Age of ash, p.2
Age of Ash, page 2
If the girl raised an alarm, Orrel would drop his knife and claim innocence. Her lost band wasn’t with him. Alys had done nothing beyond be too familiar, swept up as she was by the spirit of the day. Sammish was already elsewhere, lost in the city. That was the beauty of the pull.
When it was over, there was a moment when the touch realized something precious was gone. They grabbed at their pockets, feeling for the pouch that had been there, or looked around on the stones in case it had only fallen, thinking that whatever was lost might still be recovered. Sometimes they would flush with rage. Sometimes their faces would twist in disbelief. A rare few laughed. Whatever they did, it felt honest, and that honesty fascinated Alys.
She looked back, hoping to see the moment, but the girl only stood still in the crowd, her hand lifted protectively to her breast. Alys willed the Hansch girl to know, but she only looked dazed for a moment before turning back to her friends, and Alys felt a snap of disappointment. The bareness of her arm went unnoticed. She might not realize for hours.
Guards shouted, as unmistakable as angry dogs, and for a panicked breath, Alys thought that someone had seen them. They were caught. But the armed men pushing through the crowd wore red cloaks, not the blue and white of the city. The badges of office at their belts were silver and gold, not bronze.
The palace guard was clearing a path through the crowd. The new prince was passing by.
Byrn a Sal was here.
Ausai a Sal—his uncle—had been prince for all of Alys’s life, but now he had been put in the past like a leaf on the river. The new prince wasn’t a young man, but he wasn’t old. It wasn’t outlandish to expect decades under his leadership. If he was wise and lucky, Byrn a Sal might be prince for as long as Alys lived.
The horse he rode was pale and magnificent. Its mane and tail were plaited with silver and gold, and its coat shone like the surface of the river. Prince Byrn a Sal had a square face with a straight nose almost utterly unlike his dead uncle’s. Dark hair rose a little up his forehead, and his trim beard had touches of white in it. He was so open and his smile so ready that he could have passed for a much younger man. Alys felt the press of bodies against her as the crowd surged closer, pushing her forward against the palace guard; a little chaos of bodies that churned around her. Byrn a Sal sailed through it and above it.
Another man rode behind him. He seemed to be the same age, more or less, with ash-brown straight hair. Alys had no particular interest in the Hansch nobility, but there was something familiar about this one. If not in his features then in his expression and the way he carried himself.
She turned to a woman who had been thrown beside her: older and in a linen dress that marked her as a servant belonging in the wealthier parts of Riverport. “Who’s that?” she shouted over the voice of the crowd as she pointed.
“Young Karsen? He’ll be running half the city by spring, you can count on it. God smiled on that one.”
Alys stared at him, trying to see a man who God had smiled on. She couldn’t make the thought match what she saw. His eyes met hers. A shock flowed through her, and a sense of being exposed.
Karsen nodded to her as if he recognized her as well, or maybe it was only that he’d met her eyes and was being polite. The prince and his friend moved on and their retinue followed them, men and women and horses. Alys watched them go with her heart slowing. She told herself her unease was only because being noticed when they were on a pull usually meant disaster. She told herself that was all, and that there was nothing eerie about the prince’s companion.
The last to go were the redcloaks, turning to run forward to the head of the prince’s train and open the way on the next street, moving with a practiced coordination that matched the best thieves of Longhill.
“You done?” Sammish had come unnoticed and was at her elbow, considering her with mild, muddy eyes.
“I was waiting for you, yeah?” Alys said. “Where’s Orrel?”
“South,” Sammish said, and they both turned and started walking, shifting through the crowd like fish swimming through weeds. “Says we make our way toward Seepwater, end it by the theater. University types will all be drunk and happy.”
“They’ve got less money than we do.”
“I’m just saying what he said.”
“Fine, then.” She’d crossed Orrel once already today. She should probably be grateful he was still working the pull at all.
“Why didn’t you?” Sammish asked, pulling Alys back to herself.
“Why didn’t I what?”
“The necklace girl. Kara. Why’d you sour the pull?”
Alys shrugged as they walked. “There are enough of them we don’t need to take down our own.”
“She’s not us anymore, though. She’s not Longhill.”
“Longhill’s always Longhill.”
Sammish seemed to weigh the thought for a moment, then nodded. Longhill was always Longhill.
The street traffic thinned as they reached the canals of Seepwater. On other days, stevedores and customs men and mule-drawn carts would have filled the square. The singular moment in the city’s life had emptied it, closed the port, and locked the warehouses. Tomorrow, a more familiar Kithamar would come back. It might have been her tiredness that left her longing for that normalcy. It might have been a premonition.
The people celebrating here were different from the ones they’d been hunting. The brewers and bettors and pawnbrokers who made the canals home were rougher than the merchants of Riverport or the artisans of Newmarket. A handful of disreputable students slouched and pushed each other, though they were long blocks away from the city’s southern wall where the lectures were held. A young city guardsman with rosy pimples on his cheeks strutted through the crowd, surveying the people like a warehouseman considering his bales. An old man in a green vest so gaudy that Alys didn’t at first notice the streaks of filth on it played a reed organ.
And Orrel swayed to the music, smiling beatifically among a dozen or more other revelers. Alys moved through his field of vision, not greeting him, but letting him see that she was there. He lifted his hands, but there were no words in his fingers now. This close to Longhill, there would be too many people who knew to look for them. Instead, he shifted his hips and his shoulders, spinning in the little group of dancers. She watched him, waiting for him to choose. His false drunkenness seemed less false to her now.
When the signal came, she thought he was joking.
The strutting, acne-faced guard was moving down the street, smiling at girls. Many of the girls smiled back. It meant something to wear the blue cloak. It meant, among other things, that if he chose to beat someone or steal from them or worse, he wouldn’t be punished. Some girls liked that. They thought being the special one of a man like that would make them safe, and they were wrong. At best, it would mean that they were safe from people besides him.
Orrel started a swooping approach, smiling and tilting his face up toward the sun. His finger curved to hide the knife. Alys frowned and said No with her hands, but he pretended not to notice her. It was punishment for Kana and the necklace.
Alys didn’t know if the tightness in her throat was anger or fear.
For the pull to work, all three had to reach the mark in the same moment. If Alys didn’t start walking now, she’d have to rush at the end. It would call attention to her. If she refused, Orrel might turn aside, or he might not. If he trusted her to be where she was supposed to be and do what she was supposed to do, and she failed him, he’d be caught.
If he were caught, he’d be killed. The guard might take him to the magistrate first, or it might end here. He was forcing her to choose between letting him die or doing what he said.
She stepped forward. The guard paused at a little stand where a boy was selling honey cakes at two for a bronze coin. Orrel shifted his trajectory through the crowd, and Alys matched him. Sammish, her eyes wide and her lips thin, knelt in a doorway and pretended to dig a pebble out of her boot. Alys tried to take comfort that she wasn’t the only one who thought this was a mistake.
Close up, the guard seemed young. His beard was thin fuzz, and his skin had the oily look of an adolescence not quite outgrown. Orrel strode casually toward the man’s back. Alys had three steps before she reached him. Two. With another man, she might have brushed a hand against his crotch. A gentle squeeze of his sex to confuse and capture his attention. Instead, she yipped and stumbled forward like she’d tripped on her own toe. The guard almost didn’t react quickly enough to catch her, and she had to really take his arm to keep herself from falling. She felt Orrel’s tap only because she knew to expect it. For all his faults, Orrel’s fingers were light.
“Sorry,” she said to the guardsman as they stood back up together. “I’m sorry.”
“Be more careful,” he said, and Orrel was already past. Sammish’s grey-brown back disappeared down the street. Alys nodded and made some stupid attempt at a curtsey the way she thought a guard-smitten girl might before she turned and walked away. She hoped the warmth in her cheeks would seem like a blush. The guard snickered as she went. She put her head down and headed east, into the crowd.
The thing to avoid was looking back.
She looked back.
The guardsman was still standing by the boy with the honey cakes, but his haughtiness had vanished. His tunic hung loose under the cloak because the belt that had held it was gone. His eyes were wide with alarm, his arms out from his sides as if amazed by some miracle. His lips quivered, and his chest worked like a bellows as he gasped.
Suddenly vulnerable, he reminded Alys of a child discovering that a beloved toy was broken. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d sobbed. She felt neither triumph nor regret, but he held her attention. If she’d seen him bathing, he wouldn’t have been as naked as he was at that moment. She would have understood him less.
He turned half around as if his belt might be behind him and teasing him like a puppy. He lifted his anguished gaze to the crowd.
When his eyes found hers, she knew she’d made a mistake. His jaw slid forward, and his lips pulled back. By habit, he reached for the whistle at his belt. She turned, walking away more quickly, telling herself he might doubt himself. Then, fast-hearted, she broke into a trot.
“Grab her! In the name of the prince, someone stop that bitch!”
All around her, people shifted in alarm and uncertainty. It would be seconds before they understood who he meant. The shape of her life rested on the edge of the moment.
The slap of boots against paving stones came from behind her. She muttered Fuck, scooped up her skirt, and with the guard close at her back, sprinted for Longhill.
Of the twelve districts of Kithamar, Longhill was the oldest. And the newest.
An Inlisc camp had been on that same ground when the Inlisc had been nomads and herders. The camp called Longhill had been built of wood then, and it was now.
The long-vanished buildings had been placed to shelter each other from the vicious winds of spring, and that same logic held as the camp became a village and the village became a war post: narrow, undulating streets that broke the fury of the weather kept the air calm even when storms raged overhead.
After the conquering Hansch crossed the river, burning the Inlisc homes to the ground and founding the city called Kithamar, Longhill was rebuilt from the same kinds of trees and in the same style. All that changed was its meaning.
As the long centuries passed, Longhill slept, but its sleep wasn’t easy. It could never forget that it had once been free and unbound, and that it wasn’t anymore. And it changed. Buildings decayed and rotted and were replaced, and the district grew into something both the same and new.
The little red temple to the old Inlisc gods, infested with dry rot and centipedes, was set afire and a road made over the ash pit. The wide square where Inlisc grandmothers had bought and sold worked leather and hand-woven cloth calcified as market stalls added roofs and posts and walls. Eventually, there wasn’t even a free street to pass through.
The quarter remade itself. Street maps drawn just a generation before were worse than useless. There were stories that old Inlisc priests still held the ancient rites somewhere deep in the shadows and narrow streets, but no one seemed quite sure what those rites were. Round Inlisc faces and curled Inlisc hair were normal here. The food that old men sold door-to-door from greasy sacks used more hot peppers and pickled fish than they ate near the Temple or in Stonemarket. The hard, percussive accent of the people who lived in Longhill was a remnant of the language that they had once shared and now shared in forgetting. A city within the city, Longhill clung to its pride like a man with only one good shirt.
At its western edge, Alys’s brother Darro sat on the third floor of a building that had been cut into shelter for fifty people or more. The shuttered room had a pair of benches, a waxed cloth with clean-picked chicken bones from his breakfast, and a blackwood table. The pale woman sat across from him. Her voice was usually half-dream, but today she was agitated. Shaken, even. He’d never seen her care about anything, and it was eerie.
“We have to get the knife. That’s what I need from you. It will be fine, if we can get the knife back.” She was trying to convince herself.
Everyone wanted that knife, it seemed. Magic and politics and the gods alone knew what else was involved, but what mattered to Darro was the money. And the sense, deep in his bones, that if he played this right, he’d be able to buy himself any life he chose. He tried to act like he was only what she thought he was.
“I have someplace to look. If it can be had for you, I’ll have it,” Darro said, and the woman nodded, trying to believe him. A finch tapped at the shutters, its yellow feathers nothing more than a bright shadow, and sped away. “I have your back.”
She managed a smile.
“You do, don’t you, little wolf,” she said as she took a worn leather wallet from her belt and slid it across the table. Darro opened it with an affected calm. Ten pieces of untarnished silver glimmered as he counted them out. It was enough to let him pay Kennat Water for the use of the room and keep himself fed besides through the first frost if he was careful with it. “When can you have it?”
“Soon,” Darro said, which was true. “Days, not weeks.”
“Someone else is looking for it. Not a friend.”
Darro tried to look as if he didn’t already know that. “Someone else?”
“A woman from the Bronze Coast,” she began, and a shriek came from the street. Someone was screaming Darro’s name. There were other words in the cry, but the only one Darro could make out was sister.
He moved by instinct built from long years of worry. The shutters opened, and the light came in. Below him in the street, Young Caval was waving up to him. The woman’s coronation-day costume of greasy yellow and watery blue was made forlorn by the distress in her expression.
“Darro! Darro! They’re coming for your sister! A guardsman! They’re in the little sac by Ibdish’s. He’s going to kill her!”
The stairway from his room to the street was dark as a chimney. The summer heat drew up it like he was running down into an invisible fire. Darro didn’t remember grabbing his club, but it was in his hand: hard oak with the knobbed end dipped in lead. He reached the street and sprinted along the narrow roads. Speed-blurred faces turned to watch him with mild interest, as if he were part of the day’s show. He knew each of them by name and expected no help. If the positions were reversed, he would have been leaning out the window, curious to see whether the drama below played out as comedy or something tragic. He ignored them and ran.
At the turn toward Ibdish’s house, Darro’s heel slid on a turd some man or dog had left on the cobbles, and he almost fell. Voices raised in threat and anger echoed down the closed street. One of the voices was Alys’s.
The street widened a little where it ended, making a circle hardly wider than a stage with wooden buildings four stories high crowding in around it. There wasn’t so much as an alleyway between them. The street and the doors to Ibdish’s house were the only ways in or out, and Ibdish’s wife had pulled her iron gate closed to keep Alys’s troubles outside. Alys stood on the warped wooden steps, her face dark with rage or effort, her hands in fists at her side. A doughy bluecloak had his foot on the first step and a naked sword in his hand. Men and children looked down from the windows and roofs at the impromptu fighting pit.
“What the fuck is this?” Darro shouted, trying to pull the swordsman’s focus away from his sister. “You step back from her!”
The guard turned. Three long, bloody scratches on his neck said that Alys had fought back already. Even as the man stepped forward, Darro’s awareness spread past him, waiting for the sounds of feet or hooves. One man might be stopped. A full patrol couldn’t.
“This isn’t your concern,” the guardsman said, but there was something off about the cut of his tunic. It was loose and blousy. “I am Tannen Gehart of the city fucking guard. I’m taking this cunt for thieving or I’m cutting her throat right here, and I don’t much care which. I’ll put you in too if you don’t shut your fish-lipped mouth!”
The guard’s belt was gone. That was why he looked wrong. Darro stepped forward on the angle, watching how his enemy’s blade shifted. “You’re a guardsman, where’s your whistle?”
“Not your fucking problem.”
Darro shifted the angle of his approach. “You’re a guardsman, where’s your badge of office?”
“This one stole it,” the guard said, gesturing back with his off hand. Darro didn’t shift to look at Alys. He didn’t want her in the boy’s mind. It would take two fast steps to get close enough to strike and be struck. A blade was the better weapon, but Alys was at the guard’s back. As if he’d heard Darro’s thoughts, the guard brought his sword to the ready.
“All I see,” Darro said, “is a fat boy in a cheap costume assaulting a girl half his size. Doesn’t seem right, does it?”
