They ran first, for as long as they could with clanking packs and an unhappy tabby clutched in Madcap’s arms.
When Fie’s band could run no more, they walked as swift as possible, still heaving for breath, still wordless. Fie kept two Sparrow teeth burning, tossing spent teeth into the brush by the side of the road. Each time the orange glow of a campfire blossomed ahead, she lit a third and felt it ring in her bones like a hammer. No camp sentries looked her band’s way as they passed.
She’d learned two moons ago that burning three teeth for too long left her a hollowed wreck, but letting her third Sparrow tooth go each time felt like letting safety slip through her fingers.
By every dead god, she wanted to feel safe again.
They marched on through the bitter dawn, quiet and hurried, and stopped only when hooves thundered up the road. Then they took to the trees, and Fie burned three teeth until the patrol of Hawks passed.
Once the hoofbeats faded, Fie said, “Eat, drink, piss if you need to. Then we get back on the road.”
“Where are we going, chief?” Madcap asked.
Fie opened her mouth to answer—then thought of Lakima and closed it. A moment later she said, “North, and that’s all I’ll say. If any of us are taken by Rhusana…”
Murmurs rippled through her band. Madcap swore softly, then set Barf on their shoulders for the climb down. “Cunning, our chief.”
Long ago, Wretch had told her history would give her a name: Fie Oath-cutter. Fie the Cunning. Fie, the Crow Who Feared No Crown.
Mammoth blood still fouled her tongue. She didn’t deserve any of that.
She couldn’t fail them again.
They stopped once more before the sun set, to let another Hawk patrol pass. This time, Fie knew none of their weary legs could carry them into the trees in time. Instead, she had them shelter in the brush and called a third tooth, trying to ignore the sting as copper burned in her nose.
Her band pushed on through a second night as Fie kept her Sparrow teeth alight. No one spoke to her but to offer a water skin, a blanket round her shoulders, a strip of dried pork. She didn’t like to think of giving off hurt like a stink, but she’d spent too much of the day scrubbing tears from her face to convince herself otherwise.
The trees began to run together for her, and the stars, and the moon, and the sky, until she marched through an endless dimming gloom—but this was the chief’s way, wasn’t it? Forever caught on the road, only drifting from beacon to beacon, never finding peace, never finding home.
She’d been a fool to think any other road could wait for her.
Near midnight, Fie stumbled and fell to the dust, and found her legs would not push her back up.
The next thing she knew, she was being hoisted into a cloak turned makeshift sling. “You keep those teeth alight, chief,” she heard Varlet say. “It’s our turn to carry you.”
“You don’t know where we’re going,” she slurred, trying to climb out.
Wretch pushed her back, gentle but firm. “We do, girl. Tend to your teeth. We’re almost there.”
Fie didn’t have it in her to scrap with Wretch, and when Barf leapt up and curled on her chest, the fight was good as over. Instead she slid into a fog, rolling Sparrow teeth in her fingers, letting them slip into the sling when they burned out, focusing on staying awake even if she couldn’t walk.
She reckoned no one in her band knew how Tavin had carried her when she’d burned herself out in the Marovar.
Near dawn, they turned off the road. Fie only barely registered the change, wavering in and out of her haze—then, beyond the tang of blood still in her mouth, she caught the fresh, sweet perfume of magnolias.
Voices rose around her, first in welcome and then in alarm. She caught Pa’s voice in the din and finally let the teeth fall from her hands.
There were scores and scores of Crow shrines across Sabor, and she was sure they’d passed at least one. But with all she’d crossed since they’d parted, she only trusted Pa, and the shrine of Gen-Mara, to keep her band safe.
Of course Wretch would know where to go.
“Pa,” she croaked, “Lakima kept her word.”
And with at least that one oath kept, Fie let exhaustion drag her into the dark.
She dreamed of blood. She dreamed of drowning. She dreamed of Tavin. She dreamed of Jasimir, cursing her for abandoning him. She dreamed of Lakima, cut down on a lonely road.
She dreamed of Tavin again, of the night before he’d turned, drawing her to him and leaving his plain crown in the dirt.
She didn’t want to wake from that, and still she did.
It took her a moment to place where she was. Before, she’d just woken in Tavin’s tent, curled in his arms on a soft pallet in the honeyed glow of morning light.
Now she woke alone on a thin grass-woven sleeping mat over a dirt floor, mossy stone walls blocking most light. A few weak shafts broke through the mats woven of living vine that made up the roof. Someone had spread a blanket of crowsilk over her.
Pa. She’d fled to Pa.
She’d given up on the prince. On the oath.
Tavin had given up on them all.
There was no more running from it. She curled in on herself like a withering leaf and finally let the weight on her heart cut itself open.
Her whole body shuddered with sobs. Not the quiet ones that she could hide in a sleeve, or the ones that squeezed between angry words, but terrible, guttural things that tore from her chest like furious beasts, sucking the wind from her as they clawed their way out.
That was how Wretch and Bawd found her, racked with grief and wrath and guilt beyond words. The next thing Fie knew, she’d been gathered to lean beneath Wretch’s chin like she was five again and wailing for her dead ma. Once again, Fie couldn’t scrape together a protest, weeping into the older woman’s shirt as Bawd sat beside them, rubbing Fie’s back.
Eventually Wretch said, “You can’t carry this alone, Fie. What happened with the queen?”
“Rhusana w-wanted one of them to rule with her.” Her voice rattled in fits and spurts. “She—she—wants to turn all Sabor on the Crows. Jas said n-no.” Fie tried to think of a way to say the next part without saying Tavin’s name.
“Why did the Hawk lad say aye?” Bawd prompted after a moment.
Fie couldn’t help a shiver, but she had to say it, had to tell them what he’d damned them all for. “He asked for Rhusana’s word that no—no harm would come to … me.” She gasped a broken laugh. “I told him earlier, we need to put better kings on the throne, and he—and he—”
She broke down again.
“He cares for you,” Bawd said.
“Then how could he do it?” Fie choked out. “How could he trust her? How could he sell us all for—me?”
“Deep breaths.” Wretch let out a sigh. “I’ll never doubt that boy loves you, Fie. But loving someone doesn’t make us choose right, for us or for them.”
Fie didn’t want to hear aught about how Tavin cared. She wanted to cut his throat for being such a fool to trust the queen’s word. For choosing a throne over an oath. For forsaking her kin, her caste, her king-to-be.
“What are we going to do now?” she whispered.
“I don’t know about the next moon, or even the next week.” Wretch propped Fie up and pushed a clay plate with a stack of panbread her way. Fie saw bits of soft cheese and a drizzle of honey, the way Pa made it specially for her. “But we’ll scrape it together as we always do. You need to eat.”
Fie shook her head, even as another sob bubbled up her throat. “I’m the chief, I’m supposed to be taking care of you.”
“You think that’s how it works?” Bawd scowled and tore off a strip of the panbread. “We look after our own. That didn’t stop when you became our chief. You’re the cleverest, meanest chief on the road, and we’ll follow you straight into the twelve hells if you ask, but if you fall, we carry you. If you’re sick, we carry you. If you need us, we carry you, and I swear on Varlet’s head that if you don’t take care of yourself, we will make you.”
The strip of panbread was shoved in Fie’s face. She grudgingly took a bite, and then another, and something about filling her belly made tears roll down her face anew. The panbread vanished in short order.
The hurt went nowhere, still dragging thorns about her every thought—but her hurt never truly went away. Wounds became scars, pain tempered to bitter wisdom, and from the embers of her grief always, always rose rage.
She let Bawd and Wretch lead her to the temple’s makeshift wash-chamber, where rainwater had been diverted to a great stone cistern surrounded by barrels and basins. They left her with soap-shells and a change of clothes, and it wasn’t until Fie scrubbed the reek of old blood from her stiff hair that she realized it had clung to her like a curse.
Pa was waiting for her when she left the temple. One look at his troubled face unraveled her again, but he’d come prepared; he handed her a clean crowsilk rag to mop up her face, slung an arm around her shoulders, and led her away. “Come on, girl.”
He took her behind the great statue of Gen-Mara, to a sun-dappled grove where a handful of boulders made a ring around a long-cold firepit.
They sat together on the largest stone, and she told him everything.
She told him how Little Witness said she was a failure, how the dead god had said their oath went unkept, how she’d charged Fie to find a Birthright but Fie had chosen the oath instead.
She told him how she’d failed Jasimir, how she’d failed the Crows. She told her pa how she’d failed him.
And then, head bowed, she waited for his judgment.
Pa didn’t say aught for a while. She heard the scratch as he ran his hand over his beard, and a sluggish hot breeze passed through the grove, heavy with the smell of magnolias.
“Could be worse,” he finally said.
She looked up, startled.
Pa shrugged. “Won’t lie to you, Fie: it’s bad. But if you hadn’t sent Jade here with a wagon full of supplies, we’d have days instead of weeks. If you hadn’t given your heart to that lad, likely he never would have bargained for your life, and you and your band would be feeding the crows now. If you hadn’t cut the oath to start with, the prince would be dead, and likely, so would we all. Could be worse.”
“Could be better,” she said thickly. “And that’s on my head.”
“Aye, that’s the way of being a chief. Blow your nose.” Pa waited until she’d done so. “Every chief fouls up. And when we foul up, we don’t do it small, we do it with lives in the balance. Like Skelpie.”
Fie swallowed. Pa rarely called her ma by name, and even rarer did he speak of the night the Oleander Gentry had taken her. It was Fie’s oldest, fiercest wound. “Ma didn’t get up the trees in time because … she was passing me to Swain.”
“And I was the one who didn’t think it out before the raid. See? We should have had a sling ready for you, a plan, anything. Skelpie shouldn’t have had to figure it out herself. We’re supposed to look after our own. But I fouled up.”
“That’s no fault of yours,” Fie argued. “The Oleanders killed her. Not you.”
He gave her a long look. “Aye. I could have thought ahead, I could have given myself to save her, but it was the Oleanders who chose to ride our way. My sins were those of a new chief. Now why can you forgive me for those, but can’t forgive yourself?”
She wanted to say it was different. She knew it wasn’t.
“I’m not the chief I was,” he said. “And neither are you.”
You are not what you were. She’d all but forgotten Little Witness’s last words to her.
If only she could forget the rest. “None of it matters anyhow, Pa. Sabor’s going to rot itself to stone, and we’re going to starve waiting for it to pass.”
“I asked Little Witness what she wanted with you, you know,” Pa said. “She wouldn’t say much, some spooky blather about a storm and teeth and thieves. But she did point out one thing. You know how many Phoenix gods there are?”
Fie’s brow furrowed, trying to recall. “Twenty-four, aye?”
He nodded. “Now, how many Phoenix witches walk this land?”
Tavin had told her King Surimir was the only one, though that was before he’d shown he’d inherited the fire witchery from his father. But the king was dead. That left …
“One,” Fie said. “Only one. What does it mean?”
He rubbed his beard, grave. “Little Witness told me we’re on the edge of an end. She didn’t say what’s ending, but I know one thing: change comes with a cost, and even Phoenixes need ash to rise.”
“So we wait?”
Pa pressed his lips together. “No, Fie. Not you.”
She stared at him.
“The Fie I raised couldn’t sit about a shrine and trust the nation to sort itself out before she starves,” Pa said. “You wanted better for us before the queen brought hell to our door. You weren’t content with a chief’s lot, you weren’t content with a Crow’s lot, and you were right to ask for more. So I’ll not cast you out, girl. But can you tell me true: You’d be content to waste away in a shrine, hoping the prince survives to keep his oath?”
She shook her head, fear trying to strangle a terrible, eager relief. “I can’t take the band into that kind of danger.”
“They’ll stay here until you’ve done what you need to.”
“A Crow alone on the road is good as dead.”
A strange look crossed Pa’s face. He reached for where his chief’s string had been, only it had been whittled down to but a few scarce teeth. He touched one and said to the empty air, “It’s Cur. Send the visitors round back, if you please.”
At Fie’s bewildered look, he gestured to the statue. “Gen-Mara, the Messenger. Little Witness told me the witchery would be different on my own grave. Outside of her tower, she’s naught but a tot with a sharp memory. Here I can speak to anyone so long as I have their tooth. I’ll knot one of yours into the string before you go.”
“I’m not going, Pa.” There was something doubly vexing about arguing against something she hungered to do. “You really want to roll shells on the odds of one Crow against the queen of Sabor?”
“I’d take those odds,” a familiar voice called, footsteps crunching closer.
A moment later, two figures stepped into the clearing, two she’d figured good as dead.
Khoda gave a half-baked rendition of the Hawk salute as Viimo looked about, sizing up the statue and the firepit.
“Homey, this,” the skinwitch concluded.
Pa set a hand on Fie’s shoulder. “You’re not going alone.”