She didn’t look at Opal, and Opal didn’t look back. The room, small to begin with, felt dangerously crowded.
“There’s an opening in the eastern seawall, not far from baker’s row,” Master Kit said, thoughtfully. “I don’t remember much cover, nor any way to explain being there, but I think I could find it again.”
“Even in the dark?” Marcus asked.
“Yes. And if there’s no reason for us to be there, I think there’s little reason for anyone else either.”
“They look peaceful,” Mikel said. “I didn’t think they’d look peaceful.”
“All dead men are at peace,” Marcus said. “That’s what makes them dead. We’ve got five of these bastards to get rid of. We don’t have much time. How far is this place?”
“We’ll be seen,” Cithrin said. “They’ll find us. Ten people carrying five bodies? How does that…?”
The girl shook her head and looked down. Her face was paler even than usual. The others were quiet. If things had gone otherwise, there would only have been three bodies, and hers among them. Marcus could see the knowledge etching the girl’s soul, but he didn’t have time now to fix that, or any idea how he would have.
“Master Kit?” Cary said thoughtfully. “What about the festival scene in Andricore’s Folly?”
“You can’t be serious,” he said.
“I think I am,” Cary said. She turned to Yardem. “Can you carry one by yourself? Over your shoulder?”
The Tralgu crossed his arms, frowning deeply, but nodded. Master Kit’s face was still pale, but he rose and turned the handcart back onto its wheels, considering it. By contrast, Cary’s face was flushing rose.
“Yardem takes one,” she said. “Smit and Hornet can take the small one there. Sandr and Cithrin, the poor fellow with the beard. That puts two on the handcart. Mikel can steady them, and you and the captain haul. Then Opal and I take torches and-”
“Not Opal,” Master Kit said. “She stays with us.”
“I’ll take Cithrin, then,” Cary said, hardly missing a breath. “Opal can help Sandr.”
“You’ll take Cithrin where, exactly?” Marcus said, his voice low.
“To make sure no one is looking at you, ” Cary said, and she stepped over to the cot, lowering herself beside Cithrin’s slight frame. The dark-haired woman put an arm across Cithrin’s shoulders and smiled at her gently. “Come on, sister mine. Are you ready to be brave?”
Cithrin blinked back tears.
“Kit?” Marcus said.
“Andricore’s Folly. It’s a comedy from a poet in Cabral,” Master Kit said. “The city prince dies in a brothel, and they have to smuggle his body back into his wife’s bed before she wakes.”
“And they manage it how?”
“It’s a comedy,” Master Kit said, shrugging. “Help me with this cart, won’t you?”
There were no torches, but two small tin lanterns in the back room came near enough. With a few pins and Cary’s direction, their dresses had grown short in the skirt, and half undone at the neck and back. Their hair hung in loose curls, threatening to fall at any moment, like the ruins of some more respectable arrangement. Cary rouged Cithrin’s lips and cheeks and the swell of her breast, and in the darkness of the night the pair seemed carved out of sunlight and the promise of sex.
“Count three hundred,” Master Kit said to Cary. “Then follow. If I give the sign…”
“We’ll start singing,” Cary said, and then, to Cithrin, “Shoulders back, sister mine. We’re here to be seen.”
“Yardem?” Marcus said as the Tralgu hefted a dead man.
“Sir?”
“The day you throw me in a ditch and take the company?”
“I am the company, sir.”
“Fair point.”
They slipped into the darkness. The cold was bitter, and Marcus’s breath fogged before him. The cobbles seemed made from ice, and the smell of death came from the cart, low and coppery and familiar as his own name. At his side, Master Kit pulled, the man’s breath coming fast as panting. The living carried the dead through the black streets, guided by starlight and memory. Drying blood caked Marcus’s side, plucking at his wounds with every step. He pressed himself forward. It seemed like a slow eternity, pain in his fingers giving way to numbness, and then pain again. Behind him, he heard Cary’s voice suddenly rise in bawdy song, and then, like a river reed playing harmony to a trumpet, Cithrin’s voice with hers. He looked over his shoulder. A block behind them, their lanterns held high above them, two scantily dressed women faced a patrol of queensmen. Marcus stopped, the handcart slowing as he dropped from the lead.
“Captain,” Master Kit whispered urgently.
“This is idiocy,” Marcus said. “This isn’t your comedy, and that street’s not a stage. Those are men with swords and power. Putting women in front of them and hoping for the best is-”
“What we’ve done, Captain,” Master Kit said. “It’s what we’ve done, and this is why. You should pull the cart now.”
In the light of the lanterns, Cary twirled once, laughing. One of the queensmen draped a cloak over Cithrin’s shoulders. Marcus realized he’d drawn his knife without knowing it. They can’t be trusted, Marcus thought, looking at the guardians of civil peace in their cloaks of green and gold. You can’t trust them.
“Captain?” Yardem asked.
“Go. Keep going,” Marcus said and forced himself to turn away.
The break in the seawall was on the far eastern edge of the city. A stone walkway white with snow and gull droppings and black with ice and night looked out over an invisible ocean. Gulls nested in cracks in the walls around them and on the cliffs below. And there, a single crack, no wider than a doorway where the city had constructed a siege weapon long since turned to rust to defend it against an enemy as dead as the bodies Marcus hauled.
They moved quickly and in silence. Yardem strode to the edge and lofted the corpse from his shoulder and into the grey predawn mist. Then Smit and Hornet, like men helping a drunken companion over the threshold. Then, together, the handcart with its human cargo. And last, Sandr and Opal, the woman limping under the weight of her burden, came to the edge. The last of the knife men vanished. There was no splash. Only the hush of the wind, the complaints of the birds, and faraway muttering of the surf.
“Yardem,” Marcus said. “Get back to the rooms. I’ll find Cithrin.”
“Yes, sir,” the Tralgu said, and vanished into the gloom.
“We’ll need money to pay their fines,” Smit said. “Can we afford that?”
“Seems wrong to charge them for public lewdness,” Sandr said. “Most places you have to pay extra for it.”
“I think we can do what we must,” Master Kit said shortly. “You all go back to the cart. I believe the captain and I have some last business. Opal, please stay with us.”
The players stood for a moment and then walked slowly away. Marcus listened to their footsteps fade. Sandr said something, and Smit replied darkly. Marcus couldn’t make out the words. Master Kit and Opal stood, deeper black in the gloom all around. Marcus wished he could see their faces, and was also glad that he couldn’t.
“I can’t take her to the queensmen,” Marcus said.
“I know,” Master Kit said.
“I didn’t tell anyone else,” Opal said. “The only people who know about the banker girl’s fortune are the ones who knew before.”
“Unless one of your swimming friends down there told someone,” Marcus said.
“Unless that,” Opal admitted.
“It seems to me there are only two choices here, Captain. You won’t appeal to the city’s justice. Either Opal walks free, or she doesn’t.”
“That’s truth,” Marcus said.
“I would very much like you to let her walk away,” Master Kit said. “She’s already lost her place with me, and we’ve helped protect your work here. You’re hurt, but Yardem Hane isn’t. Or Cithrin. I won’t say there’s no harm done, but I hope there’s room for mercy.”
“Thank you, Kit,” Opal said.
Marcus squinted up. The eastern sky had begun to show the first faint lightening of dawn. The stars in the great arch above him still glittered and shone, but the faintest of them had vanished. More would go out in the next few minutes. He’d been told that, in truth, the stars were always there, only during the day you couldn’t see them.
