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.

When she opened her door, the east sides of the rooftops were glowing gold, like the sun was sitting on the top of the Temple and looking out over the city. The smell of molasses bread and baked raisins came from the oven, and Nimal was sitting by the door, a smile on his lips.

“No,” Alys said as she walked south.

“You haven’t even heard it,” Nimal said, skipping along to catch up with her. “It’s safer than washing clothes. Practically legal.”

“Would the bluecloaks say that too?”

“Since when do they need us to be guilty of something to crack our heads?” Nimal said.

“No. If it’s a pull and it goes wrong, it could come to violence, and I’m done with that if I can be. I’m not good at it.”

“Come on, Alys. Please. I’ve got most of the crew together. I just need one more who I trust. You can’t be out of the life. Not really. Can you?” His wheedling sounded like a little boy begging his mother.

Alys stopped and turned to face him. She wasn’t angry. She was barely annoyed. Nimal lifted his eyebrows and pulled a face he thought was charming. “Have you ever killed someone?” she asked.

“I’ve been in my fair share of fights. I carry myself fine.”

“No, I mean have you killed someone. Looked at them, known you meant to do it, and then done it? You have or you haven’t. Which?”

His smile faded. “I get safe. I’m too slippery for that kind of thing.”

“I’m not. I’ve been there, and I’m not going back. That’s the end of the talk, yeah?”

He looked sober now. “Shit, Alys. Did you kill somebody?”

“Good to see you,” she said. “Best of luck with the pull.”

She walked away, and this time he didn’t follow. She made her way along the route she had before, passing her houses in turn. Black Nel’s uncle was hauling shit off the streets for the magistrates, and so she had his daughter, her cousin, Ullya. Big Salla and Little Salla who lived across the street from each other. Gibby, Tall Janna’s son, was almost too young to be useful, but keeping him out of the house for the day was a kindness to his mother since it let her do her sewing work uninterrupted. That was worth a bronze in itself, when Tall Janna had it to spare, and a favor for later when she didn’t. She passed her mother’s house, but didn’t stop there. Nicayl, who’d been an apprentice at the Seepwater butcher until the bluecloaks took the butcher away for hiding his tax money and passing off dogmeat for pork. Pale Elbrith, as thin as ever, but half a head taller than he’d been in winter. All Linnet’s old crew, less Dark Aman, who’d decided she was too old and dignified for the work.

Alys gathered them and marched them along the streets, leaving Longhill, but leaving it together. They sang the same songs that Grey Linnet had taught them. That she’d taught Alys, when Alys had been young. And while Alys pretended to enjoy the song about the tiny shiny eel and the big black toad, there was actually a part of her that did. The children gave her an excuse to dance along the street and caper, and even if she rolled her eyes when she caught an older person’s gaze, not all of her pleasure was feigned.

It wasn’t even midmorning when they reached the southernmost bridge with its yellow stone and black mortar, and when they walked along it, she had to pull Elbrith off from the stone rail. He wanted to walk along it with nothing between him and the fast, dark water but air. She had the sense he was showing off for Little Salla.

At the far end of the bridge, they clambered down the stones and onto the thin, bare strip of the Silt nearest the water where the land was too new for trees to have grown. The children all walked together, hand in hand, along the side of the river. The Khahon slid past them, seeming to go faster now that they moved against the flow. At the edge of the trees, an old man sat on a white wooden stool. He had filthy grey hair and hooded eyes, but he hadn’t approached her or the children yet. Alys kept an eye on him all the same. No one who actually lived on the Silt could be trusted.

She also watched the water—where it broke against the sand and where it lapped over it, where it pooled and where it leapt, how it had changed the shape of the land from the day before and where it had left it alone. When they came to a likely-looking stretch, she stopped and lifted her arms to the sky. The children of Longhill all circled her and lifted their own hands too.

“Now,” she said, and paused, letting the little ones fill with anticipation, except for Big Salla, who was getting a little old for the game. “Get a digging stick!”

They scattered like puppies, pulling branches off of saplings or hauling driftwood from the water’s edge. She watched them, aware as a mother wolf. When she whistled, they circled back. Elbrith was talking to Little Salla and wouldn’t be quiet until Alys made them sit apart. Then he sulked, but at least he sulked quietly.

She could remember clearly being in the circle herself. She stood now as she remembered Linnet standing, smiling the way Linnet had smiled. Only not quite, because she wasn’t Linnet. She was Alys, who had been Linly’s Alys, and Darro’s. Who had been a flea for Orrel when he was cutting and a lookout for Korrim when he’d been breaking into merchant stalls in Riverport. And now she was this, and maybe would be for the rest of her life. Or maybe not.

“We all do the rules,” she said, as Linnet had done. “What’s the first rule?”

They all spoke together, a little chorus of voices above the rush of the water. “Don’t go into the river.”

“That’s right. Water’s hungry. Everybody knows that. What’s the second rule?”

“Don’t go into the trees.”

“There’s nothing there that’s our business, and too much that isn’t. Third?”

Little Salla looked over at Elbrith and grinned. He grinned back. So at least the flirting went both ways. “Always stay together.”

“And what do we do with the things we find?”

“Bring them to Alys.”

“Yes. Everything comes to me, and I’ll make sure it’s shared out fair. Anyone who holds out is a cheat. We don’t let cheats come with us.”

We drown them in the river, Elbrith shouted, gleeful at the prospect. Alys let it go. Those were the rules that Linnet had given, every day since forever, it seemed. But there was a new rule.

“And what,” Alys said, “do we do if we find a knife?”

“Throw that bastard back,” the children shouted together.

From the edge of the trees a sound came that might have been wind or might have been a man’s laughter. Or a spirit’s. Or a god’s.

“All right,” Alys told the children of Longhill. “Let’s go find some treasures…”