Age of Ash, page 8
Harvest was full of memories like that: the way the leaves in the Silt lost their green and fell; the Khahon flowing dark as tea; the slowly growing night and the fading day. The long weeks until the first freeze were a constant flow of wheat and barley, apples and squash, lentils and broad beans. Cows and lambs and pigs came to Kithamar on carts or tied by ropes, their eyes tired and incurious. The slaughterhouses in Seepwater and the Smoke poured blood into the river by the barrelful, and children helped pack the fresh meat into curing salts for a bronze a day. The pantries and larders and storerooms of Kithamar filled, and every shelf was the promise that hunger wouldn’t come.
The rush would end near the first frost with a great celebration led by the prince, and since it would be Byrn a Sal’s first, everyone was vastly curious how it would go. Would there be dancers and fire-eaters the way his uncle had done? Or would the new prince find some way to make the celebration his own? Longhill buzzed with rumors of the forgiveness for crimes, which there sometimes was, or the forgiveness of taxes, which never happened however much people dreamed. The first harvest festival without Darro.
Alys was in a Longhill taproom that everyone called the Pit, a beer in her hand. Ever since the bluecloak, she’d found her fear starting to ebb. She didn’t start at shadows the way she had, and while she hadn’t come back to a room in Longhill, she hadn’t jumped from her cell in Oldgate either. It wasn’t courage, so much as the growing sense that whatever dangers there were, they hadn’t caught her scent. And also the growing, half-felt sense that Darro wouldn’t have run, so maybe she shouldn’t either. She’d had one victory, small as it was. She couldn’t win others by running.
Around her, the younger men and women of Longhill were spending their coin and relaxing. She was at work. Sometimes she could forget what she was working at, as if digging into Darro’s death could make it not have happened. Sometimes it just poured ashes on the cut.
“Did you hear about the sugar barge that sank?” Korrim Stara asked.
“I didn’t,” another man answered. “What sank it?”
“Some asshole in Riverport got happy, ran a flatboat into the barge. Didn’t notice it was taking on water. Whole damned thing went down, is what I heard.”
“Well, there’s someone’s fortune lost,” the barman said philosophically. “Pity for them.”
The trick to finding Orrel was that he clearly didn’t want to be found. Asking after him was like touching a snail’s horn; it would only make him pull away. The best she could do was be in the places that he usually was, and then listen and watch. They were the same taprooms and street corners where she had been, where her friends and petty rivals were. She entered into her life as it had been before Darro died, like she was impersonating the girl she used to be.
The Pit had half as many people as usual, which wasn’t surprising for harvest time. Given the choice between begging in the richer quarters, scraping for work in the city, stealing, or going to the fields for the season’s reaping, about half chose the hard and honest labor, and about half didn’t. Nimal and Cane at the little table in the back weren’t the honest type. Korrim had a bad knee that wouldn’t let him do fieldwork. Calm Biran was there too, his hair pulled back from his face to let the early grey at his temples show. Everyone in Longhill knew everyone else, if not directly then at no more than a single remove. Korrim had lived in the building beside Alys’s mother for three years when she was younger. Nimal and Cane had used Alys as a lookout when they were breaking into Riverport houses sometimes. Calm Biran had an older sister who had bedded down with Darro for a time before she took up with a student at the university. All of them knew who she was, and how Darro had died.
“Anything more for you, Alys?”
She shook her head, but the mention of her name shifted the room’s attention toward her. Nimal stood, stretched, and slouched over to her. “Where’ve you been keeping yourself?” His tone and the narrowness of his eyes meant he was asking whether she was open to crewing up on a pull. Any other time, it would have been interesting.
She shook her head, answering the question he hadn’t asked. “I’ve been here. Just have my hands full for the time.”
“Heard about your brother,” he said. “Me and Darro, we didn’t always get along, but he was a good man.”
“Thank you,” she said, because it was expected of her, and because any more genuine answer would have invited him to keep speaking. He put a hand on her shoulder in a way that wasn’t an invitation to a more immediate and physical kind of comfort unless she was open to the idea, in which case it was. When she didn’t respond, he took his hand away and went to the barman for a beer.
Darro’s name in someone else’s mouth left her uncomfortable, itchy, and restless. She drained the last of her drink, straining it through her teeth and spitting the dregs on the floor, and walked out. It was still daylight, even if the sun was low and red. She could have spent some time down near the university where the girls Orrel had favored plied their trade, but it wasn’t in her. Not tonight. She could have found Sammish, but even her company felt like a burden. She needed sleep and food and time for something like hope to find its way back to her.
She walked back toward Oldgate with her hands pulled into her sleeves. The evenings were getting cooler, especially near the water. A singer had put a little wooden dais near the bridge, and she paused to listen to him warble his way through an old Inlisc ballad that ended with two lovers stabbed and dead. A closed carriage with no crest on its side barreled past like it was fleeing from something, but no one followed on behind it. A group of older men in the good clothes and colorful cloaks of Riverport merchants strolled past, muttering among themselves with the gossip of trade and politics. Reluctantly, Alys went back to the bridge and her cell in Oldgate. The effort of finding food was too much for her now, even though she knew she’d regret later that she’d let her belly go empty.
Her small darkness waited, as it always did: cot, candle, and ashes. The time was coming soon she’d have to either pay to keep it or find another place to sleep. She lay down in the dim light and turned to Darro’s box. It was such a small thing to hold a whole body. Fire left so little behind. She didn’t weep. Her heart had many masks these days. Rage and sadness were the most common, though she’d also found herself giddy and restless or weirdly calm, like someone already dead herself and only watching her life from a distance. Her heart was as uncertain as weather, and tonight it had chosen the old numbness and despair.
She would have thought grief was just sorrow. She knew better now.
“Well,” she said to the box. “This could be going better. At least Sammish found something. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me who this southern knife hunter is? What she was to you? Or where Orrel is? Anything that would help?”
Darro’s box flickered as the candle spat and the flame wavered.
“Didn’t think so,” Alys said. “If you want justice, you could start by being more useful. You should have seen that bluecloak. He was so sure of himself when he came after me that day, but I left him crying in the streets. You should have seen it. You should have—”
Without warning, her calm gave way, and she wept. Even as the sobs racked her, she felt a deeper darkness growing beneath the sorrow. Grief was supposed to fade. Wounds—even wounds to the soul—were supposed to heal. She felt hers getting worse.
The candle spat again, the wick almost spent. She rose unsteadily to her feet and dug in her sack for another, but there were none. She’d neglected light as much as she had food. A hazy half-memory came to her, and she went to her hiding place. The knife was gone. Sammish still had it. The gold was there and the little stub of black candle. She took it and went back to the holder. She stood tracing Darro’s deathmark with her fingertip until her old candle seemed to be in its last, fading blue, then lit the little black candle from the dying light. The dark wick sparked as the new flame took. She dug the old wax from the holder with a fingertip, ignoring the heat, and leveled the dark stub in its place. It was burning fast. It wouldn’t give her more than a few minutes, but some light was better than none.
She didn’t notice at first that the smoke was doing anything odd. The wisps and trails of it didn’t dissipate, but narrowed, thickened, and wove together. Her attention was on Darro and her own self-pity. The woman’s voice, gentle as it was, startled her as if it had been a shriek.
“Well now. Who exactly are you, little wolf girl?”
Alys spun. There in the gloom of her cell, a pale woman stood, her body made of smoke but solid as the stone walls. She was Hansch, with high, sculpted eyebrows and well-painted lips. Straw-pale hair cascaded down her shoulders, and even her gently smiling lips seemed bloodless. Her robe was silk the color of moss, bound at the waist with a beautiful belt of braided leather with a dove worked in bronze as the clasp.
There was a soft, throaty clicking sound, and Alys realized it came from her. That she was trying to speak, but the fear choked her.
“It’s all right,” the pale woman said, stepping toward her. “I won’t hurt you, little wolf girl. Only tell me how you—”
The dark wick spat and reached its end. The pale woman blinked out with the light.
“We’re in over our heads. This is too much,” Sammish said. And then, “What did her voice sound like? Did she have an accent?”
Alys frowned, trying to recall exactly how the pale woman’s words had sounded. It seemed impossible that something so astonishing could fade from her memory so quickly, but with each question that Sammish asked, Alys felt less certain of the answer. “She did and she didn’t? Not like she was from Hyian or Bronze Coast, but not like she was from Longhill, either.”
“But Hansch? You’re sure she was Hansch?”
“I was until you pushed me on it,” Alys said, more sharply than she’d meant to, and Sammish pulled back like she’d come too close to a fire. Alys tried to cover over her snapping by going on in a gentler voice. “She seemed almost… kind, really. Like she’d just found a puppy someplace she hadn’t expected to and was trying not to scare it off.”
It was midmorning, and they were sitting in the street outside the baker’s house where Sammish slept. Alys had spent the night walking, and exhaustion was deep in her bones. Staying in her little room after the apparition or visitation or whatever it was hadn’t been possible. She’d scooped up her things in the darkness and left, trotting down the wide path toward the bridges almost before she’d thought about where she could go or who she could stay with.
The night had been cold, but not bitter. She’d thought of going to her mother’s thin, loveless squat, or Sammish’s, or Aunt Thorn. Every impulse that came to her had the same problem: they were places that she would go. In the darkness, being where she was known felt dangerous. The sense that someone or something out there had seen her, that it would be looking for her, made her want to keep far away from the places where anyone could expect her to be. Instead, she had made her way across the river, and through the streets of Riverport and Newmarket. She’d even gone to the Temple grounds. The only rest she’d taken was sitting in an alley between two ill-dignified minor churches there.
The morning light had taken away enough of her fear that finding Sammish felt like a risk worth taking. She’d found the baker’s house when the scent of woodsmoke and yeast were thick in the air. The oven—a clay kiln set apart from the buildings around it to keep down the risk of fire—was only a few feet behind them now. Alys felt the gentle warmth of it against the back of her neck. The ground was pale with the residue of years of flour dust and rain.
“It might have been a Green Hill kind of voice,” Alys said. “Like the magistrates when they’re passing judgment or when the prince gives a speech. And she was pretty like they are.”
Sammish scratched her chin like she was stroking a beard. “This is bad. I mean, it wasn’t good before. Orrel gone. Your brother killed. But now foreigners looking for enchanted daggers and wizard women weaving themselves from smoke? Whatever this is… There might be some sense in letting it be?”
Alys felt anger in her breast, twice as vicious because she’d had the same thought. “Darro wasn’t your blood. I don’t expect you to do the same things I do.”
Sammish looked down, scowling hard. “Are you certain Darro would even want you to do this? He cared about you. He loved you. No one wants the people they love to be hurt. Maybe he’d tell us to stop? You paid his rites. You took care of him. What if that’s enough?”
On the street, the cleaner’s cart ambled around the corner. The prisoners with their flat wooden spades scraped the horse manure and other shit from the paving bricks and hefted it into the dark-streaked, stinking cart while four bluecloaks walked far enough behind to avoid the worst of the stink.
“It’s not enough,” Alys said.
“All right.”
“If you don’t want to be part of this—”
“No. It isn’t that. I just… I’m scared.”
Sammish’s gaze was fixed on the ground between her feet. Her hair was loose and falling forward like she was trying to hide behind it. Alys dug a finger in her belt, opening the hidden seam and popping a silver coin free from its hiding place. She held it out. “You’ve earned it.”
Sammish took the coin like she was stealing from a temple box, never meeting Alys’s eyes.
“Give me back my knife,” Alys said. Sammish brought it out from under her tunic. It was warm from her body, and the leather sheath was dark on one side from her sweat. Alys stuffed it in her boot the way Darro had taught her, the hilt tight against her ankle and ready to be drawn if the need came. She was surprised to see the tears on Sammish’s cheek and the shame in her expression.
Alys felt a rush of annoyance and then guilt at being annoyed. “It’s all right. It would probably be too much for me as well, if I could get away from it. But I can’t. Whatever this is, it’s mine. Until I find the one who killed Darro, I have to follow this. You don’t.”
“But then you’ll be going alone. I don’t want you to be alone,” she said, or close to it. She’d coughed a little on the you.
“How long have we known each other?” Alys asked.
“Since we were scrapping in the Silt with Grey Linnet,” Sammish said.
“And how long have we been crewing up?”
Sammish laughed through her tears. “Since you stole that sack of onions from the stand at Newmarket and I pretended to be hurt when the seller knocked into me. You had that green cloak and red boots. You were amazing.” She was still and silent for a moment, then reached out, the silver coin pinched in her fingertips. Offering it back.
Alys shook her head. “You’ve earned it.”
When she didn’t take it, Sammish balanced the coin on Alys’s knee.
“Pay me my cut when the job’s done,” she said.
Green Hill spread to the north and west of the palace where Hansch villagers and farmers had once huddled close to the ancient keep, ready to run for its protection when the Inlisc raiders came. Centuries ago, they had dug the canal, a diversion from the northern reaches of the Khahon, built to protect the village’s western edge and give clean water to irrigate fields and orchards that had long since become flower gardens and private groves.
Great houses stood on the bones of those almost-forgotten farms, and the trees and gardens that gave the quarter its name boasted of the wealth and power of its residents. To have open, living green space inside city walls verged on bragging, so while the stone towers and mansions with their vaulted ceilings and statues of fauns and spirits and serpents were designed to awe those who saw them, so were the oaks and alders that shaded them.
To the southwest, down the slope of the hill, Stonemarket spread out like a map of itself, streets and plazas arrayed like a field under a watchful farmer’s eye. The Smoke, to the south, was hidden by the palace, a servant kept out of sight until something needed cleaning or mending. The eastern half of the city from Oldgate to the Temple could have been a rumor except for the accents of the tradesmen and round-faced cleaning girls and kitchen help.
Green Hill might bow to prince and palace, but nothing less.
The great families had their compounds—Reyos, Chaalat, a Sal, a Jimental, Abbasann—but old Hansch brotherhoods also kept their houses there: Clovas and Daris and Climianth-Sul. The brotherhoods were not families of blood descent, but of oath and custom. If asked, all would swear their loyalty to the gods of the city, but in private, each also kept their own mysteries and secret rituals. Tradition ran deeper than wells in Green Hill.
Tregarro had known that before he came to Kithamar, but some days it still astounded him.
He had joined the brotherhood twelve years before, still healing from the fire that had marked him. He’d answered the call to Kithamar seven years ago, and acted as Andomaka Chaalat’s left hand for three of them. He had been inducted into the brotherhood’s mysteries. He had drunk Kithamar’s water and breathed Kithamar’s air. He had celebrated the most holy rites in the private temple in the brotherhood’s house here. He was as near to a native of the city as he would ever be.
He never would be.
He sat now in a drawing room at the back of the brotherhood’s compound, in the building the servants and staff called the second guest house when the formal members of the brotherhood were present and the shed when they weren’t. The joke was funny because in any other context the shed would have been a magnificent building: carved stone and polished wood. It only seemed humble because it sat beside the formal gardens and the brotherhood’s great hall.
Every now and then, he would amble to the window and look down into the courtyard. Andomaka was sitting in the shadow of a wide cloth banner placed there to shield her pale skin from the sun. Her cousin sat across from her. Elaine a Sal was daughter of the new prince, the next in traditional succession followed by Andomaka herself, and presently weeping quietly about something. They’d been talking down there for the better part of the morning.
