“Is that edible?”
Fie resisted the call to sigh. “No.”
“You’re not even looking,” Tavin accused.
“Because you’re pointing at the mushroom.” Its vivid orange cap had jabbed into Fie’s sight like a thumb as she trudged past, a nub of brightness in the gray-green hillsides. And by now, she’d kenned too keen to how Tavin took interest in that which stuck out.
Four days had broken since leaving Crossroads-Eyes’ shrine. Since then, Fie had settled into as near a routine as she could manage: Follow the main flatway north. Hide from the sound of horses or Hawk patrols. Try not to miss Madcap’s walking songs.
Ignore the hollow sting in her gut every other night, when she glamoured Tavin’s face away with a new Peacock tooth. Catalogue a new way she could tell him apart from the prince: a tilt to his brow, a stray freckle by the corner of his mouth. How the slightest gesture seemed weighted with motive.
How the weight of his gaze shifted on her.
Sleep half the night. Chew a few bitter laceroot seeds. Trade out watches with Tavin. Scratch out a few new letters with Jasimir. Trade dark for a dawn the prince still prayed to.
Follow the flatway north, as squash fields bled into sprouts of maize, then orchards and rocky pastures. North, toward the Hawks, toward the Marovar, toward a Covenant oath kept.
Fie had moments of anger and moments of doubt, and worst of all, moments of terrible peace. Moments to wash up alone, to watch the sunrise in silence, to sharpen the chief’s blade by herself.
She ought to have hated it. She surely hated that she didn’t.
“Fine. Is that edible?”
But not as much as she hated Tavin’s way of passing the time.
This time she had to turn to see what he’d found. It appeared to be a rock.
“The moss,” he clarified as her face darkened.
She couldn’t bite back the scowl anymore. He’d asked the same question of dozens of plants in the last few days. “If you want to soil yourself for three days, aye.”
“That sounds useful.” He grinned at her and the prince. “You two are making the same face again.”
“Because neither of us wants to know how that’s supposed to be useful,” Fie said. “And—”
A rumble beneath her soles cut her short. She sighed and started toward the bramble at the roadside. “Riders. Come on.”
The boys hadn’t tried to fuss her like they’d fussed at Pa; it seemed they’d been cured of that in Cheparok. They hurried into the bushes, crouching to peer through the leaves as Fie called up a Sparrow tooth just to be safe. A few breaths later, a few horses trotted by, their riders cowled in the faded lavender hoods of young Owl sojourn-scholars. They had the deeper brown skin of Owls from the western coastal academies, darker than Fie and much darker than Vultures.
Jasimir let out a sigh of relief as they passed, and shifted to stand. Fie yanked him back down.
The tremors only grew. The sojourn-scholars twisted to look at their backs—then cursed as more horses cantered into sight. Dust billowed up from the road, wheeling into one more ring about the Owls as the new arrivals surrounded them.
“What is the meaning of this?” one Owl scholar demanded, coughing.
As the dust settled, one jagged silhouette stood apart from the rest. Four lines of new-cut steel shone brighter than the older notches carved into a helm crowning a mountain of a man.
Tatterhelm.
Her kin’s killer, not twenty paces away. One Phoenix tooth, maybe two, and Fie could take him down—
And lose the prince, the oath, everything Pa had trusted to her, because she couldn’t also take down the rest of the skinwitches riding with him. A sick kind of wrath paced in her heart, rattling its bars; for now, Fie kept it caged.
“Business of the queen,” Tatterhelm boomed. “You see any bone thieves on this road?”
“The Merciful Crows?” Another Owl cocked his head. “Whatever for?”
Tatterhelm pressed his mount closer. “Business of the queen,” he repeated. “Looking for three of ’em. Won’t ask again.”
The scholars traded looks. “We didn’t see three,” the first Owl said, slow. “We saw a band yesterday, perhaps a score? They were bound northwest, I believe to Livabai.”
“They could’ve fallen in with another band.” That Vulture’s voice scraped all too familiar; last time Fie had heard it, the skinwitch had been huddled in the bloody sand. When Fie squinted, she could make out bandages swaddling Viimo’s hands. She’d survived Cheparok after all. “To throw us off, since we figured out where they’re headed.”
A grunt echoed from the ragged helm as it swiveled about, slowing when the eye-slits turned Fie’s way.
She lit another Sparrow tooth swift as she could, snapping it into harmony. The twin teeth showed her each beacon of a gaze, as before. This time, some gazes fractured into spidery branches picking at the tracks on the road—skinwitches sniffing for their marks. None stuck.
Glee flashed through Fie at that. Skinwitches were like hounds: they needed to know a scent to track it. Without something that belonged to her or the lordlings, they couldn’t sift their footfalls out of the flatway. So far, the Vultures had their wits alone to lead them, and those were about to lead them astray.
Tatterhelm let out a harsh cry and lashed his horse into a gallop. The rest of the Vultures followed, leaving three Owls in the dust and three fugitives in the brush.
Fie tallied them up as they left: less than a score of Vulture riders, fewer than Viimo had numbered, all carrying naught but a few packs and furs. She thumbed Pa’s tooth: the spark flickered yet.
Once the Owls had shaken off the dust and carried on down the road, grumbling about the indignity of it all, Fie sat back. “They’ve a caravan.”
Tavin rocked on his heels. “How can you tell?”
“The horses,” Jasimir answered for her. “They’re packing just enough supplies to camp a day or two. They must have a supply caravan trailing them. I suspect that’s also where they’ll have the…” He faltered. “The hostages.”
That sick wrath shook its cage once more. Fie stuffed it down.
Near three weeks left in Peacock Moon. That’d be time aplenty for other castes to ride to Trikovoi, but for Crows with beacons to answer, that’d be cutting it close. Too close to waste any lead they could scrape up.
Fie picked at Pa’s tooth the way the Vultures had picked at the road: angry with what it couldn’t tell her. Then she pushed herself to her feet. “We keep moving.”
She felt Tavin’s eyes on her as she shoved her way back to the road, but all he said was “Yes, chief.”
“Now you write it.”
Fie took the twig from Jasimir and fumbled about for a grip that felt right. None did. Her fingers shook as she carved a tremulous line in the dirt, then another, and another.
They looked nothing like Jasimir’s tidy letters; hers were overlarge and tilting like a drunk. Her ears burned.
“This is nonsense,” she mumbled, and dropped the stick.
Jasimir scuffed out her first attempt, then handed the twig back. “My mother said my letters wobbled like colts when she first taught me to write,” he said. “It’s like anything else: it just takes practice. Try again.”
“Do you miss her?” Fie began to scratch out another line.
“Every day,” he sighed. “Mother made sure I never ran out of scrolls to read or strategy games to work through. She said a sharp mind did more on the throne than a sharp sword. But Father would have preferred me to be”—he blinked through the campfire, where Tavin stretched on a sleeping mat—“someone different.”
“You know it’s his job to die for you.” The second the words flew out, Fie silently cursed herself. Tavin scarce needed her to fight his quarrels.
“It’s his job to keep me alive,” Jasimir corrected, stiff. “Just like it’s my job to keep the country alive. Mother raised us both to know our duty.”
“Oh aye, he’s supposed to take an arrow for you, and you’re supposed to suffer a crown for him. It all evens out.”
The jibe sailed clear over the prince’s head. “Exactly. Besides, when he’s not on duty, he gets to do whatever he wants. And unlike me, he can go right back to doing that once we return to Dumosa.”
“And if he doesn’t want that?” Fie’s writing stick stalled in the dirt. “To go back?”
The prince let out a baffled laugh. “As opposed to—to this? Cowering in bushes, washing in puddles, and eating scraps? He’s a Hawk. He has no business living like a—”
He cut himself off, but not near soon enough.
A log popped in the campfire, spewing up sparks in the silence.
“Like what?” Fie asked, just to make him say it out loud. Her hands shook.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Like a Crow?” She threw the stick down across the half-scrawled letter. “You palace boys, you’re too good for this life, aye? You don’t deserve to be treated like me.”
Jasimir held up his hands, voice rising. “I don’t know! There has to be some reason why the Covenant lets this happen to you—”
“You mean your pa,” Fie spat. “There has to be a reason your pa lets this happen.”
Tavin rolled over, yawning, and Fie’s gut lurched. She scuffed a foot through her letters swift as she could.
“What…” Tavin sat up. “Why’re both of you awake?”
“It’s naught,” Fie answered, at the same time Prince Jasimir said, “I was teaching her to read.”
Fie’s very skin crawled with fury and humiliation. “Was not.”
Prince Jasimir stared. “What is the matter with you? We’ve been at it for five days now.”
“Shut up,” Fie hissed, desperate. Maybe if Tavin went back to sleep, he’d forget he saw anything.
You reckon he’ll take you away and polish you up so much that the gentry forget what you came from? Hangdog sneered, a shadow on a creek bank long gone.
“You ungrateful little—”
“Jas.” Tavin cut the prince off. “Be quiet.”
Jasimir drew himself up, looking wholly betrayed. “Are you—”
Tavin held a hand up, brow furrowed, searching the dark. “Do you hear that?”
Fie sifted through the noises one by one: the creak of smoldering firewood. Leaves murmuring in a weak wind. The soft trill of faraway cicada song.
Just beyond it all, a thin, uneven whistle.
Not the sort Fie issued for marching orders or the steps of the Money Dance, nor even the sort Swain half hummed under his breath while he tallied inventory. The nearest thing Fie could recall was a hunched-up poppy-sniffer she’d passed in an alley years ago, a forgotten reed pipe resting on his slack bottom lip. Every wheeze had skimmed off a faltering note.
And somewhere beyond their campfire, it sounded as if scores of those poppy-sniffer whistles were closing in.
“Trees. Now. Grab what you can.” Fie had started keeping a few bowlfuls of earth near their campfires for moments like this. She threw the dirt over the flames, smothering them in an instant. Then she blinked away the deeper dark and shoved as much as she could into her pack.
The whistles whined louder.
Mercifully, the prince was not barefoot this time. He and Tavin had scaled a sturdy oak, and Fie followed them up, calling two Sparrow teeth. She settled on a thick bough, teeth alight, and tried not to think on all the supplies still left below.
The whistling rose to a soft shriek, mere paces from camp.
Fie had seen her fair ration of terrible things in her sixteen years: scummed sinners, long-dead Oleander victims, the aftermath of a plague beacon gone unanswered. She’d heard campfire tales of monsters, devils, ghosts of wretched souls even the Covenant refused. All stories, she’d told herself. The only monsters she’d seen were humans with something to hide behind.
But by every dead god, she was starting to believe now.
Fie heard the dull clang of a pot overturned, a flap of a sleeping mat, strange wet leathery sighs, and above all, the whistles. But the dark hid the camp below too well. She could see shifting ripples of piecemeal moonlight and no more.
Worse, the twin Sparrow teeth ought to have shown her gazes peering about camp, so she might turn them away as needed. The teeth burned steady as they always did, and yet—
Fie saw naught below.
No searching looks, no scouring beacons, no Vulture gazes prying about the dirt. Only shifting, slippery night.
A brief sizzle drifted up, chased by a whiff of something rancid and burnt. Then the whistles shifted, flowing out of the camp, away to the north.
Fie didn’t let out her breath until long after the final quiet shrill seeped away.
“Anyone see what that was?” she whispered.
“No.” Tavin’s voice shook. “Jas?”
“I’ve no idea.”
Fie rolled Pa’s tooth about, half to think, half to comfort herself with the familiar spark. What would he do, hunted by the night itself?
Same as he ever did: keep them safe.
“We’ll stay up here until sunrise. You two try to sleep. Tie yourselves to the branch if you can.” It would be a long, cold few hours. Fie resigned herself to spending it thinking on what had passed through camp and flinching at every twig snap. “I’ll finish out my watch.”
The dawn gave them no answers.
It did, however, allow them a small mercy. The supplies they’d abandoned were knocked about the clearing as if a drunkard had bumbled into them, but near all of it was salvageable. Beyond that, the visitors had left only two signs of their arrival. The first were strange, writhing drag marks all about the dirt.
The second was a thin film of something sticky and charred, left behind on the campfire’s now-dead coals. The outline was too plain to deny: a flat wedge with five dents at the broad end.
“It’s a footprint,” Tavin said. “Who steps in hot coals and doesn’t scream?”
“If we’re right about Rhusana being a witch, maybe those were people under her thrall.” Jasimir glanced at Fie, cautious.
She ignored him. If the prince thought a raid from an unseen nightmarish beast was enough to make her forget what he’d said, he had sore underestimated the depths of her spite.
Instead she cinched her pack shut. “We can ponder it on the road. Daylight’s wasting.”
Jasimir sucked in a breath. She ignored that, too.
Then Tavin pointed over her shoulder. “Fie, look.”
She twisted round. Above the treetops, a thin column of orange smoke coiled in the air to the north.
It seemed the Covenant had a long day in store for her. With a sigh, she yanked her pack back open.
“How far is it?” Tavin asked.
“Plague beacons start black.” She rummaged about for the goat-hide map. “Every league marker nearby lights up purple smoke. Then every league marker that sees purple lights blue, and then it goes green, yellow, orange, and red.” Sure enough, a new red curl rose from the south, where they’d passed a league marker the afternoon before. “So five or six leagues.” She spread the map out. A web of rivers and roads scrawled across the leather in seared lines and Crow signs, mottled in forests or hills.
“Is it Livabai?” Tavin peered over her shoulder. “Because that’s bound to be a trap.”
His breath caught her hair in a sore distracting manner. Fie gritted her teeth and tried to focus on the cities. Livabai sat on the shores of a lake, and she didn’t see one within seven leagues. “No.”
Her finger traced the flatway line, prodding out the beacon’s probable sources. The answers were not kind. “We know it’s north of here. If we’re lucky, it’s due north. If we’re less lucky, we’ll need to head west at the next crossroads. Worst is if it’s east.”
“Trikovoi’s northeast,” Tavin said. “So why is east bad?”
“Because then the plague’s more like to be in Gerbanyar.” She read out the city’s Crow signs. “‘Cold.’ ‘Don’t stay overnight.’ And best of all, ‘Oleanders.’”
Tavin’s frown cut sharp as Hawk steel. “That’s too risky.”
“They’re all too risky,” Fie said. “Pa told you: Crows go where we’re called.”
“And if you’re being called into a trap?” His frown didn’t budge. “Vultures passed us yesterday, then our camp was overrun by the world’s worst band of pipers, and now suddenly there’s a plague beacon from the same direction they both headed. Even if this one is fine, how long do you think it’ll take Tatterhelm to figure out that’s how he can lure us in?”
“He’ll have to find a town that lets him first. Hate us or no, people know what happens when they attack Crows in the open.” Fie pointed to a vale on the map near Trikovoi. The lone Crow mark there said “ashes.” “There was a village here once. They decided the chief asked too much for viatik and cut down her husband and child. The band carried word out, and next time that village lit a plague beacon, no one answered until after the whole valley rotted. Saw it burn myself. Any town that lends Tatterhelm their plague beacon knows they’ll meet the same.”
Tavin stood, arms crossed. “He may not give them much of a choice in the matter.”
“I still have to answer,” she fired back. “It’s my duty. I don’t get to only do it when it’s easy, any more than you get to guard the prince only when he’s safe. And if you think the rest of the region won’t lash out at Crows for a shirked beacon—”
“I won’t risk thousands of lives to the plague,” Jasimir said, abrupt. “She’s right. Besides, we need more supplies or we’ll never last in the mountains. The only way we’ll get them is the viatik.”
“Easier to say when your caste hasn’t caught the plague since Ambra,” Tavin grumbled. “But fine, I’m outvoted.”
“I’ll handle the body.” The hilt of Pa’s broken sword prodded Fie in the side. “All you two need to do is hope it’s not Gerbanyar.”
“I suppose I could have hoped harder,” Tavin admitted the next morning.
A black serpent of smoke writhed into the sky above, whelped from the signal post of Gerbanyar.
“Masks on,” Fie ordered, unhitching hers from her pack. “From here on out, keep your mouths shut and your eyes sharp, ken me?”
Tavin glanced sidelong at her. It was one of his many-sided looks, saying we’re walking into trouble, saying none of us are ready, saying none of us can walk away.
But what won this time was “Yes, chief.”
Fie strode to the post and rang the bell. The Hawk guard leaned out from the platform long enough to give her a curt nod. A whistle pierced the air as the plague beacon sputtered out.
A man strolled through the gate in Gerbanyar’s plain stone wall. He matched his city well enough: his face was the grayish sort of brown, and the painted stripes of his hide vest matched the stripes of granite and basalt stacked into nearby house walls. Those stripes marked him for a Pigeon and a courier; the twitch of his gaze marked him for a man Fie wouldn’t trust at her back anytime soon.
“This way,” he announced, a smirk tugging at his lips.
For a moment, Fie couldn’t make her feet work. It reeked of a trap.
“Right behind you,” Tavin said under his breath.
“I said mouths shut,” she mumbled, and headed for the gate.
The Pigeon courier led them down the main road, where mismatched stones sank into usurping moss. Gerbanyar was nowhere near as large as Cheparok, and though it too spilled across a hillside, the gray stack-stone houses jutted up as they pleased.
But the messenger’s path didn’t curve toward the houses. Instead, he took them past an open market, where merchants laid one hand on the purses at their belts; past pens of goats and chickens and cattle and the flint-faced shepherds who stopped to watch; and at last toward a stone-lined channel at the lowest ground within Gerbanyar’s walls.
Fie’s gut sank. “You scummed the sinner,” she said flatly.
“You took too long getting here.” The courier no longer bothered hiding his smirk. “So we took matters into our own hands.”
She strode over to the channel’s edge. Gutter-mouths punctured the rim of a far wall, their contents plopping into murky water padded in yellow algae. Scant paces below Fie, fetid waters lapped sleepily at the breast of a man lying in the waste.
The marks of the Sinner’s Plague burned clear enough on him: lips dark with bloody tracks, skin bruised with the Sinner’s Brand, eyes pasted shut in crusts. Flies clotted his air, crawling in and out of a mouth agape. A dirty sleeping mat carpeted the rough hewn steps nearby. Fie wondered if the sinner had started on the mat and rolled into the cesspool in his fever dreams, or if the scummers had tossed him in, mat and all, not caring where either landed.
Sometimes sinners got scummed because they’d earned their plague at their neighbors’ expense, and those trespasses had come home to roost. And sometimes sinners got scummed because their neighbors wanted Crows to wade around in filth while they watched.
From the collection of onlookers Fie found when she turned round, she wagered it was the latter.
But that body wasn’t about to drag itself onto a pyre. She’d wrapped her arms hand-to-elbow in rags, yet she hadn’t wagered on fishing a corpse out of a sewer. “We need a cart,” she announced. “And firewood. That’s our viatik.”
“You’ve got his mat,” another man said, sporting a Sparrow butcher’s pattern-work apron. “Drag him out on that. Firewood’s at the gate. You can have his teeth for viatik.”
She gave the man a snide look before remembering it was wasted behind her mask. “Aye, I’ll drag a leaky sinner all the way through your city, right on by all your livestock and all your markets, and then I’ll wait for that plague beacon to light back up for the rest of you. I want a cart.”
“I see one sinner and three bone thieves. Carry him out.”
Fie bit her lip. She couldn’t risk the lordlings touching a plague body. A gate to the eastern road yawned on the other side of the channel. Maybe she could haul the body that far herself.
Then the Pigeon man nodded to the Sparrow and jogged off. The Sparrow butcher hid a smirk behind a hand.
Something else was coming.
“Fie—” Tavin started.
“I’ll handle it,” she interrupted. There was no time for lordling nonsense. She had to get them out before the Pigeon courier came back.
“On your own?” Tavin whispered.
“Aye, Pissabed,” she said, “on my own. Stay up here.”
She marched down the steps. The mint in her mask’s beak couldn’t overpower the foul stench of plague and dung, so she sucked each breath through her teeth.
“There she goes,” someone laughed above. “Told you. Crows are right at home in the scum.”
Fie set her pack down on the steps, pulled the filthy sleeping mat to the sinner, then took hold of his nearest arm and yanked. The man didn’t budge.
Instead, he screamed.
Fie dropped him faster than a hot coal. A cloud of flies spewed up. A terrible chill swept down her own limbs, fingertips buzzing; the broken sword swayed at her side like a noose.
Still alive. Somehow, the sinner was still alive. And that meant one thing.
When, not if.
A needle-thin rasp faltered from the man’s bloody mouth:
“Mercy.”