince of Kithamar, said in the boy’s lovely voice. “You’ve done well.”
“Thank you, my prince,” Andomaka said.
The guards released the thin frame, and Ausai walked through the temple slowly, becoming accustomed to his new skin. The harpist put away his bow, and Ausai’s footsteps were the only sound. She would have known him by the way he moved, no matter what body he wore. The flood of love she felt for him had been something she’d trained herself to since she’d been a child. That it was constructed and practiced made it no less real.
“All of you, get out,” Ausai said, and his gaze locked on her. “You stay.”
Within a dozen heartbeats, the temple stood empty except for Andomaka, the spirit that had ruled Kithamar for centuries, and the candles still burning in their places.
“It took time finding the original knife,” Andomaka said. “The new blade shattered. I don’t know what we did wrong when we consecrated it, but—”
“It wasn’t the blade.”
Andomaka shifted. “Master?”
“The knife didn’t fail, though I suspect we were intended to think it had. The theft of the sacred blade was theater. It gave us something to blame so that our enemy could hide the true cause of the catastrophe.” He shook his head, a smile that was equal parts anger and disgust on his unfamiliar lips. “If I hadn’t thought to put a secret line of my own into the world where we could use it, you’d have been left to blame the knife and spend your time and effort searching for it or trying to remake it, and failing again. Or the rite, looking for some error in the ceremony. Or yourself, your confidence shaken. Eventually, the ceremony would be abandoned.”
“The brotherhood would never let that—”
“This is my city. I have sat that throne since the Temple was built.”
“If it wasn’t the blade or the rite…” Andomaka said.
“The blood,” he said.
“The vial?”
“The man. We failed because I had no connection to the new prince. Byrn a Sal is not our line. At least my sister-by-law and quite possibly my mewling cunt of a brother have betrayed the city and put a bastard on the throne. If they weren’t already dead, I’d haul them over a live fire to ask the details. But…” He gestured with one young hand. She had seen that movement so many times done by a different arm. For a moment, she felt a wave of vertigo. Ausai rubbed his palms over his eyes.
“He’s been crowned,” Andomaka said.
“Yes, and what proof do we have of his treachery that doesn’t also reveal my secrets? Are we supposed to go decades back in time and set a watch on Irana to see who she fucked besides my brother?”
“There could be letters…” Andomaka said.
“Letters burn. Proofs can be altered. I didn’t suspect anything for the decades I sat the throne. Who’d believe me now? Look at me. I’m a Bronze Coast whelp. I wouldn’t believe me.”
“I’ll stand,” Andomaka said.
Ausai lifted himself to sit on the altar. For anyone else, it would have been blasphemy. No rules that applied to other people constrained him. “You will, but not that way. This war began in the shadows, and it has to end there. A false prince sits the palace, and we will take him from it. Byrn a Sal may not even have known what he is, but it doesn’t matter. He has to die.”
She grasped at the thought. Byrn a Sal might not even know he was a bastard.
“He wasn’t brought up in the brotherhood. It will be simpler if he isn’t already on guard against us.”
Prince Ausai scowled with the young boy’s face. “If he didn’t know then, he may by now. I wasn’t expecting to have anyone else’s eyes on my private things. If he’s found them… yes, he’ll know there’s something. Not the details, but even those he may come to suspect, given time.”
“He has an heir.”
“His daughter dies too. The House a Sal will have to end. It’s time for a new family to guide the city. Chaalat is honorable and old and carries my blood. It is time for the ages to turn in Kithamar, and you are the axis around which history will spin.”
Silence reigned in the temple as Andomaka took the thought in, held it in her mind.
“It can be done, and better quickly,” she said. “But it can’t be discovered. The city wouldn’t understand.”
The boy nodded. Or Prince Ausai did. Or the thing that had worn Prince Ausai’s skin—the thread and spirit of Kithamar itself. The god that she had been raised to worship.
“When they fall, you will be prince of the city, Andomaka,” it said. “And I will be you. It’s the only way this works.”
Three days after Longest Night and a week still before Tenthday, Alys walked unsteadily back from her night’s drinking. She’d thought that being around people would be less awful than being alone, and she’d been partly right. The soup had been warm, and they’d had meat tarts with spiced pork that she could still feel burning pleasantly on the back of her tongue. There had been wine with only a little water in it. The wash of bodies and heat made a welcome change from Darro’s hole, for a few hours at least. Korrim and Calm Biran had sung a drunken round, celebrating the coming of the light, and she’d felt the tension growing at the back of her neck.
As she walked, she realized that part of what drove her back into the dark and the cold of her room was guilt. It had come in mouse-quiet. She’d enjoyed herself for a little while, and she’d forgotten Darro. For the time it took to eat a bowl of soup and drink a cup of wine, she’d lived in a world where Darro was truly forgotten. It was a mistake she couldn’t allow herself again.
As she took the dark stairs, she heard a man’s deliberate cough. It came from behind her own door. Darro’s door. She took her club in her fist, rage and fear flowing into her like she’d found a spider in her hair. She kicked the door open.
Tregarro sat at her table. His scarred face caught the light of a little oil lamp. He wasn’t woven from smoke this time. He’d actually come in the flesh. Magic would have been less alarming.
“How did you find me?” Alys asked.
“Fuck you,” he answered calmly. “And close the door.”
She did, but she didn’t sit. Her gaze shifted, checking to see that Darro’s box was where she’d left it, closed and undisturbed. She relaxed when she saw it was safe.
“What do you want?” she asked.
Tregarro nodded. “She said you were hungry for work. Is that still true?”
“Yes,” Alys said without pausing to think.
“There’s work. In Riverside.”
“All right,” Alys said. “What is it?”
“Are you loyal to her?”
Alys frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I am. I’m loyal to her. If I think for a moment that you would put her or our work in danger, they would never find your body. You know that.”
With a shock, she realized the scarred man was frightened. She didn’t know what of. “I know,” she said.
“There’s a girl who’s been trysting with a boy while his family’s elsewhere. It’s a merchant house. You’re to find the house.”
“What can you tell me of it?”
“Just that.”
Alys scowled.
“If it was simple, I’d have done it already,” the scarred man said. “Find the house. Watch over it, and when they make their little love meeting, you’ll interrupt them and kill the girl.”
Alys shifted her weight. Part of her was already refusing. Find a merchant house with young lovers freshening up the luck? That had to be half of them. And walking into danger was one thing, even anticipating a fight. But the prospect of murdering someone—of seeking them out in order to leave them dead—was like looking over the edge of a cliff. It left her head spinning and her heart beating fast. She told herself it was just excitement. “Kill her?”
“Yes.”
“Is she one of the people who killed my brother?”
“She’s one of the people who’s against us. That’s all you need to know.”
“And her boy?”
“I don’t give a shit about him. But the girl dies.”
She tried to imagine what Darro would have done. What he would have said, and how he would have said it. He would have been fearless. He would have been hard. She wasn’t either of those things, but she could learn to be. She could pretend she was until it came true. She smiled his smile, leaned against the wall, her hand resting on the club. Her breath was short, and her heart tapped against her chest.
“A girl who’s with a boy?” she said. “Next you’ll be telling me to look for someone who’s breathing.”
“I know it isn’t much to start from. But do what you can, and you’ll be paid.”
She shrugged the way she imagined Darro might have. “Then I’ll do what I can.”
There’s plague in the Stonemarket,” Black Nel said. “Palace guard shut down three streets for quarantine. Anyone that wants can go in, but try to come out and they fill you full of arrows and burn your corpse.”
“Bad omen,” Deva’s Quinn said.
Seems like there’s a lot of those these days, Sammish thought. She almost said it aloud, but she was afraid people would agree. It was six days now since she’d sat with Saffa and Goro, and she hadn’t been able to get the woman’s dry voice out of her ears.
We’re in over our heads. That’s what she’d said to Alys, it seemed like years before. She hadn’t understood how deep they’d really been, or how dark the waters were.
The Pit seemed almost comforting. Longhill and Seepwater might be desperate in their poverty. People might risk freezing if the weather turned cruel or starving if their coin ran out. People caught knives in their guts over a wallet of bronze or a romantic betrayal or a mad, angry sense that this was all the life they would ever have coming out in impotent rage. What they didn’t have was dark magic and the prince’s throne.
Sammish sat in a corner, her eyes on her bowl of broth-and-onion. No one noticed her because she didn’t want them to. She didn’t want anyone to, ever again. Her mind kept circling back to Saffa, sitting in the strange little hut on the Silt. Her voice as she said She came to our summons. Had she? Sammish had lived her whole life around the petty magics of Kithamar: the fortune-tellers and the rat wards and the herb sellers whose tea promised health or love or the return of whatever else you’d lost. Most were pulls by a different name, but some were true. Had Saffa doomed Orrel to a slow, ugly death, or had he only been unlucky? He’d puked after watching someone he knew die. So what? He hadn’t stopped, but he’d hid himself in a plague house. People got sick all the time. Had Sammish put together the better hunting grounds to find Saffa by herself, or had some spirit drawn her? She didn’t like to think of herself as a small piece in a larger game, driven by forces she didn’t control. And when she did, she’d rather the forces be gold and knives and politics. But hadn’t Grey Linnet called the way she could choose not to be noticed a little magic? Could that be truth?
Sammish’s mind skipped and jumped around her skull like a trapped sparrow looking for a window out. Her stillness was a mask for her storms.
“I heard there’s rot in the granary,” a thin Hansch man said. He was sitting by the fire. Sammish didn’t know him, but some of the others seemed to. “Green rot. The kind that makes you sick up and go crazy.”
“That’s bad, if it’s true,” the barman said. “If the brewers can’t get the temple priests to sneak them out cheap grain, I’ll be charging all of you two fingers and a nose for a tun of beer come summer.” His voice was jovial to pull the sting.
“It’s shaping up to be a hard year,” Black Nel said. “We’ll all be thinner before harvest comes again, you can count on that.” And then, “Plague better not fucking spread. A quarantine in Stonemarket’s all to the good, but the palace starts thinking it’s here, and they’ll burn Longhill to the ground and us inside it.”
“Hey,” the barman said sharply. “No talk like that.”
Sammish sipped her broth. It wasn’t that odd for someone to be a little tipsy and start railing at the atrocities the nobles and merchants rained down on the Inlisc of Longhill. It meant more that the barman was worried about reprisals for it. Or maybe it was only that Sammish was frightened and uneasy, so that everything seemed soaked through with menace and portent.
The street door clattered open and closed, and then Alys herself pushed through the folds of cloth that kept the heat in.
If Sammish hadn’t known her, she’d have guessed Alys was one of Aunt Thorn’s crew. Leather and good wool, black boots and a thick belt. The only thing that made it seem like she might not be wealthy in her own right was that she carried a lead-dipped club instead of a blade. She looked around the taproom, her eyes fever-bright and a smile on her lips that left Sammish anxious. Alys didn’t see her, and Sammish took the moment to stare.
Alys’s hair was tucked under a woven cap except for a curling lock that had escaped at her ear. Her broad cheeks showed a little color where the cold had bitten them. Her body, hidden though it was, left Sammish aching in a way she didn’t like to think about. All that was usual. Alys was beautiful, but she’d always been beautiful. Today, she was sharp; hard and brittle as cracking ice. And that was new.
We should have run, Sammish thought. As soon as Orrel cut the bluecloak’s belt, we should have run for the city gates and never stopped. Sammish lifted her palm and let herself be seen. Alys’s smile flickered into something more genuine. Relief, maybe. It was odd. Usually Sammish was the one who took comfort in it when they found each other.
“You’ve been thin on the ground,” Alys said as she slipped onto the bench across from Sammish. She didn’t quite make it an accusation, but she didn’t keep it from being one either.
“I’ve had things,” Sammish said. “Figured you did too.”
Sitting close as they were, Sammish could see the seams on Alys’s coat. Black, thick, and triple-stitched. It was good work. Expensive work. Sammish had known that before, but now when she saw it, she thought of Saffa begging her friends and family for the coins that had bought it, and it made the jacket less in her eyes.
“I’m making progress,” Alys said. “Tregarro came to me. The scarred one.”
“I know who he is.”
“I think they’re preparing for something big. The people that killed Darro are about to suffer a real loss. I don’t know all the details, and what I know, I can’t… I can’t speak of. You understand.”
Sammish didn’t laugh, and if she had, it wouldn’t have been mirth. “I do.”
“They’re going to suffer,” Alys said, and to her it was a good thing. Sammish felt something shift in her gut. She must have made a sound, because Alys looked up at her, an apology in her eyes. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you. I’ve promised not. Once it’s done, I maybe can.”
“It’s all right,” Sammish said.
Alys reached across the table and put her hand on Sammish’s arm. Her eyes had taken on an expression that was almost a plea. “Don’t be angry with me. I know you’ve been with me on this. Even when I had to do parts of it by myself, I know you’ve been there. I’m not looking to keep you out of it.”
She’s frightened of something, Sammish thought, and it brought a bitterness that surprised her. When Alys was strong or sad or angry, Sammish was tolerable: worthy of a warm bed in the Stonemarket cold or a beer if there was no one better about to drink with. When Alys was frightened, Sammish mattered. The kindest way to phrase it was that she was who Alys came to when, for whatever reason, the stakes were highest.
She could think of other less charitable ways to describe it.
If I told you everything I know, she thought, you would run to the Silt to try your hand at killing Saffa. Or worse, to your pale woman to spill it on the floor for a pat on the head.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Sammish said. “It’s all right.”
“You aren’t angry?”
“I’m not,” Sammish said, surprised to find it was true. Something was complicating her heart, but it wasn’t anger.
The conversations in the Pit all found a pause in the same moment, and the barman’s voice cut through like he was an actor on a stage. “There’s gods on the streets these days. Be careful is all I’m saying.” He looked up, embarrassed to have spoken so loud in the sudden quiet, and the mutter of voices rushed back. If Sammish had been in the mind to look for omens, it would have been one.
“We need something to drink,” Alys said. “You want cider or wine?”
“I’m fine with the soup.”
“You’re sure? I’m paying.”
The dark-eyed, brokenhearted woman hiding in the Silt was paying, she just didn’t know it. Sammish remembered the day Alys had offered her a coin for helping. She was glad she’d given it back. “I’m certain,” she said.
The yearly rituals that followed Longest Night took up the palace and most of Green Hill. The great families had their turns hosting the prince Byrn a Sal and his retinue, and in return the palace was opened for the private rites and observances of the brotherhoods. Crystal lanterns hung at the street corners, and music filled the galleries and temples. It was a seventh year by the reckoning of the Clovas brotherhood, so its members were out in masks and rags, giving out charms and bits of sage-scented candy. Tregarro had heard that the apparent charity led to a vast orgy on Tenthday, but he’d heard similar rumors about the Daris that he knew from experience to be false.
