“How far off?” Jasimir asked, squinting at the plague beacon. It near blended into the sundown-soaked sky.
“Seven leagues. A day.” Fie squinted at the angle of the sun, the lines of the mountains. “Due east, so could be close to Trikovoi. Could also be another trap.”
“We would know if the Vultures passed us, right?” Jasimir rubbed his chin. “Do you suppose the Oleander Gentry have gotten clever?”
“Maybe.” A curl of unease twined in her gut. If she didn’t answer, the Covenant would stack every one of the plague-dead on her head alone.
If she did … Tatterhelm could be waiting.
“Let’s keep going,” Jasimir said. “Either we reach the beacon first and can look for signs of a trap, or we reach Trikovoi first and I’ll ask Aunt Draga to loan us an escort.”
“‘Us’?”
“My caste hasn’t caught the plague since Ambra,” he said firmly. “I’ll just wash up after to be safe. Didn’t I tell you? A leader should be skilled as any of their followers.”
“Aye. And then you said you were too good to live as a Crow.”
Jasimir cringed. “Right. Well. Let’s say my perspective has shifted.”
Fie allowed herself a strained laugh as they started walking, but her heart wouldn’t settle. Always watch the crowd. She hooked a finger around a Vulture tooth on her string, then reached for Tavin’s sword.
His trail rolled south, on and on down the flatway, just as it ought. Fie let out a breath.
Then the trail stopped. She stopped as well.
“What’s wrong?”
“The Vultures have come north,” Fie answered, brow furrowed. Tavin’s glamour had to have burned out days ago, yet only now did they move north. “Can you get the map?” Jasimir freed it from her pack, then unfurled it on the thin roadside grass. Spring had ended dry and hot in the Marovar, turning green shoots yellow even before the solstice.
Fie knelt and tried to reckon Tavin’s trail against the line of the flatway burnt into the goat-hide. One fingertip traced the road until just north of Gerbanyar. That yielded no good answers. “They’re riding toward the crossroads.”
Jasimir tapped the map. “They could be aiming for the flatway west. That’s the fastest route back to the capital.” He grimaced. “Or they could be coming after us.”
She pinched at Pa’s tooth. His spark hadn’t gone out. He lived yet, but who else? She knew Tatterhelm had taken one of her own on the bridge; she knew he’d shot down Hangdog the moment he could. The skinwitch had ten hostages when he’d left Cheparok. How many had he bothered to keep alive?
Fretting wouldn’t keep her oaths, though.
“We’re a day from Trikovoi. They’re too far to catch up before we make it.” Jasimir leaned back on his heels. “Let’s follow the beacons until they split from the road and see how close the Vultures are by then.”
Uncertainty coiled around his words. Part of Fie felt better for hearing it there. “That’s sound enough. We can cover at least another league before we stop tonight.”
They camped in the ruins of an old watchtower that night, one they’d found thanks to Crow marks on a signpost. It held a bounty: a clean well, a long-feral vegetable garden, and, best of all, a hearth. For the first time in days, they could light a fire and not betray their camp.
Jasimir watched Fie scrawling out Ta-ri-ka-o-va-oi in the ashes. “And then Tavin passed the governor the platter of Hassuran steak and said, ‘I didn’t think your son could make it.’”
Fie collapsed into giggles, the weary sort that came of late nights.
So did Jasimir. When the laughter died down, he said, “Gods, I miss him.”
A knot blistered in Fie’s throat. “Aye,” she whispered. “So do I.” Ta. Ri. The letters blurred. She needed a distraction, anything to leave that wound alone. “He said the king has a shine for Hawks.”
“Hawks and women. At least he and I have the Hawks in common. Hopefully for different reasons.” Jasimir’s voice scraped with something almost like hunger. “But that’s why he married one of the Twin Talons. I don’t think Aunt Draga ever forgave him for it.” He reached for the fire, letting it harmlessly thread his knuckles. “All he wanted was a son like a Hawk. When Tavin arrived…”
Fie knotted it all up herself: How the prince had demanded Tavin’s duty, not understanding what it would mean to be fulfilled. How he’d rankled as Tavin’s loyalty slipped to her. The tremor in his voice when he’d claimed his Hawk had one job alone.
“The king put Tavin first,” Fie said.
Jasimir closed his eyes and nodded like it hurt. “My mother spent so much time training him, right until she died, and Father would always … light up when he watched. I’ve barely seen him since he married Rhusana.” He let out a bitter laugh. “He couldn’t even be bothered to watch my funeral march.”
Beyond the ruined watchtower walls, a reedy howl coasted on the wind. They both knew the whistle of skin-ghasts by now; they both fell silent until it faded.
Then Jasimir glanced at the ashes and brightened a little. “Your vois are getting better. Keep it up and when you see Swain again, you can help him with his scroll.” Jasimir stared into the fire. “I can’t believe everything Crows carry in your heads. It’s incredible. All that history, all your traditions…”
“That’s what walking songs are for. We hear them nigh as soon as we’re born.” Fie pondered a moment. “The teeth feel like that, too. Like each one has a song, and when I call them, the dead sing through me.”
“Were either of your parents a witch?”
Fie shook her head. “No. Wretch said Ma met my blood-pa when both their bands stayed in the same shrine. She fancied him, and then I happened nine moons later. Pa’s my real one. He took me for his own daughter when Ma died.”
“Do you still miss her?”
The slate slipped a little. Fie licked her lips and smudged her name off the surface. “I was four,” she said, frowning as she began writing anew. “I don’t remember much before … Oleanders got her.” She closed her eyes a moment, plucking the dim memories like crowsilk from branches almost too high to reach. “Ma kept her hair long for a Crow. She liked to pick dandelions and blow all the fluff off, and we’d see who could do it faster. Pa said she was so dead-set to give me my name herself that she sent off anyone who couldn’t keep their mouth shut while she birthed me.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Crows name their babes for the first cross word sent their way. It’s luck. That word can’t hurt you any if it’s already your name. She said I howled like a devil when I came out, like I was born vexed with the world. Ma couldn’t abide the noise. That’s how I came to be Fie.” She swallowed. “So aye. I suppose I still miss my ma, too.”
Jasimir stared through the decrepit roof, up to the stars. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry Father didn’t stop the Oleanders sooner. I’m sorry I haven’t done anything about them, either.”
Fie turned the scrap of slate over. “They’re the same, in the end. Different heads on the same monster. The Oleanders. Rhusana.”
“My father.”
Fie threw a sharp glance at the prince. His eyes were fixed on the stars, his face hard as iron.
“You wanted to save him,” she said.
“I still do.” His mouth quirked, too alike Tavin. “If he’s someone I can save.”
Fie knew he didn’t mean to save the king from just Rhusana.
“People get drunk on crowns,” she warned. “Think they can do as they please because they know we’ll catch twelve hells if we hit back. But by every dead god, one day I will. And so will you.”
“Let’s make them pay,” Jasimir whispered.
“Let’s burn them down,” she answered.
A look shuttled between them like the weft of a loom. The threads of their terribly different worlds gathered, crossed, and pulled taut.
They didn’t speak the words aloud; they cut no oaths into their palms. But a promise took root in them all the same.
She didn’t want to burn Sabor down. Neither did the prince.
But, by every dead god, one day Sabor would know that they could.
In the morning, Tavin’s trail stopped north of the crossroads—but not so far north that the skinwitches stood any chance of closing in.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Fie said peevishly, squinting at the map. “They’re not moving fast enough to be hunting us, so why come north?”
“Let’s figure that out once we reach Trikovoi.” Uncertainty lingered in Jasimir’s tone.
They carried on, following beacon after beacon. By noon, Fie could see the stone fangs of Trikovoi’s towers jutting from the crest of a stone ridge and looming over a field of maize ahead.
“Almost there.” Wariness dangled each word at arm’s length. The next beacon could lead them down some roughway, giving the Vultures time to cover ground.
Fie opened her mouth to answer—then froze.
A soft, dangerous shiver crept up through the soles of her sandals from the road below.
She knew it. She knew that tremble like the voice of kin.
And in that moment, she knew exact where they’d fouled up.
Jasimir stopped dead, eyes widening as he too read the signs.
“The trail,” he whispered. “We weren’t tracking the skinwitches, we were tracking Tavin—”
The shiver swelled to a rumbling high tide. Fie heard a scream just beyond the bend of the road at their backs.
“Run—run—!” Jasimir bolted off the road, Fie at his heels.
They scrambled over a splinted fence and plunged into maize stalks near as tall as Fie. A dark border of firs waited at the field’s end, and beyond it, not one league off, lay Trikovoi.
She couldn’t run a league straight. Not with a pack weighing her down. They weren’t going to make it—
Fie thought of the starving wolf and ran.
Maize leaves bit at Fie’s face and hands as she and Jasimir stumbled over furrows of crumbling earth. She didn’t waste time trying to call on Sparrow teeth: the sway of stalks betrayed nigh every step they took.
They only have to catch you once.
A Vulture whoop streaked the air. Moments later, the drumbeat of hooves muddled into the wet crackle of breaking stalks.
Almost there—almost out—they were only a few paces from the woods—
Something splattered at her feet, speckling the back of her legs. She caught a whiff of acid and burnt wool—then pain burst across her calves.
Jasimir crashed into her, knocking them both to the ground. She swore, bewildered, and tried to shove him off. He rolled back to his feet and dragged her up. “Your legs—fire—” he wheezed.
Fie twisted and saw scorch marks burned into the backs of her wool leggings, the flesh beneath red and welting. A scattering of small white fires speckled the maize behind them, each no bigger than a fist.
An arrow whistled eerily through the air, then thudded into the trunk of a fir nearby. White fire sprayed from its shaft like syrup.
“Flashburn.” Fie sucked a breath through her teeth. “It’s flashburn.”
She had to hand it to the Vultures: if you wanted to kill a Crow and keep a Phoenix, fire was the way to do it.
Jasimir’s horror said he, too, had pieced it together. “Come on. They won’t have a clear shot in the forest.”
They raced into the firs. Any sign of Trikovoi vanished behind heavy, needled boughs. Shouts and cursing echoed behind them. The horses weren’t built to weave through the thickets here, but they’d catch up sooner than later.
“We just—have to get—to Trikovoi,” Fie panted, staggering up a heap of rocks. The plague beacons would have to wait, and the Covenant would have to forgive her, and the dead gods would have to be kind if she and the prince were going to make it out of this damned—
The forest stopped.
That was false; it didn’t so much stop as empty out. The ground at their feet clogged with rocks and broken wood and old caked mud. Hundreds of trees stood before them, gray and clean, stripped of their bark and needles but for tufts near their dead crowns.
Pa called them ghost forests, stretches of trees that a mudslide had smashed in the pass of a few breaths. Right now, all Fie saw stretched ahead of her were a thousand-thousand royal ghosts, and the teeth of Trikovoi in the slopes less than a league away.
Hoofbeats pounded behind them.
She and Jasimir took off into the ghost forest, aimed dead for the fortress. The ground bucked and slipped beneath their feet, branches rolling, dried mud buckling, stones tipping every which way. Fie prayed that would foul up the riders even worse.
Then an arrow sailed over her head and into the trunk of a ghost tree.
Flames leapt from every drop of flashburn, spreading in a trice. Jasimir yanked her back as the tree groaned and splintered into a pillar of white fire.
Shielding their eyes, they veered round it, still pushing on toward the fortress. Almost there—they just had to get away from the Vultures, just had to clear these damned ghosts—
Another arrow hit, and another, sinking into the dead trees. Fie twisted but saw no riders. A war cry shrieked from the dark woods to her left, and its match echoed back from her right.
The Vultures had them flanked.
Arrows rained down around them, sending up belches of white fire wherever they hit. The earth beneath their feet began to hiss and steam. Flames outran her and the prince until the world was white-streaked fire, waves of blistering heat, air that reeked of flashburn and smoke, and a roar that near drowned out the skinwitches’ cries of triumph.
They’d run headlong into the Vultures’ trap.
A ghost tree screamed as it crashed to the ground not ten paces off. Fie swore and hid her face from the shower of embers, choking on air that scraped vicious at her lungs with every breath.
Jasimir wrapped an arm around her and barreled on. His voice barely sounded above the maelstrom. “Use a Phoenix tooth!” he shouted. “You can put out the fire like you did with the Oleanders.”
It had taken near everything she had to bring that tiny campfire to heel nigh a moon ago. But even if she wanted to argue now, she hadn’t the breath for it.
Fie called up a Phoenix witch-tooth. The one that answered gave her a song of battles and glory, a prince convinced his name would resound through history. Fie drew the power through her, then bent it to the fires ahead.
She might as well have bent it to an ocean. Wherever she pushed, the fire only flowed round. Fie cursed and tried again, tried to shove enough away to let them pass, but the white flashburn flames scratched and pried and slid about no matter how she willed them away.
Get out. You have to get out. You have to keep the oath—
But everywhere she looked, she saw only burning ghosts.
The seed of a notion sprouted. Fie licked her dry lips, tried to take a breath, couldn’t. The world began to flood with gray.
She closed her eyes and called up a second Phoenix witch-tooth.
A queen answered this time. And she fought furiously with the dead prince, circling and spitting like cats. But they were neither a match for Fie, the worst Crow they would ever cross.
She wrenched the teeth into harmony without mercy and let them burn together.
Roaring gold fire erupted about her and the prince, fire that answered to Fie alone. It wheeled and shrieked, a blazing storm tearing through the flashburn-white flames, clearing a ring for her and Jasimir to pass.
The wider their halo grew, the more it sucked in clean air, leaving scarce enough to choke down. And with every breath, the twin teeth fought like no others had, thrashing for discord and, more dangerously, for release.
If Fie let them, they would burn Sabor from mountain to coast.
“Trikovoi,” she gasped instead, and staggered into a run once more.
The towers of Trikovoi carved at the sky ahead, creeping closer with each step, rimmed in the golden fire she kept leashed. Almost there. The teeth howled and twisted in her hold.
She tripped, stumbled, shoved herself back up.
Almost there.
Everything dissolved to flame and scorching air, breath after agonizing breath, ground that shifted with every step. She didn’t run so much as half fall, again and again, snatching her balance back each time, lurching forward through white fire and smoking earth and trees smashing down around them.
Vultures wailed beyond her sight, furious. Arrow after arrow dashed against the wall of golden Phoenix fire, only to be torn apart when its own flashburn exploded in the fiercer heat. The flashburn fire pushed back, thunderous. She could feel it, acid-born and starving, snapping at their halo of gold—that white fire was a wolf, and those jaws were hell-bent to close on her—
The oath, keep the oath, keep going, she had to keep the oath, she had to look after her own, she was a chief, she was a chief, she was a chief—
Fie staggered as the ground steadied and hardened beneath her feet.
The flatway. They’d burned a path straight from one bend of the flatway to another. And the gates of Trikovoi waited only a hundred paces away.
Jasimir let out a laugh like a sob behind her. This time it was pure relief.
Then hooves rattled the wind at their backs once more.
Fie spun round. For a dreadful moment, she was back on the bridge of the Floating Fortress; above golden flames, she saw a rider crowned in a jagged helm.
She didn’t feel the arrow when it buried itself in her thigh.
She dropped. She couldn’t help it; one moment her right leg bore her weight, and the next it folded and dumped her on the road. This arrow bore no flashburn, only a shaft of steel, and so the fires hadn’t troubled it in the slightest.
Pain ripped up and down Fie’s thigh, the kind that she felt in her teeth, the kind that twisted in her gut and turned her bones to water. Her fingers scrabbled at the arrow’s stem before she could fight the instinct, sending searing agony through her leg.
The teeth screeched into discord. Fie let one go, kept the other alight, sweat rolling down her face as she forced her bloody hands to clench in the dirt instead. A wall of golden fire bowed across the road. The Vulture riders kept their distance.
She didn’t realize the prince had been calling her name until he knelt at her side. “We’re almost there, Fie, just a little more to go.”
He looped her arm over his neck again. She tried to stand—slipped—
One wrong step put all her weight on her right leg. She screamed, red flashing through her sight. Jasimir swore and lowered her to the ground again.
“I can’t believe this,” he said with a strained smile, too alike Tavin. “You’re supposed to drag me into Trikovoi, not the other way around.”
Fie winced, propping herself up on shaking arms. So close—they were so, so, so damned close—
She shook her pain-addled thoughts down as blood pooled beneath her leg. She could heal herself with a Hawk tooth—no, healing was risky work to do on its own, let alone while injured and rushed. She could call Gull winds to blow the arrows off course—but she’d need two teeth, maybe three, and she’d have to hold them—
More red fog chewed into her vision. Paces away, the Vultures’ horses pawed at the earth.
The starving wolf had come for her. And she had no way to run.
Her heart thudded in her ears. So close—she’d almost done it—Wretch said they’d tell her story for centuries—
The story of a chief.
Her red-stained fingers shook too much to undo the knot on the bag of Phoenix teeth. She pushed it at Jasimir. “Get this open.”
“What are you planning?” His face blurred and swayed back into focus. She was running out of time.
Fie looked dead at Tatterhelm. Then she looked back to the prince.
“Leave your pack here and make a run for the gates. I’ll hold the road.”
Another arrow sighed in passing, ringing off the dry earth.
Jasimir’s face hardened. “Not an option. I’ll carry you.”
Fie blinked away patches of red as she shook her head. “I’ve got one waking minute left, maybe two. The second I black out, they’ll ride you down.”
“I won’t—”
“You have to,” she yelled, voice cracking.
“No one else is dying for me,” he spat back.
She seized a fistful of his shirt, smudging dirt and blood on the crowsilk. “You get caught and it’s all rutted. It’s all a waste, everything you’ve given up, everything I’ve given up to get this far. All of it. You get caught and Rhusana wins. You have to be king. You have to keep the oath.”
Even as she said the words aloud, the last lit Phoenix tooth slid from her grasp.
The flames sputtered into thin air, revealing a line of skinwitches across the road, dim phantoms in the haze. Tatterhelm rode at their heart, the notch-cut helm carving an unmistakable crown on his hulking silhouette; behind them swayed the drooping shadows of even more skin-ghasts.
Tatterhelm nudged his horse into a deliberate, unhurried stroll. Each ambling hoofbeat fell like the slow toll of a slaughter bell.
“Go,” Fie hissed. If she pulled together, she could light one more tooth, one more fire—she couldn’t burn it all, but by Ambra, she could burn her name into history—
The crown prince of Sabor got to his feet.
And then he planted himself between Fie and the Vultures.
“No,” he said. “They have to go through me. Rhusana wants me alive. So we’ll see how many of them it takes.”
Tatterhelm paused, the helmet’s eye-slits betraying naught. Then he flicked his reins and rode on.
Fie wanted to fight. She wanted to drag Jasimir to the gates of Trikovoi herself. She wanted to tell Tavin she’d done it, she’d kept the oath.
She wanted to see Pa again.
The earth shuddered.
At first, she thought thunder had rolled off the mountainsides. But that was wrong: the blue skies were only mottled with smoke.
Then she thought it might be more skinwitches. But that too was wrong: Tatterhelm dragged on his reins less than five paces from the prince, and twisted in his saddle to peer into the murky road behind him.
And then Fie saw the tusks.
They broke through the billowing smoke like warships through fog, a landslide of muscle and coarse fur. Weak sunlight picked out the steel spikes bristling the deadly bone arcs of each tusk, the plates strapped to every massive skull and trunk and leg, the razor-sharp lances lashed in clusters within reach of their riders.
Fie had seen mammoths before. At a distance. In a pasture. She had never seen them ridden to war.
She couldn’t tell if the Vultures had, either, but at least they had the sense to scatter when the mammoth riders charged.
Tatterhelm’s mount reared and whinnied. Fie heard a growled curse. He kicked at the horse’s sides until it dropped and shied toward them. Fie’s heart lurched as his hand swiped for the prince—
And a spear thudded into the road one hair away from his fingers, its shaft reverberating like a warning rattle.
Tatterhelm cursed again, turned his mount, and fled into the cover of dust. In a heartbeat, every Vulture rider and skin-ghast vanished from the road.
Fie slumped back with a broken laugh, red swimming in her vision. She didn’t know if the lightness in her chest came from relief or blood loss.
She’d done it.
She’d brought the prince to his allies.
A mountain of a shadow rumbled nearer, fading in and out of sight. A mammoth. A rider, spear still in hand.
“Master-General Draga,” the prince said stiffly from somewhere above her. “How did you know?”
“You lit a fire the size of Gerbanyar, Highness,” his aunt answered from even higher. Fie could scarce pick her form out of the blur, but she sounded like the sort of woman who enjoyed riding mammoths full tilt at a pack of Vultures. “And even if you hadn’t, I was warned to expect your arrival.”
She pointed her spear to the gates behind them.
Fie reeled about, heart in her throat. Had she missed it? But Tavin hadn’t—he couldn’t have gotten the message out—
A black thread of smoke spooled into the sky, lit from Trikovoi’s plague beacon.
“Oh,” Fie said.
And then, eyes shuttering, she fell to the dirt.