Age of Ash, page 29
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. And then, “Fuck.”
With a grunt, she hauled herself to sitting and pressed the heels of her palms against her eyes. The candle was in her safe cache. All she had to do was light it, tell Andomaka what had happened and what hadn’t. Or tell her lies about it and brazen her way through. Anything would be better than waiting and worrying and chewing her own tongue with all the ways it had gone sour for her. Maybe she’d do it. She just needed a drink first. Beer or strong cider. A bowl of something warm in her gut. Then she’d do it. Get it over with. Be done.
Or maybe she’d light the candle, and the scar-cheeked Tregarro would appear instead. Or maybe he’d knock on her door.
“I have to get out of here. Get some food,” she said, opening her cache and grabbing up a few bronze coins. Darro didn’t answer. When she went, she left the shutter open as if he might enjoy the cool breeze and the light. If she felt a twist of disgust at herself for that, it was only one among hundreds, its significance overlooked.
The wooden walls and roofs of Longhill were dark with the runoff as old ice became fresh sludge. Rivulets of dark water ran down the streets, carrying away the dirt, shit, and food scraps of the long winter months. Rats gamboled in the shadows and in the sunlight, then scattered as dogs rushed in, barking in something part play and part hunt. The city was still cold, but the promise of spring made people want to believe it was warm. Men walked without jackets, their breath only smoking a little bit. Here and there, a girl had taken a summer skirt out, mended the winter’s damage of moth and mouse, and suffered gooseflesh for her optimism. The chill hadn’t gone, but the city was bent on pretending it had. If they did it long enough, it would become true.
Alys bought a cup of thick soup from a cart by the east wall and ate it while she walked. To the north, the Temple glittered in the sunlight, and the looming presence of Oldgate and Palace Hill was hidden by the wooden buildings on her left. She could almost imagine that everything west of the river had been washed away, and Kithamar become an Inlisc city the way it would have been had the Hansch never come.
She saw the funeral before she knew what it was. She crossed an intersection of two curved, shifting roads, and there almost at the bend a few people stood together. It could have been anything—a conversation about the weather or how to remake a wall thin with dry rot, a pull being organized or paying out, even just a collaboration of chance. But there was something in the way the people—adults and children both—stood and bowed their heads toward each other that spoke of sorrow. Alys slowed, turned, and walked toward them.
As she drew near, she knew some of the faces. Danna. Cane. Nimal. They stood outside an open door that someone had draped with a red cloth, talking in low tones. Nimal had tears on his cheeks, which was unnerving. Nimal was too worried about seeming strong and manly to weep easily. There were children with them—two girls young enough that they would have been genderless in different clothes—holding each other by the hand, a thin boy with bright white hair, an older girl with thick braids framing a broad and angry face. Alys knew them, even if she didn’t recall their names at first. The girl with braids was Danna’s daughter. The two holding hands had the same name, but she didn’t remember what it was. It would likely come back later, when she’d forgotten to think about it. She sucked down the last of her soup and shoved the empty cup in her sleeve. Cane saw her and nodded. Nimal saw her and looked away.
“Who passed?” she asked the thin, pale-haired boy. Elbrith. That was his name.
“Grey Linnet,” the boy said.
The name hit Alys like a stone thrown at her breastbone. “What happened?”
“She went to sleep, and she didn’t wake up,” Elbrith said. And then, with a solemn, knowing nod, “She woke down.”
Alys had known Linnet since she was younger than this boy. She’d gone to sweep the shores of the Silt with her and the other children. Nimal and Black Nel and Darro had too, before her. And this child, standing in front of her. How many generations of children had gone looking for mundane treasures at the side of the water with Linnet? There would have been a time not long ago that the idea Linnet could die would have been as ridiculous as the river dying. Linnet was a part of the city. Only she wasn’t. Hadn’t been. She’d been a woman, same as anyone, and just as mortal.
“I’m sorry,” Alys said, and the pale boy nodded as if she’d spoken a password or a reply in a religious rite. She’d said what she was supposed to say, and he approved. Odd child.
Alys went to the open door and stepped past the red cloth into the room beyond. It was a small space, narrower than her own room, with a cot and a thin mat of rushes on the ground, but it was filled with people. The air was hot, and it tasted like someone else had just breathed it out. There was little enough room to move through, but no one would run a pull here. Grey Linnet had lived alone, fighting for her food and a place out of the weather, but she had been known, and to judge by the press of bodies in the space now that she’d left it, she would be missed.
Alys would miss her.
She almost didn’t recognize her mother at first. The winter hadn’t been kind to her. She had looked wan on Darro’s nameday and lost more of the flesh from her cheeks since then. Her hair had been grey, but now it was thinning. Alys could see the shining, oily scalp back past her mother’s hairline. The whites of her eyes had taken on the yellow of old ivory, but her hands were steady and her eyes were dry. Caught up in conversation with an old, thick-bellied man, she didn’t see Alys.
She’s also dying, Alys thought. Even if not from anything in particular just yet, she’s still dying. It was so clearly true that it should have been trivial, but it stopped her like a slap. Her mother laughed at something the man said. There was a dark gap where her left eyetooth had been. She looked older than the image that Alys had in her mind when she thought Mother.
Alys turned back, edging her way out to the cold street. Her mouth was set in a scowl so profound it ached a little, but she wasn’t angry. Not quite. She lowered her head and started walking, counting the steps in her head until she reached fifty, then looking back. The group outside Grey Linnet’s room ignored her. Black Nel had Nimal’s arm, and they were leaning on each other. A new child that Alys didn’t recognize was sitting on the paving stones, weeping with her head forward. No one looked her way, much less called her back. Alys wondered whether Sammish had gone to pay respects, and if she hadn’t, if she would. She wondered who would pay for Grey Linnet’s rites, and if they’d opt for full or stay with partial since the old woman hadn’t died in the river. She thought maybe she ought to, but the coin she had from Darro would only last so long. She had herself to think of.
She walked back south, the Temple behind her now. Her shoulders ached. She had been born in Longhill. She’d lived her whole life there. But Darro was gone, and she didn’t want to speak to her mother or Sammish. Ullin was dead. Somehow, Alys had built a life that didn’t have anyone in it for her to sit with except a box of ashes. It felt unfair, but she didn’t know who she could blame for it. It hadn’t been her plan. It just happened that way.
She reached her corner more quickly than she’d expected, lost as she’d been in thought. From the street, she looked up at her own window. The shutter stood open, as she’d left it. It was one of hundreds she’d walked past, and nothing to lend it meaning or significance apart from that it had been Darro’s and was now hers. Every other one she could see had another room behind it, with someone else living out a life that meant as little to her as hers meant to them. She felt small.
As she made her way up the steep, lightless stair, she thought about where she would go when Darro’s gold ran out. A little rat-haunted cot like Grey Linnet’s, maybe. Or someplace like Sammish’s little closet by the baker’s kiln. Or a place in a barracks like Ullin had kept in Stonemarket. Or the deep holes and tunnels of Aunt Thorn, if she found it in herself to be the killer she pretended. Or the street. Or her mother’s floor until her mother woke down herself someday.
It was strange to have spent seasons with her focus always on Darro’s ashes, and only now to feel the sense of her own life’s boundaries, still distant but coming closer breath by breath. Why won’t you look at my face? She shuddered and opened her door.
The air in the room was cold as the street, but dark. Smoke filled the space, but there was no fire for it to come from. Her throat went tight, and her less immediate fears flew away like sparrows.
“I didn’t know what happened,” she said under her breath, willing the words to come naturally. “Ullin didn’t tell me he was doing it.”
She closed the shutter enough that only a thin slice of light came in, then went to her safe cache. The black candle was there. When she picked it up, it was cold to the touch. She had an impulse to put it back, leave it in its drawer, and pretend she’d been out in the city someplace and hadn’t seen the summoning gloom. It would be easy enough. She could even make her way down to the taprooms in Seepwater or to the river where the old men and women played at stones and watched the river flow again now that the ice had broken.
But that would only invite Tregarro to find her again in person, and that would be worse. She put the candle in its place on the table, lit it, and waited. The smoke shuddered and shifted, thickening and weaving itself into a human shape. Alys relaxed a degree when she saw the pale hair and eyes.
Andomaka’s eyes clicked over Alys’s face and body like she was reading words written on her skin. Her smile was tight and thin.
“You haven’t made a report recently,” the pale woman said. Her usual dreamy quality was gone, and a harshness had taken its place. “Where do things stand?”
Ullin did something stupid. I don’t know what it was. I wasn’t there. All the lies she’d practiced crowded at the back of her tongue, bumping against each other so that none of them could get through. Andomaka tilted her head, a little frown tugging down the corners of her mouth.
“We tried,” Alys said, and wished the words back as soon as she’d spoken them. It was too late. “We watched the house when we knew the family would be away. The bluecloak came, and his girl did too. We went in for them, but… they fought. Ullin was killed and the girl got away.”
Andomaka was still as stone, pale eyes locked on Alys with a focus that itched, and she rested one thumb in her braided belt like a swordsman putting hand to pommel. Her pale tongue darted out, wetting her lips in a brief, lizard-like swipe, and she shrugged. “Well, that explains some things. Did the girl see you?”
“She did,” Alys said.
“Did you see her?”
“Yes.”
“And?” Andomaka said. Alys shook her head. Andomaka sighed. “Did she look familiar?”
Alys reached for something to say. It wasn’t a question she’d expected. “She looked… rich? She was Hansch.”
Andomaka was still again, and then smiled. When she spoke, it seemed more than half to herself. “I love this city. Well, we’ll have another chance later. She can’t stay hidden forever.”
“If you say so.”
“I have another job for you. You can make up for your failure with the girl who looked rich by tracking down an Inlisc girl who looks poor.” There was a laughter in the words that uneased Alys. It might have covered anger or disappointment or something else, but it was sharp-hearted, and it made Andomaka seem different. As if Alys were seeing a side of her that had been hidden until this moment.
“Any particular one?” she said, trying to match the tone.
“We had a little mouse come visit my temple. Brown hair, brown eyes, so absolutely unremarkable that the guards hardly took note of her while she walked in past them. But she knew me, and my enemies. She knew my business. And she knew my name. My understanding is that not many people know my name. But you do, don’t you?”
“Only because you told it to me.”
Across the table and across the city, Andomaka lifted a reassuring hand. “I’m not accusing you of anything. But I am asking if you might have mentioned it to anyone.”
“Ullin, once,” Alys said. But her thought was Sammish, by all the gods, what did you do?
“Anyone like our unwelcome visitor?”
“May have,” she said out loud. “I don’t know. I know a lot of poor Inlisc girls.”
“With whom you discuss me and my work?” The edge on the words could have cut cloth.
“No,” Alys said. “Just one, maybe. She wouldn’t do anything against you, though.” Except that she might. He wasn’t your pale bitch’s lap dog floated up in her memory. Her breath was coming fast and shallow now. Her head felt light.
“What’s her name?”
“She goes by several,” Alys lied. It was a reflex. If she’d been able to think, she wouldn’t have, but her body knew the smell of a predator. Instinct led her to the strategies of the Longhill street rat that she was. “But I know where she sleeps. I can find her.”
Andomaka leaned back on the bench, stroking her chin as if she were a man touching a beard. For a moment, the silence between them was brittle. The pale woman came to her decision.
“Hunt her down,” Andomaka said. “Bring her here.”
That’s all you can tell me?” the coachman said. He had a way of scowling that Tregarro found annoying. It was as if the man was making a mask of his own face. They stood in the yard nearest the stables, the late morning sun pressing down from a blue-white sky. If there had been even a breath of wind, it would have been frigid. With only sunlight and still air, the day could have been mistaken for warm.
“It’s what you can start with.”
The coachman scowled again and shook his head. “There’s a lot of Inlisc girls who don’t look like much of anything, boss. Wasn’t there anything about her that stood out?”
“She was in the private temple without anyone stopping her. That was exceptional.”
“How am I supposed to look for where someone was before they got where they are now? It’s not like there’s a mark on her from it.”
Tregarro scratched his cheek with a casualness he didn’t feel. The coachman had been one of his most trusted knives for half a decade. The impatience he felt now was likely more about himself than his hired man’s impertinence. “Try going to taprooms near Longhill and listening. If someone’s drunk and bragging, maybe you hear it. If someone stops talking when you mention the Daris Brotherhood, maybe you notice it. I’m giving you the place to start from. If I knew the whole path to the finish, I wouldn’t need people like you.”
If he put a little roughness into the words people like you, the coachman didn’t notice. He only shook his wide head in a performance of despair. “That’s going to be a hard fish to hook.”
“You aren’t doing it alone. Everyone is on this. If you’re the one to haul her in, it’s well worth the time.”
“I’ll do what I can,” the coachman said, as if there had been an option.
Tregarro wasn’t offering work that his people could pick up or turn down at will. He was instructing them. But he was also aware that he was raw and itching. When he felt like this, it was too easy to start fights he regretted later. “I trust you to.”
Mollified, the coachman nodded, turned, and trundled back across the courtyard to the stables. Tregarro stretched his shoulders, trying to get the tightness out of his joints. It had been there for days.
Thaw was past, and the vines that climbed the courtyard wall were already wrapping themselves in fresh green so bright they looked false as a child’s memory of leaves. The early flowers were already blooming, and the air smelled like the promise of summer that hadn’t come. He had the sudden and visceral memory of walking through this same space only a year before and finding Andomaka here. She had been sitting with the corpse of a bird, looking at it as if it were singing to her.
The true thread of Kithamar—the founding spirit that had held the city safely in the world from its first days—had returned, what had been broken was mended, and the idea that anything could turn the avenging blade of the Daris aside seemed impossible. If the price of that was that he wouldn’t find Andomaka kneeling over dead feathers in a springtime courtyard, it was what he’d sworn to suffer. He would be fine with it.
He made his solitary way around the perimeter of the house compound. Half a dozen buildings from the great central house to the carved granite toolsheds. Some were connected by covered walkways, some by buried passages, some not at all. They made up his little nation. Kithamar was bounded by its walls, by custom and status and its boughs and branches. The Daris Brotherhood was bounded by Tregarro’s will, and it had been breached once already. It wouldn’t happen again.
Turning the corner at the eastern edge, he found two of his guard leaning against the wall, scowling at the traffic on the street. Their narrowed eyes and casual posture, the hands they rested on the pommels of their blades, made them look like a weak man’s idea of strength. Tregarro’s half-formed sorrows shifted easily toward them, and he strode along the edge of the street. His guards’ eyes were dazzled with servants in the colors of half a dozen houses, carts piled high with flowers and vines with black soil clinging to pale roots ready to be planted in the kitchen gardens of the powerful, and a small company of redcloaks marching in north from the palace. Tregarro was fewer than a dozen steps from them when his slouching guard caught sight of him and straightened.
He stopped before them, waiting with the same calm, silent attention a houndsman might use to scold a pup. The two men tried nodding their salute, then a more formal raising of their hands. Their eyes were bright and anxious, and their relief was unmistakable when he returned the gesture.
“Anything?” he asked.
“No sir,” the senior of the pair said. “Nothing of note.”
