The Merciful Crow

by Margaret Owen

  “How bad?”

  “I’ll live.” He let her help him up, one hand pressed to his side, leaning askew to keep the weight off a leg. Fie winced at an ugly burn over one shoulder. She hadn’t kept all the flames off him after all. “How long do we have?”

  “Ten minutes at most. But we’ll never outrun them on foot.” Prince Jasimir peered up at the hill’s summit for any sign of Vultures.

  “So we don’t outrun them. We hide.” Fie pointed to the trees below.

  The prince pursed his lips. “These are the best skinwitches in Sabor.”

  “And I’m the worst Crow they’ll ever cross,” she snapped. “They have my family. They’re lucky all I aim to do is hide.”

  She slung Tavin’s arm over her shoulders and set off, not bothering to wait for royal permission.

  “We’ll hole up and you can fix yourself,” Fie muttered, as much to Tavin as to herself.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re worried.”

  “Worried I’ll have to hide your body.” That was a half-truth.

  Tavin forced a crooked smile around clenched teeth. “You’re getting sentimental on me.”

  “Aye, and that sentiment is ‘don’t leave a trail of bodies,’” she said, grim.

  “That’s”—he sucked in a breath as they slid down a tricky bit of path—“touching.”

  Fie waited for him to keep chattering off his sauce and nonsense. He didn’t.

  “We’ll hole up,” she mumbled again. “Don’t go leaving a trail.”

  “Yes, chief.” His voice scarce rose above the rattle of stone.

  She half dragged Tavin past the first few trees sturdy enough for them. “First place they’ll look, likely,” she grunted in answer to the prince’s sprouting question. “Too easy.”

  The tree she settled for was a cedar sheathed in bark ragged enough to swallow the marks of nailed soles. This time the prince helped push Tavin up and followed on his own. No sooner had Fie steadied herself on a branch than the slow pound of hooves dripped into the air.

  These weren’t night-bold Oleanders looking for a scapegoat. She wasn’t crawling past bribe-fattened gate guards anymore, either. The queen’s own Vultures, the best skinwitches in Sabor, were out for her hide.

  Fie drew two Sparrow teeth from her bag, rolled them between sweat-sticky palms, and closed her eyes.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  OFF THE ROADS

  Harmony.

  The two Sparrow teeth flickered to dissonant life. Fie wrestled with both until the chord struck and prayed it would be enough.

  Fie saw the gaze before she saw the Vulture, lit up by the Sparrow teeth. The skinwitch’s attention flicked and pried about the trees like a forked tongue, lingering on any snapped twigs or traces of nail-lined soles. This was the true face of the Vulture Birthright, the hunger of a predator stalking a scent. The jingle of bridle and creak of saddle leather slid into a creeping dirge, measured in the drumbeat of hooves.

  What had Tavin said of the queen’s Vultures a week past? Tatterhelm wasn’t the best of the trackers. He was all twelve hells to cross just the same. He had Rhusana’s favor.

  And likely he had Fie’s family.

  Fie didn’t know if she wanted to see Tatterhelm, or a Vulture who was a few less hells to cross.

  The branch shivered as Tavin shifted. She caught a muffled hiss—and then quiet. The Hawk alone knew true how bad he’d been wounded. But if healing himself burned as much as when he’d healed her, for once, she didn’t envy him.

  He’d be fine. He’d be back on his feet soon enough, armed with his short swords and his smiles deadlier still, back to vexing her at every turn.

  He’d saved her life. Broken her fall.

  He had to be fine.

  The skinwitch rode into sight, below ragged curtains of needled boughs: Tatterhelm.

  For a heartbeat Fie was back in another tree a week before, watching an Oleander lord try to smoke them out. Where the lord had shouted and cursed and threatened, though, Tatterhelm spoke not a single word. Instead he paced, studying the forest about them with the patience of a man certain of victory. And with good reason: she could see his gaze alight upon one track after another, drawing closer to their tree.

  One of Tatterhelm’s fists stayed clenched tight around a strange fistful of dried leaves.

  The string of teeth twitched at her throat. Fie started. Her own fingers had already plucked at a Phoenix molar.

  Give him fire.

  That voice didn’t even sound like a Phoenix’s anymore.

  Tatterhelm dragged on the reins. His mount grunted and stopped, pawing at the needle-strewn ground. Sharp pine resin wafted up the warm air.

  Now, her own damned head urged. Give him fire. Teach them you’re not to be crossed.

  Give him fire and you bring the whole rutted lot of them down on you, her Chief voice snapped back. Pick that fight when your Hawk isn’t in pieces.

  And a dreadful mutinous part of her yet wondered when she’d started calling Tavin her Hawk.

  The Sparrow teeth squawked and slid out of tune.

  Harmony, Pa’s voice chided as she scrambled to push the teeth back into order, fingers digging into the uneven bark.

  The skinwitch’s searchlight crept up toward her.

  She ground her teeth, holding the harmony as steady as she could. It wavered as the Vulture picked and peeled at the slippery edges of the Sparrow teeth’s refuge. Panic simmered in her gut and clawed finger by finger up her spine. They’d already been caught, Tatterhelm only meant to toy with her, hiding was no use—

  Bitter fury boiled up with the fear.

  She was so, so sick of hiding. Just once—

  Teach them how you look after your own.

  Her Phoenix teeth warmed on their string.

  No. Fie swallowed, fighting for a steady head. Tatterhelm wasn’t the best, but he was good enough to break through her teeth, and that was aught that mattered. Two weren’t enough to hold off his gaze.

  Pa sometimes used three teeth.

  But Pa hadn’t taught her how.

  Pain shot through Fie’s index finger as a sliver of bark burrowed beneath the nail, yet her hold on the branch only tightened. Forget three, she’d need a lone Phoenix tooth and then she’d have vengeance for Pa, for her kin—

  It could be so easy. The Sparrow-tooth harmony began to fray.

  Tatterhelm reached for a hunting horn at his belt.

  Their branch shuddered—Tavin had tipped off-balance—

  She seized his hand, rough with dried blood and slate dust.

  And a third Sparrow tooth sparked awake on her string.

  Fie’s bones didn’t just hum, they sang, an awful drone that felt like it might shake her straight into the next life. It took all her focus to pin the tooth into harmony, into balance, and to keep it there—but then there it stayed, each tooth steadying the other two in turn like the legs of a stool. Tatterhelm’s gaze sloughed away like an old scab.

  And after a long moment, he rode on.

  Each dwindling hoofbeat was an accusation. He had dead Crows to answer for, and Fie—she had enough fire teeth to light Sabor from mountain to coast.

  But what she wanted didn’t matter.

  Tavin, too, had steadied out. She pulled her hand free of his and looked away.

  Three Sparrow teeth. Fie let her senses roam, prodding at what the triad could reveal. Nearer to Gerbanyar, she half saw, half sensed something like distant cobwebby nets casting about over the treetops. The nearest one already trailed dreamily toward them, just half a league off.

  It had to be the rest of the trackers aiming to sniff them out. One thing was sore sure: she didn’t want to be any nearer those webs than she had to be. Tatterhelm had ridden on far enough now. It was time to move.

  Fie let the third Sparrow tooth go and slipped off the branch, intending to dangle from her fingertips.

  Instead every bone in her hands dragged like iron. Her fingers slipped
off the branch. She hit the ground in a flurry of pine needles and crowsilk, knocking the wind clean out of her gut.

  She gasped as cedar boughs and silvery sky spun dizzily above. A thin whine rang through her ears, the only sound until a thud said one of the boys had made it down as well.

  Tavin lurched into view. He looked much better. At least she thought he did. Less blood, less flinching. Maybe no limping now. That meant he was better, right?

  His mouth moved, but she caught no words, only a dull ringing. He really had a nice mouth. Even with a little blood streaked at one corner.

  She almost believed the fear on his face. He’d gotten hurt for her today. Almost died. A lot. Kin might do that. Caste might do that. Not some near-royal lordling. It made no sense. He made no sense.

  He crouched by her side, and as Fie’s thoughts slipped and wobbled about in her rattled skull, one thought drifted, dreadful and plain, to the surface: she wanted that.

  She wanted him to stay at her side. Not for the day, not for the moon. She wanted him with her even after the oath. She wanted it more than she knew how to want someone. She wanted it more than fire or steel or teeth.

  And she wholeheartedly hated it.

  “… hear me?” Tavin’s voice seeped in past the ringing in her ears, rising with worry. “Fie? Are you hurt?”

  She blinked up at him as her head began to clear. Then she laughed.

  It was not a happy laugh.

  A raid from monsters. A scummed sinner. The first throat she’d ever cut. A war-witch boiling a man in his own blood before her eyes. An ambush from the queen’s pet Vultures. That same war-witch near snapping his own neck on her account. Tatterhelm walking away in one piece. Falling out of a stupid tree.

  And a traitor heart that refused to listen to sense.

  She hated it. Hated all of it. Hated him. Hated herself.

  “Anything else?” she croaked, waving a shaky, blood-flecked hand at the sky. “Covenant? Got any more disasters you’re keen to spit my way? Day’s still young.”

  Tavin let out a breath, then brushed her hair aside to rest calloused fingertips on her brow. “Let’s not go giving the Covenant any ideas. Can you move your—”

  “Let’s not go telling me what to do.” Fie swatted his hand off and made herself sit up, a peculiar wrath aching in her bones. He had no right to her, to any part of her, least of all her heart. “You damned fool. We could have been in and out of Gerbanyar before Tatterhelm caught up, but you just had to lose your head, didn’t you?”

  Tavin jerked back, shamefaced. Part of her curled with guilt. He’d felled that man on her account.

  But she hadn’t asked for it. Wanted it, perhaps, in the ugly way she’d wanted Tatterhelm to burn before her. But wanting and asking were beasts of two wholly different names.

  “We’re lucky the Gerbanyar Hawks didn’t stuff us all full of arrows on the spot,” she spat. “The queen would’ve liked that, aye? You’d have done her work for her.”

  Tavin stared at the ground. Maybe if she pushed him far enough, this nonsense of theirs would be over. He’d stop pretending a Crow and a Hawk could share a road as aught but strangers, and she’d keep pretending it didn’t matter to her.

  The razor edge of anger glittered in his eyes again. The set of his mouth said it wouldn’t be turned on her.

  Somehow that only infuriated her more. “What, Vulture got your tongue? You couldn’t keep quiet when all our hides were on the line, but now it suits you? You’ve mummed as my kin for nigh a fortnight now. When are you going to understand that being a Crow means you can’t just do what you want?”

  “Don’t try to tell me I do what I want,” Tavin snapped.

  He rocked back on his heels. One hand ran over his mouth, fingertips pushing down into the sides of his jaw. Then he stood and looked away.

  In the startled silence, Fie wondered if she’d meant her words for Tavin or for herself.

  The prince’s voice cut through the air. “Enough. It’s not his fault.”

  “If by ‘not his fault’ you mean ‘square his fault,’ then aye.”

  “He saved your life not ten minutes ago.” Jasimir’s tone soured on your. “Haven’t you been berating us since day one for not standing up for the Crows? Make up your mind whether you want our help or not.”

  “You call that help? Your Peacocks and Hawks listen to crowns, not Crows. Deal with them when you’re not hiding behind our masks, and I’ll call that help.”

  “I already swore an oath to do just that, and if you think that won’t cost me dearly—”

  “Oh aye, such a trial,” Fie sneered. “Poor little princeling has to treat us like people.”

  Tavin spoke before the prince could fire back. “We need to get moving.”

  “To where?” Fie lurched to her feet, wearing a scowl. “The Vultures know we’re headed northeast. They’ll block the flatway to the Marovar.”

  “We don’t have anywhere else,” Tavin said shortly. “They can’t go too far from their supply caravan, which slows them down in bad terrain. We can keep ahead of them if we stay off the roads.”

  Fie sucked in a breath. “I won’t be able to see plague beacons.”

  “No,” Tavin agreed, “you won’t.”

  He didn’t know what he was asking. Lordlings got to look away when they wanted to. Fie’d never had a choice in keeping her eyes open.

  “You won’t be able to walk us into another trap,” the prince muttered.

  “Jas.” Tavin shook his head.

  Fie waited for the rest of what he ought to say: I know we’re asking more of you. But your Crows need you. We need you. I need you.

  She knew it all already. Believed some of it. The rest—the rest she wanted from him.

  But he didn’t offer another word. And she would not ask.

  Perhaps she’d pushed him far enough after all.

  Perhaps she’d pushed too far.

  But going off the roads … She’d already turned her back on her kin. What would the Covenant think of her turning her back on sinners?

  Didn’t want to be a Crow no more.

  Fie’s hands curled into dust-lined fists. The Covenant knew the oath she carried now. And Pa wanted her to keep it. It was plain as that.

  She shifted her pack and squinted for where afternoon sunlight needled through the cedar boughs. “We go northeast,” she said finally, and set off through the trees, back to the sun.

  * * *

  Fie’s hands burned with salt in a hundred tiny scrapes, and yet she kept scrubbing.

  The sun had long slunk below the horizon before they’d stopped for the night. They’d pushed up in thick silence through the bristling hills, up into rockier ground, onto thinner game trails, always searching the growing dark for skinwitches closing in. When they’d staggered to a halt by a pond in the crook of a steep hillside, she’d waited for the boys to refill the water skins, then burned the remains of her arm-rags on the campfire and took the salt and soap-shells to the pond.

  She couldn’t wash up proper here, not a few paces from the campfire. Even though Tavin had been badgered into sleeping while dinner cooked and the prince didn’t shine to girls at all, stripping down in front of lordlings didn’t sit right.

  But scrub as she might, she couldn’t shake the memory of Pa’s sword sliding through flesh. By firelight, the salt and suds on her arms might as well have been blood. Even a string of bubbles on the pond’s surface reminded her of the gash across the sinner’s throat.

  “Was that your first time killing someone?”

  Fie started. The prince had perched by the campfire, stirring a mash of maize and salt pork, one eye on Tavin’s sleeping back.

  “Aye,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  Jasimir frowned at the mash. “You … your family should have been here to help.”

  Near a week had passed since she’d left them in Cheparok, yet a hot lump still rose in Fie’s throat. She spl
ashed cold water on her arms. “Have you ever killed someone?”

  He shook his head. “Tavin has. Before today, I mean. One of Rhusana’s assassins went down fighting, and another fell on her own poisoned dagger, so Tavin put her out of her misery.”

  “That’s … nice of him?”

  “It’s how we were raised. The Hawk code requires you to treat an enemy with dignity, even in death.” Jasimir let the campfire roll around his fingers.

  Fie straightened and scoured the hillsides, calling up two Sparrow teeth she’d kept simmering, then working in a third for just a moment. The only Vulture signs the triad showed were those gauzy webs still near Gerbanyar.

  She let the third tooth go and returned to the fire, stretching her arms out to help them dry. “Pa never said if it got easier.”

  “It shouldn’t.” Tavin sat up, rubbing his eyes. “It does.”

  “Go back to sleep,” the prince said at once. “You need to recover. I’ll take your watch.”

  “I’m fine. Besides, how could I sleep through a feast like this?” He flashed a smile Fie didn’t buy for a second. Neither did she miss how his eyes swept the dark.

  She salted their paltry dinner anyhow, trying not to fret over their dwindling rations. Four days without viatik made for thin fare, and she wasn’t about to march back into Gerbanyar to collect pay.

  She wasn’t alone in her worries. “We’re not going to make it to the Marovar like this,” Jasimir said around a mouthful of maize. “Even if we had enough food, we’d freeze on the first mountain.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Tavin said.

  “No, we need to come up with a plan.” Jasimir pushed a strip of dried panbread about his bowl. “We’re farther north now. Maybe—”

  Tavin shook his head. “Not again, Jas.”

  “The Hawks could escort us there faster.”

  “Or they could hand us over to Tatterhelm for an early solstice present.” Tavin tried to make it sound like a joke. The strain in his voice hamstrung any levity. “The Gerbanyar Hawks weren’t exactly throwing themselves between us and the Vultures.”

  “Then we find other Hawks.”

  “No, Jas.”