The Merciful Crow

by Margaret Owen

  “Lead the way,” Prince Jasimir said, collecting his torch.

  Tavin held a hand out to Fie.

  Something hitched in her gut.

  I did what you wanted. Handog’d yelled that and taken an arrow in the eye in payment. It didn’t take a scholar to square out who he’d been serving on the bridge instead of the Crows.

  Yet she was the one walking away from her people now.

  She forced her fist to uncurl and let Tavin help her up.

  The three of them worked their way along the dark channels, through winding corridors and down crumbling stairs. Sometimes curious rat-shrills pierced the dark ahead, but they left only bones and dung by the time Fie arrived. Finally they reached a long drainage channel scarce as tall as her waist.

  “This is the last,” Tavin promised behind her, dousing his torch. “Then we’re out.”

  Out.

  Pa wouldn’t make it out of the city tonight.

  Pa wanted her to keep the oath.

  Fie steeled herself and eased into the water.

  And so the three of them left Cheparok the way they’d arrived: crawling on hand and knee.

  Fie didn’t know how long she splashed through the empty dark before a slivery silver glow sliced over the water’s surface ahead. She crawled faster and faster—

  And found herself below a square of iron lace. Tavin reached up to the middle of the grate and turned some unseen panel. The iron creaked and shuddered. With a heave, he shoved the grate aside.

  For a moment, Fie could only stare at the night above, dusted in a belt of stars, buckled by a newborn Peacock Moon. She’d seen it near every night of her life, yet …

  Her people, her home. If they could see the moon now, it would be through a cage of rooftops and plaster.

  This was not like any other night of her life.

  Tavin’s hand jabbed into her sight. “Fie?”

  She let him pull her up one more time.

  * * *

  The walls of Cheparok loomed colossal behind them, skirted in a sour, briny fog. Blots of lantern-light singed holes in the mist, dotting an outdoor market along the eastern bank of the Fan River, just like the one before the western side’s gate for Common Castes.

  Fie’s belly churned, half from nerves, half from hunger. Her frown dug deeper as she followed the lordlings into the haze.

  Even if they could keep one step ahead of the Vultures, it would take near three weeks to get to the south end of the Marovar. And all they had were the boys’ blades, Pa’s broken sword, and a bag of very inedible teeth.

  Jasimir had said days ago that the king could be dead before the end of Peacock Moon. Fie wasn’t sure they’d make it that long, either.

  Fie’s stomach growled again as they passed slabs of spiced shark and onion searing on a griddle, kettles of honeyed maize-meal, stacks of buttered panbread, and more, all meant for those with coin. She tried not to look. Her nose, however, could not be leashed in.

  A Crow shrine. They’d find a Crow shrine outside the city and see what could be foraged from the viatik stash. Fie had managed on an empty belly plenty of times.

  A woman guarding a griddle cracked an egg over sizzling lentils, then rained a pink glitter of sea salt and paprika into the pan.

  Fie bit her lip.

  Tavin paused at the stall a moment, then hurried on. A few steps later, a calamity erupted at their backs, pots and pans clanging to the ground amid a flurry of swearing.

  “Don’t look,” Tavin mumbled to them and sidled behind a stall, then turned his hands out. Three dumplings sat in each palm. “Found us some dinner.”

  Fie’s eyes widened. “Did you steal those?”

  “Borrowed,” Tavin said. “Relieved. Liberated.”

  “So stolen,” the prince said, flat. His hand paused halfway to a dumpling.

  “Academically speaking.” Tavin waggled his fingers, straining for his old humor. “But I have it on good authority that they taste exactly like dumplings obtained through more orthodox means.”

  Fie knew square how Pa felt about thieves.

  She didn’t know if the hunger did it, or the wear of the long day, but either way her Chief voice came back. With a vengeance.

  “You ken me, aye?” Fie jabbed a finger at him. “See how I walked through that whole market without taking a damned thing? The last thing we need right now is an angry merchant bringing Hawks down on our heads.”

  “Only if they catch you,” Tavin said with a haggard grin.

  She didn’t smile back. “If you’re fixing to keep me along as your stand-in for chief, then you’d best act like it. Steal what you please when you’re not mumming as a Crow. But if you’re going to keep rolling our fortune-bones over something slight as an empty gut, I’d rather turn around right here and go try my luck with the Floating Fortress.”

  Tavin raised an eyebrow. “There are shorter ways to say ‘I don’t want a dumpling.’”

  “How about ‘don’t steal, bastard boy’?” she shot back. “Is ‘steal again and I’m out’ too many words for you?”

  His grin faded. “No, chief.”

  She gave a stiff nod. And then she swiped two dumplings. “Rule number two: don’t waste food.”

  Prince Jasimir had the decency to look faintly disapproving as he also took two.

  Before Fie could take a bite, she caught splinters of torchlight on steel in the corner of her eye. A pair of Hawks strolled down through the market, spears tipped against their shoulders.

  She shoved her thieved dumplings into her bag and jabbed an elbow at Tavin. He blinked up around a mouthful and sighed, resigned. “It’s that sort of day, isn’t it?”

  He stuffed the second dumpling into his mouth and led them away from the road, into the great swells of grass-studded sand betwixt them and the bay. Fie couldn’t say how long they stumbled through the dunes, sharp seagrass whipping at her legs, only that the walls of Cheparok had shrunk too far and yet not enough by the time they stopped.

  “Here.” Weariness sapped the expected lilt from Tavin’s voice as he gestured to a copse of squat sandpines at the edge of the beach. “This is … this is good.”

  Jasimir didn’t say anything, just staggered to a patch of seagrass and dropped. Fie cast a last look behind her, then found her own sandy hassock and allowed her legs to give out. The hilt of Pa’s sword jabbed into her ribs until she laid it aside.

  Then, finally, she pulled the dumplings from her bag and took a bite.

  Pa should have salted it for her first, as a Crow chief did.

  Pa wasn’t there.

  The pastry dough was dry, the maize and tripe gooey. It glued to the inside of her mouth and stuck there as she chewed, a thick wad that hurt as she gulped it down. A faint snore said Jasimir had already fallen asleep.

  Through the bottlebrushes of sandpine needles, she saw the pale streak of sand, a gray blur of ocean, and, too far away, the unyielding walls of Cheparok.

  The next bite was harder to chew, harder to swallow.

  A faraway part of her wished for a drink of water. Then the absurdity hit. She’d had plenty of water today, from the gentry’s freshest reservoir to the canals of Third Market. She’d just been drowning at the time, was all.

  A bubble of broken laughter turned to a shuddering cough, then a sob, and then Fie curled in on herself as she drowned again, this time in salt and fire running from her eyes, from her nose, from her mouth.

  She wanted a campfire, she wanted a kettle of stew, she wanted Madcap’s jests and Swain’s nebbish sneer and Wretch’s scoffs. She wanted walking songs and salt. She wanted Pa’s voice.

  She wanted her damned cat.

  Fingers brushed her quaking shoulder, then vanished, a misstep corrected. Sand shifted at her right as someone sat.

  “I’m sorry,” Tavin said.

  Part of her shriveled with shame at weeping like this before him. The rest was too raw and furious to give a damn.

  “I’m sorry about my cousin in the market
,” he continued. “I’m sorry about my … about the Hawks, how they treated—how—how we treat you. And I’m sorry for making you keep the oath. I didn’t—I don’t—” His voice hitched, and he cut himself off a moment. “Rhusana gave the Crows over to the Oleanders, but Jas and I brought your family into this mess ourselves. I’m so sorry.”

  She wanted to hit him. She wanted him to stay. She wanted him to be speaking true.

  But the weeping didn’t go away. Neither did he.

  The words spilled out like her tears, burning, unstoppable. “I hate it. I hate how, how we’re always the ones who have to keep our mouths shut and take it and keep doing our job, because we’re Crows. You can kick us around anytime because we all know if we kick back, you’ll just put on some white powder, call yourselves Oleanders, and cut every one of us down.”

  She couldn’t stop.

  “And even if you don’t, you just look the other way, and when they’re done you say we provoked them, we brought it down on our heads, we’re the ones who ought to hold our tongues, we ought to shut up and take the high road, we always pay so you don’t have to.”

  Everything burned saltwater.

  “And now I have to abandon my family, I have to save someone who didn’t give a damn for my caste until it was convenient. Your prince’s crown is coming out of my hide.” She hated herself for dancing up the oath. She hated Pa for making her the one to keep it. She hated Tavin for his silence, for not leaving, for driving her to spew up the sickening fire in her heart instead of letting it break her down to ash.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  It made her angrier, somehow. “You’re just as bad,” she snarled. “It’s easy, isn’t it? Believing whatever the prince tells you to believe. You keep telling yourself he has to be right because otherwise you’re dying for someone who isn’t worth it. You see how we’re treated on his family’s watch, and you still tell yourself he’ll be a good king.”

  “I…” His voice cracked. “I can’t answer for—for Jas. But I swear if we make it out of this, I’ll do everything I can to help you. And yours.”

  “Why should I trust you?” Her knees near swallowed her words. “Why should I trust any of you?”

  A long wind dragged through the needles of the sandpines before Tavin said, bleak, “I don’t know.”

  Then he stood, one more shadow tearing edges into the night sky.

  “I’ll take watch.” He stumbled toward a break in the trees. “Get some rest.”

  Emptiness curdled where he’d been. Fie swallowed, then scrubbed her face dry with tight fists and coiled down in the lukewarm sand.

  Sleep dragged her off despite the hurricane in her head and her heart, and didn’t let her go until day broke across her face.

  Fie woke to a mouthful of sand, a sliver of dawn slicing through the sandpines, and a strange sound drifting through the cool air. The tide had come in, pushing waves up only a score of paces from their camp. At the copse’s edge, Tavin sat, eyes on the sunrise, humming. If it was a song, she didn’t know it, halting and uneven, a melody meant for one voice alone.

  Fie rolled to her knees. Tavin looked to her, the song halting. Something flashed through his eyes, something neither of them had words for, still somewhere between I need you and I’m sorry.

  Then his head whipped about to stare at Cheparok. He shuffled back into cover. “Someone’s coming,” he muttered, and shook Jasimir’s shoulder.

  Fie crept to the edge, peering through the brush. Two figures emerged from the dunes, looking to and fro before settling on the sandpines.

  The sand at Fie’s back hissed as the prince sat up. “I think the one in gray is a local,” Tavin whispered. “The other is Viimo. She’s one of Rhusana’s best trackers.”

  Fie guessed Viimo to be the ruddy-faced skinwitch with a cap of pale curls who looked a few years older than them.

  A skinwitch. A Vulture. Fie’s heart began to pound.

  The woman shushed the man at her side, then reached for a belt of narrow iron cylinders.

  A Vulture. One of Tatterhelm’s trackers. One of the queen’s best.

  Jasimir inhaled sharp. “That’s a flare. She’s calling for—”

  They never found out. Tavin thrust out a hand, and Viimo and her guide fell to their knees, frozen.

  Fie stared. She’d forgotten the Hawk blood Birthright meant more than healing.

  “Hurry,” Tavin gritted through his teeth, and she saw red blooming in his eyes as vessels burst. “Knock them out, tie them up, whatever you do—hurry.”

  Fie’s heartbeat roared in her ears.

  Jasimir started to climb through the copse. Fie beat him to it.

  She hurled herself at Viimo, knocking her to the sand, a furious scream rising above the roar of the sea. Fie clawed and scratched and rained blows upon any flash of skinwitch she saw. Her own fists split at the knuckles, but she didn’t care, spitting curse after curse through the blood and the pain until Jasimir pulled her off.

  She’d been in a handful of scrapes in her life; she’d lived a handful of scrapes through the teeth of the dead. She wasn’t a particular gifted fighter, for that did not a long-lived Crow make.

  However, she found it cruelly easy to hit someone who couldn’t hit back. Perhaps that was why the other castes liked it so.

  “Not what I had in mind, but close enough.” Tavin pinned Viimo facedown in the sand, one knee on her back. Jasimir tossed him a length of hemp rope from the other man, lying bound and unconscious nearby. “Viimo. It’s been a while.”

  “Choke on horseshit, you little bastard,” Viimo spat back, face scored with scratches.

  Fie yanked Viimo’s head up by her blond curls. “How many Crows did you kill?”

  Viimo frowned. “As in today? The last year? Got to be a mite more specific.”

  “Fie left you both your eyes,” Tavin said, mild. “All things considered, I’m fairly sure she’s willing to revoke that decision if you don’t start talking.”

  Viimo snorted at him. “You ain’t got the tripes for it, Hawkling. And even if you did, you ain’t got the time. How long you reckon before Tatterhelm comes crawling right up your—”

  “Then we cut to the point.” Fie let go and pried a tooth from her string. A Crane witch answered her call, an ancient magistrate whose righteous fury resonated with Fie’s own wrath, ready to ring the truth in Viimo like a bell. “Sit her up.”

  Tavin pulled Viimo to her knees. The skinwitch’s face soured when she spied the tooth. “Ugh. Cheater.”

  “How many Crows survived your ambush yesterday?” Fie asked.

  The Vulture fought at first, her eyes burning, lips twisted shut. But the Crane Birthright of honesty would not be denied, and neither would Fie, and so the truth flossed through Viimo’s clenched teeth: “Ten. Not counting your dead traitor boy, o’course.”

  Fie’s heart sank. She’d lost one Crow. “There should be eleven. Who … who died?”

  “Dead gods if I know.” The skinwitch shrugged. Fie near went for her eyes again. “But it’ll be nine soon. One’s well on her way to wolf-feed.”

  “Who?” Fie’s voice came out higher than she wanted. The Crane tooth slipped. “Is she wounded?”

  Viimo gave Fie a look of disbelief. “No, just pining for her homelands.” Fie yanked the tooth tighter, and Viimo grimaced. “Of course she’s wounded. Oldest woman in your kin, caught a few too many arrows from us on the bridge. She’ll take water, but she ain’t got much more’n a week left in her.”

  Wretch. It had to be. Wretch, who’d helped Fie practice all her whistle signals, who’d schooled her in laceroot and counting days and moons, who’d been the last one to cut Fie’s hair before this terrible oath. And she was dying among Vultures.

  “… brought her water?” Tavin asked at the edge of Fie’s ken.

  The skinwitch looked away. “Aye. Dead hostage’s no good.”

  The Crane tooth had slipped from Fie, but she rallied it again.

  �
�Why take my kin hostage?” Fie demanded.

  Viimo cracked a bloody, split-lipped grin. “You’re the girl with all the teeth. And we already talked over one Crow chiefling. Maybe we can deal with you, too.”

  Tavin reached for her elbow, then caught himself. “Fie—”

  She ignored him. “What did you promise Hangdog?”

  Viimo shook her head. “You don’t want it, chiefling. Help me bring these boys in and—”

  The skinwitch had wormed out of the Crane witch-tooth’s hold. Fie bore down with every scrap of rage in her bones. “What did you promise him?”

  “He didn’t want to be a Crow no more.” The words burst from Viimo in a wheeze. “One of our scouts caught him a few nights back. Promised him he’d be spared, that he’d never have to burn another body again, never deal with Oleanders no more. All he had to do was give up the prince, and we’d forget he was a Crow.”

  The Crane witch-tooth slipped from Fie’s hold in the stunned quiet. For a moment all she heard was the rush of the sea, the whine of the gulls kiting about overhead.

  Viimo spat a bloody wad in the sand. “Guess he ain’t a Crow no more now he’s dead.”

  Fie sucked in a breath. She reached for Pa’s sword.

  “Wait—” Tavin threw a hand out.

  She flinched back.

  It was habit, really, old as her bones. A Hawk was a Hawk, and she jumped at any sudden moves. Even one who said he was sorry.

  Even one who stared at her now, horrified, as he kenned true what that meant for the first time.

  He swallowed. “Please … just … keep using the tooth. If you can. We need to know more.”

  All Fie could manage was a stiff nod. The tooth droned for her once more.

  “Where do you think we’re going?” Jasimir asked.

  Viimo’s look was pure venom, but the Crane tooth reeled the words from her regardless. “To the master-general. To Dragovoi.”

  Tavin and Jasimir traded looks. Dragovoi was the ancestral seat of the master-general, days north of Trikovoi. An opportunity.

  “What about Tatterhelm’s forces?” Tavin asked. “What are we up against?”

  “Tatterhelm,” the Vulture cackled, “who’s enough on his own.” Fie gave the tooth a push, and Viimo coughed. “… and me. And the queen’s other three trackers. Six more skinwitches by special commission. A dozen grunts. And—” She cut off. A grimace stretched the scratches on her face farther. Her cheeks turned red, then purple.