Age of Ash, page 9
But perhaps it was coming to an end. Andomaka stood and took the girl in her arms. They embraced for a moment, Andomaka whispering something in Elaine’s ears before the girl stepped back. Tregarro retreated from the window. Being where the princess might notice him was bad tactics. It risked spoiling whatever moment Andomaka had been building between them, and he gained nothing by doing it. Despite that, he had to fight the impulse to drift back and watch. He wasn’t a man who had gotten where he was by respecting the privacy of others.
Still, the sun had moved another hand’s span in the sky before Andomaka came to him. Her lips were quirked in a little smile.
“That was unexpected,” she said as she took a seat on a silk divan.
Tregarro poured out a glass of fresh water for her from the pitcher in the servants’ closet. She took it from him without acknowledgment or thanks. “She seemed upset.”
“My loving cousin isn’t finding all aspects of palace life suit her, and I am fortunate that she feels at ease turning to me for counsel.”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not,” he said, and sat across from her.
“I am and I’m not,” she said, and drank. He tried not to watch the subtle working of her throat as she swallowed. He was a trusted servant to the high priestess, not her lover. There were ways to look at things that exposed the observer more than the observed, and it was better that he avoid them. She put down the glass and settled herself.
“Your cousin coming here,” he said. “Is it to do with the… the rite?”
The crisis that was upon them after Ausai’s death and the failure of the brotherhood’s mysteries wasn’t something they spoke of openly even here. He expected Andomaka to disapprove, but she only seemed thoughtful. When she spoke, her tone was bitter.
“No, I think our failure was so complete it went unnoticed.” She frowned, and her attention shifted. For a moment, he thought she was back in the Temple in the terrible hours after Prince Ausai had died, reliving the catastrophe again the way he did. When she spoke, he knew he’d been wrong. “I had a dream. The old god Shau had come to the city, and he’d taken on the form of two girls. They were both in grief, and that was the joke. And the beauty. One of them was the wolf girl.”
“The one that used the candle,” Tregarro said.
“I couldn’t see the other one.” Andomaka waved a dismissive hand. Tregarro didn’t know if she meant the dream was empty of prophecy or just that she’d lost interest in it.
“Do we think the boy survived?”
“My wolf boy? I don’t know,” she said. “If he did, he wasn’t there. The girl was younger than him, but of the same stock, I’d guess.”
“A daughter? A sister?”
“Too old for a daughter.”
“They start young down there,” Tregarro said.
“She was surprised by me,” Andomaka said, ignoring his words. “Frightened, even. I tried to gentle her, but there was very little time.”
“She snuffed out the light?”
“I don’t think she did, actually. I was looking at her when it died. I think it might only have reached its end. I think she wanted to talk with me.”
“Well, if the candle’s gone, she won’t be reaching back that way. Did she have the blade?”
“I didn’t see it. She might, she might not. She had an interesting face. I liked her.”
Tregarro pushed away the little twitch of impatience. Andomaka often got lost in how things related to her experience of them. It came, he assumed, from looking at all the world as though it were a dream she was having.
“Was she in the boy’s house?”
Andomaka narrowed her eyes as if she were trying to see again what she’d already seen. She shook her head. “She was someplace else. It was much quieter. And there was no wind. Little wolf always had the wind with him. And everything around her was stone.”
“The west side of the river, then. Unless she was at the Temple. Was there anything else?”
“A cot. It was a narrow room. And a… box? It had a symbol traced on it. A deathmark, I think. Do you think that could have been little wolf?”
“Too early to say anything. That makes it sound like it might be the Temple. I’ll go and look. Did she have anything remarkable about her?”
Andomaka reached out and touched the scars on his cheek and neck. He tried to be patient with her. “No,” she said at last. “Her hair was at her shoulders. And it curled. Her face was round.”
“That’s half the Inlisc girls in Longhill.”
“I’d know her if I saw her again.”
“Well, that’s something.”
“You’re angry,” she said. “With me?” She didn’t make it an accusation, complaint, or apology. She never did. If he had been angry with her, it wouldn’t have bothered her. It would only have been another curiosity in a lifetime filled with them.
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m frustrated. And I’m anxious.”
“Hope,” she said, nodding as if he’d confirmed something. “It was almost easier when everything was lost. The wolf boy and the blade with him. And Ausai. And the other boy, that one. Everything scattered and failed. Then we could mourn and build a new plan. If there’s still hope, there’s still something to be lost.”
Tregarro felt an eeriness in her voice that was like an echo only of meaning, not sound. She found ways to say things that made them deeper than the words themselves. It was part of what fascinated him about her and a part of what he feared. He took her hand and gently folded her fingers away from the scars on his cheek. She didn’t resist. She never did.
“I have my people,” he said. “We will look for her as best we can.”
“They may know the city. But they don’t know her.”
“They know she exists, and that’s better than we had yesterday. The Bronze Coast boy’s still in play. He’s still kept safe, so if we can get the knife, we haven’t lost anything we can’t win back.”
“Only if it’s the right Bronze Coast boy,” Andomaka said.
“If this girl had the candle, she may know where your Inlisc friend kept his other secrets. If he had the blade the way he said and it didn’t get stolen when he got himself killed, maybe she can lead us to it.”
“If and if and if,” Andomaka said, and the dreamy quality had left her voice. She seemed only like what she was: a noblewoman of Kithamar whose will had been thwarted by circumstance. “They’ll poison us if we let them, these ifs.”
“Let me give you a few more, all the same,” he said. “If this new girl is like your wolf boy, she may be greedy. If she is greedy, she may be looking for us as well. And if that’s the case, you and I and the city have just gotten very, very lucky.”
The foreign woman with the fascination for blades had passed through Kithamar, but she’d been careful about it. Every person the woman spoke to had suffered hundreds of fresher dramas and curiosities in the days since. A calligrapher near the Temple might have met with her if he wasn’t mixing the question up with one that his wife’s father had asked. A brewer in Seepwater had let a woman who had been asking after knives sleep in his back room for a night, but he didn’t think she had been foreign. The street magician who sold amulets of glass and tin had seen a Bronze Coast woman, but she’d been looking for her son, not a blade. The petty blessing men and fortune-tellers who plied their trade in the markets—more of them frauds than real—had seen her, or pretended to have done until they could decide whether Sammish had money to trade for their story. Sammish knew better than to pay good coin for someone to echo back what she wanted to hear.
She didn’t ask about the woman made from smoke. She told herself it was because Alys was following that thread, but that was more than half a lie. The truth was, Sammish didn’t want to find that one. It wasn’t only the high magic that disturbed her, though she didn’t like it. It was the idea that the woman of smoke sounded like Green Hill. In the games of the noble and the wealthy, girls like her and Alys spent like small coin. What had happened to Darro could happen to them, and Kithamar wouldn’t miss a meal. Putting herself into this would have a cost.
It already did.
“Nothing for you today,” the butcher said.
Sammish laughed, then saw that he wasn’t joking. She gestured at the flesh around them—sheep and pork and lamb unmade and ready for the pot. “All of this, and your knives are still sharp?”
He didn’t meet her eye. “I have a Newmarket boy taking care of it for me. All my blades are fresh yesterday.” Then, when she didn’t speak, “You missed your day twice. Two times, I lost a morning’s work because I didn’t have my tools.”
“I said I was sorry for those,” Sammish said.
“You did, and you were, and I am too,” he said. “But the Newmarket boy gets them back to me when I need them, and neither of us is trying to make chops with apologies.”
“What about the skins?” Sammish said. “They go to the tanners, don’t they? I could carry them there?”
“The tanner’s boy does that. I don’t have anything for you. Not today. Maybe… Maybe next week. I don’t know. Don’t count on it.”
She stood there, trying not to show her humiliation and guilt. The truth was that she would probably have done the same in his place. A helper who doesn’t help was less than worthless. She was less than worthless.
“I’ll come back,” she said, and left. She wouldn’t come back.
She ran to the next house, feet slapping hard against the stone so that it hurt a little. She told herself she’d never miss her work again. She’d just push herself harder. If she only bore down more, she’d find a way to do all the things she’d promised…
It was the week of the harvest festival, and the streets were crowded. The men and women who’d gone off to the farms for the gathering in were returning, and the fat of the land came with them. A mule-drawn cart rumbled along before her as she walked, piled with rough burlap sacks and smelling of apples. The stalls of Newmarket were so filled with gourds and sacks of beans that the walkways were hard to pass through. Children sat on the corners with wicker baskets piled with honeyed walnuts and late summer berries that stained their fingertips. All the food was cheap, and everyone had coin. Now and for a few weeks more, all of Kithamar could pretend it was wealthy, or at least everyone who had spent the time to earn the extra silver and bronze.
It was wrong that seeing people she knew happy and thick with coin left Sammish feeling diminished, but it did. Even Alys had her secret cache of gold, though she was sworn not to spend more of it. Everyone had something extra except Sammish. She remembered something her father had said when she was very young and he was alive. Plant daydreams, eat dreams. He had meant Don’t be lazy, but Sammish wasn’t lazy. She’d been working as hard this last season as she ever did, only the payment she wanted wasn’t coin. Not even the silver that Alys had offered her. She wanted to matter to Alys. Now, with all the wealth and plenty around her, part of her began to wonder whether she’d been foolish.
The festival itself began at sundown and lasted for three long, drunken days. Servants in the colors of the great families and laborers for the guild halls rolled tuns of beer along the street. Bright cloth banners were being hung from the windows. As long as it didn’t rain, there would be music and dancing in the streets, lanterns hung at the prince’s expense to push back the night, costumes and masks and open doors at every house with food and wine to offer to passersby. In a better world, Sammish and Orrel and Alys would have been out among them making their own harvest. Only they wouldn’t, because Darro was dead, and Alys was drowning in it, and Sammish was a lovesick idiot busy trying to forge loyalty out of lust. She tried not to see all of them with contempt, and she succeeded a little where it came to Alys and Darro.
When she took the knives she had to the whetstone man, he was in a cloak of orange and blue. His hair was tied back by a woven leather thong, and he looked almost handsome. He was working, though, pedaling the little pump that passed the water over the pale flesh of the stone, holding the blades at just the proper angle, listening to the music as they hissed softly and took their edge. She imagined herself in his place, and the simple, pure sensuality of the movements. It wouldn’t be so terrible to live her life alone, maybe, if she had some simple, well-practiced beauty like that to fill her days.
“You’re taking these back tonight?” he asked as she unfolded the leather and removed the knives.
“I am,” she said.
“Not going to be taken up by the festival? Put off delivery to after?”
“Fuck no,” she said.
“Good,” he said mildly.
“I’ll be back before sundown.”
“They’ll be ready,” he said.
And when she came back late that afternoon, they were.
The harvest festival’s sun went down, and Kithamar changed its nature again, if only for a little while. Alys made her way through the streets of Longhill. She had rented costumes from a stitcher at the edge of the quarter. The seams weren’t even and the thread was weak, but for the moment she was swathed in ribbons of green and blue and black that swirled about her like river weeds. Her false fingertips clicked like rain against stone. Her mask was sewn with grey thread that was supposed to look like silver and had polished stones in it that could pass as valuable in bad light. The other costume was pale as bone, and she carried it under her arm.
The baker’s house was closed. He and his family were out in the streets and canals, and she rapped at the door to Sammish’s little room until she was certain that she wasn’t there either. The stars were out, filling the sky, and a wide, white moon was with them. The festival, like the wind, didn’t reach into the depths of Longhill, but Alys could still hear it. The subtle sounds of merriment, far away. The city was enjoying itself, and the combined voices and violins, drums and pounding dancers were like listening to someone talking in the next room. She considered putting the pale costume at Sammish’s doorway and going on her own, and wrestled with the reasons to leave and the reasons to be patient until Sammish arrived and the debate lost its importance.
Sammish had the leather satchel she used when she was carrying knives, and a sour expression. Alys could tell that she was trying not to snap when she spoke.
“You look ready for a night,” Sammish said. “What’re you meant to be?”
“Water nymph,” Alys said. “You’re a snow fairy.”
“I’m a what?”
Alys held out the pale cloth. “Snow fairy. Now strip off your day clothes and put these on. We’re going to Green Hill.”
Sammish took the costume like she’d been handed a dead animal. “Why?”
“When else are we going to be able to pass up there?”
“Why would we want to?”
“To look for the smoke woman. What else?” Alys said, surprised that Sammish hadn’t followed her thought. “Come on. You’ll be cunning in this. And it’s already paid for.”
For a moment, Sammish looked so lost and despairing that Alys thought she would refuse. But she took the cloth and motioned Alys to wait as she undid the lock on her room and vanished into the darkness. A few minutes later, she emerged. The costume was fine—white cloth that caught the moonlight and yellow dye in patterns like light under water, a leather mask that made her eyes look wide and exotic—but she wore it like it was a sack.
“How bad?” Sammish asked.
“They’ll bow down before you and ask for wishes,” Alys said. It was a lie, but it was the right lie, and Sammish managed a smile. They walked together through the narrow and twisting streets until one opened onto a square, and they were in Newmarket. The harvest festival was in its full fever. They wove their way through the crowds and music until they came to the streets where open carts were letting anyone ride without charge. Alys found one heading toward the northernmost bridge over the Khahon, the one that linked Riverport to Green Hill, and clambered aboard, careful of her false fingers. Her heart beat a little faster with every street they passed, and she imagined what a hunter in the forest must feel.
Riverport was alive with torches and lanterns and firepits. The rich smell of roasting pork and the sweetness of sugar beet mash mixed with the smoke. The peculiar combination brought back memories of other harvest festivals through her girlhood, of running after her mother through a crowd, of dancing on a rooftop she’d climbed to while the owner of the building shouted at her to come down, and of being carried on someone’s shoulders through a dance while sparks and embers flowed through the air around her. The flickering of the light made the buildings themselves seem to sway, and bluecloaks marched in force with a sand cart trailing behind them, watchful for any untamed fires.
At every house, servants or younger children handed out bits of sausage and ham, fresh-cooked game and bits of pumpkin-and-butter still warm from the oven. Many of the revelers on the street brought cups to dip into the bowls of hot juice and spiced wine. Alys thought she caught sight of Nimal dressed as an ancient Inlisc warrior, but it might have only been someone who looked like him. It was early yet to be running a pull. The city would be drunker the farther it fell into night.
Alys had lived in Kithamar from her first breath without ever crossing its northernmost bridge. Going to Green Hill was like walking to another world. Black water surged under them, churning white where the old stone broke it, the river cold and angry and filled with voices that had never known a human tongue. The air was more than chill; it was cold. Alys paused in the center of the span, looking west into the flow. For a moment, she felt very small, like she was a rabbit and the river a great dark owl that might kill her or might not, as its whim took it. Sammish took her hand, their fingers briefly weaving together. The uncertainty in Sammish’s masked eyes made her think she felt the same unease, and they walked the rest of the bridge hand in hand.
