Age of Ash, page 37
“All well?” her mother asked.
“Well enough. Did anyone come asking for me?”
“No one.”
“And you still have it?”
Her mother took a long, thoughtful puff of her pipe. “I do.”
“Did you look at it?”
“I didn’t. You told me not to, and so I didn’t.”
“Are you lying?”
“Oh my, yes. But only about looking. All the rest’s true.” She grinned, shifted her weight, and took a grey rag out from under her thigh. Alys unwrapped it to see the leather sheath, and drew the blade to check the markings along the silver. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust her mother. It was that she knew her mother was Longhill. If the old woman took offense, she didn’t say it.
“Bring that back, and we could find a buyer for it.”
“Some money isn’t worth the trouble it brings.”
“Now that’s wisdom,” her mother said. “No, I mean it. Took me more years than you’ve got to see that for truth.”
“You can’t tell anyone you had this.”
Her mother mussed her hair affectionately. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
Alys shoved rag and blade together into the cloth satchel at her side. When she stood, the high clouds were already fading to grey. The first stars flickered in the east. There would be many more soon.
“You’ll come back to see me?”
“I will if I can,” Alys said, and turned her back to the stars.
The Khahon was black and as smooth as glass that night. If she paid attention, the sound of the water had tones in it like a musician giving their instrument free rein and hoping it would lead them to some new melody. Alys crossed the southernmost of the four bridges that led to the base of Oldgate. The switchback road rose above her, climbing to Palace Hill and whatever was happening there that night. Torches and lanterns marked the way up, but that wasn’t where Alys was going.
She walked along the river’s western edge. Two bluecloaks passed the other way, watching her with suspicion, but they didn’t stop her. She didn’t look like trouble, and she didn’t look like fun. They passed along their way, and she passed along hers.
A path snaked under the northernmost of the four bridges. In sunlight, the stones were green with algae. At night, they were the same black as the river. Alys went down the old, well-worn stairs and then along the path, feeling the slick under her feet, slippery as ice. Where the river hit the stone pylons, it threw up a pale foam. She waited, listening. Sometimes the streetbound took shelter there in the shadows, but not tonight. Tonight, she was alone. She wasn’t sure whether to feel pleasure or regret for that.
She didn’t know when she’d decided on her plan. Maybe when Sammish had told her about the rite and she understood what she’d seen in that slaver’s room on the night they’d taken Timu. Maybe when she was walking away with the blade in her hand. It hadn’t felt like making a choice so much as becoming aware of one that had already been made. She was sorry not to tell Sammish. It felt wrong to leave that friendship on a lie, but the girl wouldn’t have understood. She might have stopped her. And as good a friend as she was to her, Sammish wasn’t blood.
She wasn’t her brother.
She sat at the water’s edge. If she’d wanted to, she could have taken off her boots and cooled her feet in the river, but instead she pulled off her satchel and put it beside her. It was darker than she’d expected, and unbuckling the straps took a while. She took out the blade first, unwrapping the rag and then taking the silver from the sheath. It seemed brighter than it should have been, as if it were in a shaft of moonlight that nothing around it shared.
Next was the box. Darro’s box. Darro. She ran her finger over the grooves of his deathmark. She’d brought it in case her memory failed, but now that the time had come, she knew every line and curve. She’d spent too many nights in the last year with Darro as her best company to forget it. A tightness took her throat, and tears rose in her eyes. She didn’t sob, only let the sorrow come.
There were times now she didn’t feel it. Or at least forgot to feel it. Sometimes for days in a row. She felt it now, and deeply.
With the rag, she rubbed a bit of paving stone clean. Or as clean as it could be. When that was done, she took the silver blade and pressed it to her arm. It was sharp. It bit her easily. Eagerly. Blood welled up, black in the darkness, and then she drew the tip of the blade through it like it was ink.
The impulse to hurry was profound, and she pushed against it. She didn’t know what would happen if she got it wrong, so she kept her eyes open and wide to catch any bit of light. Slowly, carefully, she drew the deathmark just the way she’d seen a thug dressed as a coachman do, back in some other lifetime. Only this mark was Darro’s. The thinness of the world around her seemed to ripple like a curtain.
When she was done, she sat back, knife in her clenched fist. She hoped nothing would happen. She would have tried and failed, but that would be enough. The thing she couldn’t bear was not to try at all. She waited, caught between longing and dread.
It was too dark to see the blood beginning to smoke. She smelled it instead, like overheated iron. The murmur of the river fell away into some deeper silence. Something like mist or smoke seemed to rise from the water. Or not from it. Through it, as if all the world were insubstantial and the shadowy mist was the only real thing. She heard her own breath catching and stuttering. It was how she knew she was on the edge of panic.
All around her, the shadows grew thicker, darker, more solid. A sensation like insects crawling over her skin raised gooseflesh. The attention of the dead was on her, and it was heavy, cold, and unsympathetic.
She tried to speak, but all that came out was a thin whine. She balled her fists until her fingers ached, swallowed, and tried again. She’d come too far to stop. Not until she was sure.
“Darro?” she said to the roiling dark around her. “Darro, are you there?”
For a long moment, nothing seemed to change. But then, slowly, the darkness gathered, condensing into a solid shape. A man’s body, dark within the darkness.
“Is that you?” she whispered. The figure didn’t move at first, but then slowly lifted a hand, as if in greeting. Alys rose to her feet.
“I wanted to see you. I wanted to know that you’re all right. Are you all right?”
The figure made no response. She tried to see its face, to see Darro’s face in it. The emptiness was too profound.
“I miss you,” she said. “I tried so hard to have you still be here, but… I miss you. I love you. I think there’s a way I could bring you back, but then I wouldn’t be here anymore, and that’s too much. I already tried it, in a way. It’s too high a price, and I’m so sorry it is. I’d save you if I could, but not like this.”
She waited. The darkness waited too.
“I didn’t get to say goodbye.” There were tears on her cheeks, thick and warm and flowing, but her voice didn’t waver. “I had to tell you how much I miss you. And goodbye.”
The figure didn’t move. The formlessness that was its head and body remained as blank and featureless as before, but she had the impression that she was looking at its back now. That it had turned away. Maybe that was all it could do.
She waited a moment more, savoring it and hating it and carrying the knowledge of what came next like stone in her belly. She slid her foot forward, putting it over the deathmark, and twisted at the ankle, smudging the mark out. Instantly, the figure was gone, and with it the unreal mist and the abrading attention of the dead. Alys bowed her head, noticing the tightness in her chest and her throat. She tried to love the sorrow, because it was all that was left of her brother. And because she knew now that even it would fade.
Across the water, a carriage barreled through the darkness, torches bright on its roof. The river murmured as it had before. The city all around her shifted and muttered and slept, a vast beast with tens of thousands of eyes. She had to force her hand to relax, then stretch out her fingers, working the joints until the stiffness and ache were gone. She took the blade by its point, cocked her arm back like a knife thrower at a carnival, and aimed halfway between the horizon and the top of the sky. She put her hip and shoulder into the throw, and two long, breathless seconds later, she thought she heard a splash in the voice of the water, but it might only have been her imagination. She sat alone in the darkness for a time, feeling something that wasn’t peace—not yet—but that was near to it.
We have a problem, you and me,” the boatman said, lifting a lantern so that the light was in her eyes.
Sammish squinted up at him. Her body was sore, and her sleep so fueled by exhaustion that it was hard to tell the thick-bodied man from a dream. She sat up, willing herself back to consciousness.
They were five days south of Kithamar now. Saffa had negotiated passage on one of the flat-bottomed boats that floated down from the northern city to river villages in exchange for loading and unloading at the docks along the way. The food was little more than starvation flavored with fish, the sleeping cots were piled so close over each other that Sammish had opted to brave the flies and mosquitoes on the open deck, and the work would have been punishing for a man twice her size.
They’d reached the second village of the trip near sundown, tying up to an old, waterlogged dock. The plan had been that Sammish and one of the other hired hands—Hansch, with what had been a neatly kept beard that was quickly becoming less so—would unload the cargo before they slept, and Saffa and the boatman would load what was waiting onto the boat in the dark of morning so that they could leave with the light.
The light hadn’t come, but the birds were loud with the threat of it.
“What’s the matter?” Sammish managed at last.
“She’s not working is the matter,” the boatman said. “We have to be off the ties before the next boat comes, and at this rate, we won’t be.”
Sammish cursed under her breath and pushed herself up. The boatman stepped back toward the dock. The river hushed and spat around them as she followed him to the dock. The darkness smelled like the green of summer. Saffa was there, a sack across her shoulders, her eyes cast down as she walked. The boatman went past her like she wasn’t there, making his way to the handcart and the looming darkness of the village warehouse beyond it. Sammish fell into step beside the Bronze Coast woman.
“All well?” Sammish asked. “Big man said you were struggling.”
“I’m fine. I’m sorry. It’s only that I was thinking too much.”
Sammish took the sack from her and slung it across her own shoulders. Saffa walked faster when she wasn’t burdened. “What’s on your mind?”
“It’s almost my son’s nameday,” Saffa said. “And I hear him in the water. He is very much with me. Or his absence is. I’m sorry. I should be able to work.”
Sammish dropped the sack beside half a dozen others like it. Barley left over from the winter promised to a place downstream where the crops had failed. Sammish’s back hurt. “It’s all right. You put off feeling too much about him all while we were in the thick of things. Now you’re safe, it’s time you did.”
“I’m not doing my part.”
“Sure you are,” Sammish said. “Just your part’s for Timu right now. Go get some rest. I’ll take care of this.”
“I’m sorry,” Saffa said again, but at least she headed back toward the cots and didn’t try to keep working. Sammish stretched, spat into the river, and started back along the dock. The boatman had pushed the rest of the sacks off the handcart and gone back into the darkness for another load. Sammish picked up one, balanced it on her shoulder, and then took a second one on her hip like it was a dense, limp, oversized baby. She tried to be careful going back to the boat. The water made the wood of the dock slick in places, and if she slipped and dropped one of the sacks into the river, they’d be walking to the Bronze Coast.
She’d thought that leaving Kithamar would mean a change to everything. She had put the city of her birth—of her full life—behind her. She’d thought that leaving the streets she’d known would mean leaving the girl she’d known too, but here she was, carrying someone else’s weight. Or maybe it was just that all of life everywhere was just the next set of problems, one after the other, until she could sleep in pyre flames.
And in truth, she almost hoped it was.
To leave everything and begin again was a frightening thing. The night when they’d burned the brotherhood and stolen back the knife, she’d found Saffa in the streets of Riverport. When Sammish realized that she was planning to go with her when she left, it had felt like looking over a cliffside. Now that it had happened, it was just more work, more hunger, more interrupted sleep. She knew how to do that.
Another two sacks, and when she went back again, boatman and cart had returned. He didn’t say any words, but his grunt seemed generally approving. He carried a sack with him, Sammish behind, and then stayed on the boat, rebalancing the load. The rest of the carrying looked to be on her.
Sweat trickled down her back and sides. Her muscles hurt. She found herself struggling to get enough air into her lungs and out again. But with each trip to the shore and back, the pile grew less. The birds were louder now, and the star-sown sky to the east was fading from black to charcoal. What had only been blackness had the hard lines of rooftops, the softer curves of trees. The pile of sacks on the ground grew smaller. The one on the boat increased. Sammish suffered, and found to her surprise that she was also enjoying herself.
As she carried another pair of sacks in toward the boat, the other hand came out toward her, and they danced a little, side to side, as they silently worked out how to pass each other. On the boat, she waited for him. He was only carrying one sack.
“We should go together,” she said. “That way we don’t accidentally knock each other over the edge.”
The Hansch scowled at her, as if he were unaccustomed to taking orders from some forgettable wisp of an Inlisc girl, but then he shrugged. “Fair point,” he said.
With him helping, they had the sacks cleared from the dock and secured on the boat before the sun came up, but it was a near thing. The stars were all gone and the clouds the pink of roses when the boatman and the village taxman threw off the ties and pushed the flatboat out into the wide, lazy current of the Khahon. The boatman went into his cabin—a tiny room hardly wider than his shoulders and still bigger than the one his three hired hands shared—and came back out with a brass horn that he blew on. Three long notes, and one short that echoed away down the river. A moment later, she heard an answering call with two short and two long from upriver.
“Cut that one too fucking close,” the boatman said, but there was satisfaction in his voice. “You can make yourselves food if you like. I’ll watch the water.”
The bearded man nodded, and Sammish followed him back to the little crate of rice, dried apples, and salt pork. She started a little cookfire on the stone and he put a mash of rice and apple and river water in a tin pan hardly larger than a fist. It was supposed to be for all three of them.
“What do you think he’s watching for?” the man asked, nodding toward the front of the boat. It was more than he’d said to her since they’d left the little docks by the hospital outside Kithamar.
“Logs, maybe,” Sammish said. “Sandbars.”
He grunted his agreement.
“First time on the river?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Mine too.”
“I took that from what your friend said. Will she be all right?”
“She needs some time is all,” Sammish said, and hoped she was speaking the truth. She thought she was.
The water started boiling, and the steam from it smelled of old apple and salt. The man started to stir it, and she stopped him. You’ll make it gummy. Just let it boil. He took her advice, and she liked him better for taking it.
The sun rose and burned off what little fog there was on the river. The apple rice cooked through, and the bearded man took a little bowl of it off for Saffa while Sammish ate her share slowly. That was one of the tricks to being hungry. Wolf it all at once, and her body forgot it had been fed. Go slowly, notice the taste of it, and even too little food left her close to sated.
When she was done, she lay back, stretching out in the heat of the sun and the humidity of the river, and listened to the buzz of the insects, the distant call of boats working the river, and the soft murmur of the Khahon.
Good enough, she thought on the edge of sleep. It wasn’t the life she’d dreamed of. It wasn’t a place at the brewer’s window. It wasn’t a room in Seepwater. It wasn’t Alys, or the girl she’d dreamed Alys to be.
But it was enough.
Alys woke in the morning to the sound of the baker singing to himself as he tended the oven fire and put his day’s buns and loaves in. Alys shifted as she woke, and the cat at her knees got up petulantly, walked to the door, scratched it, and looked back at her with an expression of unmasked disappointment. Alys had assumed the animal was dead, but then it had appeared a week after she’d taken Sammish’s room with a new notch in its ear and no apparent notice that the girl sleeping in its bed had changed to someone else.
It was five weeks now since the brotherhood had burned and Byrn a Sal had died. For the first week, Alys had kept to the deepest shadows of Longhill that didn’t belong to Aunt Thorn. She’d even sent her mother to the taprooms to listen for word of Andomaka Chaalat, and whether anyone from Green Hill had been asking after someone who looked like her. No word came, and day by slow day, Alys came to believe she’d escaped. The Alys that Andomaka had called wolf girl was dead in the rubble of Green Hill, and there was a sense in which that was true. Still, she’d cut her hair short and sold all her old clothes and the wooden club too. Just in case.
She washed with a cloth and water that she’d taken in with her the night before, then dressed in a simple tunic and workman’s leggings of canvas. They’d be warm for the weather, but she expected the day’s work to be rough, and she preferred heat to skinning her knees and ankles.
