Fie loosed the teeth. Mammoth riders circled the Vultures and dismounted, unwinding shackles. The master-general herself rode toward Fie through the ebbing flames, storm-faced. Fie couldn’t say which loomed more menacing: the mammoth or Draga.
If Draga meant to have her head for this, though, perhaps Fie’d settle for dragging the Vultures into the twelve hells with her after all.
Then someone limped past, leaning on a spear, and planted himself between Fie and the master-general:
Jasimir.
Another dusty shadow followed him, standing steady in the road. Madcap. Another: Wretch. And more still.
Crow by Crow, they walled Fie off, and at last Pa’s arm wrapped about Fie’s shoulders as he took his place by her side.
For all her spite and cleverness, everything had emptied out of Fie, leaving her only with a knot in her throat and eyes that burned with tears. Pa pulled her in and let her bury her face in his shirt, just as he had for years. For a perfect moment, Fie didn’t give a damn for Hawks or princes or skinwitches.
She’d done it. She’d kept the oath, she’d struck down Tatterhelm, she’d looked after her own.
Draga might execute her now, but at least she’d die a chief.
“Out of the way,” the master-general ordered.
“You’ll not lay a finger on her,” Wretch answered, just as hard.
“She assaulted and abducted the heir to the throne so she could use him as bait. He could have been killed.” Draga cleared her throat. “I cannot—”
“I commanded her to.”
Fie raised her head and looked at Jasimir. This had not been part of their plan.
Draga blinked, which seemed to be as much surprise as she’d allow herself to display on a battlefield. “Think very carefully about what you are telling me, Highness.”
“I commanded her to,” Jasimir repeated, loud and plain. “Perhaps we should discuss this on the ground, master-general?”
To Draga’s credit, she knew better than to let the prince shout within her soldiers’ earshot about how he and a half-grown Crow had played the head of Sabor’s armies for a fool. She climbed down from her mammoth and strode over, looking not the slightest bit appeased. “There were clear signs of a fight in your chambers.”
Jasimir shrugged. “If there weren’t, you would have searched Trikovoi for us first. We needed you to come after us at the right time.”
That much was true. They’d left a clear trail of nail scratches all the way out.
“And if I hadn’t followed? You couldn’t just surrender to Tatterhelm.”
“Oh aye, that they did,” Madcap said, their voice bright. “Hoodwinked us all, head and heart.”
“I carried Phoenix teeth in my hands,” Jasimir clarified. “Tatterhelm didn’t think to check the captive for any weapons.”
Draga frowned. “The Phoenix teeth couldn’t have been a surprise to him. Did he magically forget to bring a hostage you wouldn’t burn, or did you just cut your losses?”
Jasimir glanced over his shoulder, then turned back. His voice dropped, though there was precious little point in subtlety now. “He brought Tavin.”
Draga’s face fractured as she found her son behind the Crows. For once, she couldn’t frost it over. “And?” Her voice cracked.
“I’m fine,” Tavin answered, stiff. “Tatterhelm is not.”
“You’re hurt—”
“I’ll live.”
Draga nodded, more a twitch of her chin than anything. Then she drew herself up and narrowed her gaze on the prince. “You’re saying you thought of this all on your own? That she only followed your orders?”
Pa started forward, but Fie shook her head.
“Royal commands,” she said, letting go of Pa to stand on her own. “Can’t disobey those.”
The master-general shot her a cold look.
“I take full responsibility,” Jasimir answered. “Any punishment should fall on me alone.”
Draga’s mouth tightened. It was plain she didn’t believe him for a heartbeat. But she couldn’t exactly pass a reckoning on her own crown prince.
“This ploy could have destroyed everything you worked for,” Draga snapped. “The fact that it worked is only a sign that the Covenant isn’t done with any of you yet.”
“It worked because Tatterhelm underestimated Fie.” Tavin’s voice cut through the crowd, straight to his mother. “And so did you.”
Silence stretched taught as a wire until Draga’s shoulders slumped. She rubbed a hand over her face, letting out a long-suffering sigh. “Anything else? Anyone have another grievance or five they feel compelled to air? Any new secrets to fess up?”
“Tavin and I slept together,” Fie offered. “Since you’re asking. Probably would’ve come out one way or another.”
Pa turned a laugh into a cough. Madcap twisted about and crudely gestured their approval.
Draga stared at Fie a long, long moment, then muttered, “I’m getting back on the mammoth.”
“That went well,” Pa said under his breath.
“Corporal Lakima,” Draga called, stalking away. “I want healers working through these people before we return to Trikovoi. And we’re taking the Vultures with us. Spare hostages never hurt anyone.”
“Wait.” Fie pushed forward as Draga spun on a heel, scowling. “Keep Viimo separate. She lied to Tatterhelm and said she didn’t see you coming. The other Vultures will know.”
“Why would she do that?” Draga demanded, bewildered. Fie shook her head. “Fine. She’ll have a nice cozy dungeon all to herself. Now follow me so we can patch you lot up.”
The Crows hung back, looking from Fie to Pa, and with an odd lurch, Fie realized they waited for the marching order.
Pa raised his brows at her. “Well?”
Fie wavered. “I—I dropped my teeth,” she said.
Pa nodded and patted her shoulder. “Catch up when you find them.”
He whistled the marching order. The Crows moved out, peppering Jasimir and Tavin with questions.
Fie hung back to peer about the cinders, hunting for her tooth string. She also didn’t favor adding a lost sword to Tavin’s list of troubles.
As she turned, Tavin’s iron bell swung on its rope. Fie hadn’t realized she still clenched it in a sweating fist.
Hot, scaly fingers closed around her ankle.
She yipped and jerked free, stumbling in her haste. A blackened hand scrabbled through the ash toward her, leashed to a steaming mass of burnt flesh.
Tatterhelm somehow lived yet.
But not much longer: his blood turned the cinders about him to dull red paste. If he were fortunate, blood loss would fade him out before the burns could.
“Mercy,” he gasped.
She sucked in a breath that savored of ash and scorched hair.
Mercy.
They always wanted it, in the end. They wanted to hunt Crows, and they wanted to cut them to bits, and when they faced the Covenant’s judgment, they wanted the Crows to grant them a swifter, cleaner way out.
Fie’s hand slipped a little. Her chief’s sword no longer steadied her.
This was her road, wasn’t it? She was a chief. She was a Merciful Crow. Maybe the Covenant had skipped the plague with Tatterhelm and sent her to crop him instead. Maybe she was the Covenant’s judgment now.
She thought of the sinner in Gerbanyar, the smile on his face, the blood on her hands. She saw the Oleanders beneath her tree, screaming for her blood. She saw the Hawks of Cheparok haunting her steps just for being a Crow in the wrong market. Because Crows had to let them. Because Crows would always be merciful.
She saw fire on a bridge. An arrow in an eye. Swain, sharing his scroll with a prince. Tavin, cutting through the rope bridge. Iron slaughter bells hanging about the heads of her own.
She saw a finger on a desk. She saw a trail of fingers on a dusty road.
She saw her own blood-soaked hands.
She was a chief; she looked after her own. Crows, si
nners, bastards, kings-to-be; somehow, they had all become her own.
“Damn you, Crow,” he begged. “Mercy.”
Greggur Tatterhelm suffered no plague. He’d chosen his own road, just as Fie had chosen hers.
The Covenant could have sent the plague to deal with him. Instead it had sent a Crow.
Fie dropped Tavin’s slaughter bell in the ash before the skinwitch’s dimming eyes.
“Some of us,” she told him, “are more merciful than others.”
The nails in her sandals ground on cinder and bone as she turned from the Vulture. Her teeth and Tavin’s sword waited in the ashen road ahead.
She took them up again, and did not look back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
SHORT LIVES
“Figured I ain’t seen the last of you.”
True to Draga’s word, Fie found Viimo alone in her cell. The Hawks at guard eyed Fie but said naught. Perhaps they’d learned her teeth made a better threat than any steel.
She’d slipped off while Corporal Lakima settled the Crows in guest barracks. Her kin were safe and whole, mostly; yet Fie had something more to settle before she could face Pa. Her head told her plain what would come of that talk. Her gut said she wasn’t ready to own it, not yet. And her heart …
Her heart had ghosts to cast out.
The skinwitch propped herself up on an elbow, sprawled on a thin straw pallet. “You lookin’ to make speeches, or you lookin’ to whine about your dead traitor lad?”
“Your kin shot Hangdog down,” she reminded Viimo, trying to sound imperious. “That’s two counts of Vulture treachery to one from a Crow, so let’s mind who we’re calling traitors here.”
“It’s to be speeches, then.” Viimo flopped back down on the pallet and closed her eyes. “Go on, get it over with. I got sleep to catch up on.”
“What were you promised?”
No answer came.
Fie gripped the bars hard enough for cold iron to grate against bone. “Why did you turn on Tatterhelm?”
Viimo opened one eye. “And if I don’t say, you’ll use another Crane tooth, aye?”
“Maybe. Maybe I think you want to tell me.”
Viimo opened her other eye.
“Stuck under a mountain, split off from your kin, and you just brought your own leader down,” Fie continued, leaning into the bars. “I wager you want to tell someone, anyone, why, before they hang you for treason.”
Viimo didn’t speak for a moment. Then she sat up and folded her arms, tracing the valor marks there. “I found tots,” she said. For the first time a bleak note sawed in her voice. “When I was younger. Lost ones, stolen ones. Could track them halfway ’cross Sabor if I wanted. And I’d bring ’em back. Got too good at it, and the queen heard what I can do, and next thing I know … Well, you don’t say nay to a queen. But I liked bringin’ the tots back. I liked who I was. Not someone who hunts brats and roughs up grannies.”
Wretch. Fie remembered how the old Crow had spoken to Viimo, even with a knife at her throat.
“It don’t take a master scholar to read the Oleanders’ horseshit for what it is,” Viimo sighed. “So nobody promised me nothin’, chiefling. I didn’t want to be that person no more.”
Fie didn’t know why the notion made her so angry.
No, she did.
The words flew out before she could stem the tide: “So you didn’t do a thing until you decided you didn’t like yourself? You didn’t draw that line when your lot cut off Pa’s finger? When you tried to burn me alive? When you tricked a boy into turning on his own kin by telling him you’d treat him like a person? Wasn’t any of it enough for you to stop Tatterhelm?”
“It all was,” Viimo said, exhausted. “I didn’t.”
“I hope you aren’t waiting on my forgiveness,” Fie hissed.
Viimo sighed and dropped back onto the pallet. “I ain’t waitin’ on aught from you. You asked me what makes a traitor, chiefling, and the only thing I got that crosses with your dead boy is this: we both didn’t want who we were. That’s all.”
She closed her eyes and did not say another word.
Fie mulled over throwing pebbles at Viimo until she sat up again, but decided the Vulture had naught more worth hearing.
She’d come to settle her heart. Instead the ghosts lingered yet, and still she had to face Pa.
And Tavin, another voice nagged.
The thought of looking Tavin in the eye tonight made Fie burn like a sinner. It also made her want to run out of Trikovoi and not stop until she hit the sea.
She all but bolted for the barracks.
She found the Crows hustling in and out of the courtyard, sorting through heaps of gear and goods. Draga had conferred the entirety of the Vultures’ supply caravans upon the Crows, a bounty that could very well last them until the end of summer.
As long as they met no Oleanders.
Fie let out a breath. She doubted duping the master-general into a rescue would make Draga reconsider her stance on the oath.
“I count six water skins here, Highness,” Madcap called.
Fie blinked. Jasimir peered around a cart, marking a note on a length of parchment. “That makes a dozen even. Could you please add them to the others?” He pointed inside.
Fie walked over as Madcap bustled past. “What are you doing?”
Jasimir flashed a list at her. “Someone has to write all this down.”
Swain had always scratched out their inventory. Fie supposed that would fall to her now. “I can take over.”
Jasimir shook his head. “We’re catching up. Did you know Tavin poisoned the Vultures?”
“Snuck some plant into their stew down by Gerbanyar,” Wretch added, swinging a sack of rice over her shoulder. “Gave them the runs for three days.”
He’d found a way to make the moss useful after all. Fie couldn’t help a grin. “Did the prince tell you he barfed on a corpse?”
The Crows’ laughter rose, then died when a Chief voice called. “Fie.”
Jasimir pointed his charcoal stick over her shoulder. She turned. Pa sat at a table inside the barrack, gesturing to the seat across from him.
Fie unbuckled the chief’s blade as she walked over and set it down on the lacquered red table before she sat.
Pa did not take it.
“The prince told me the Hawks are balking at the oath,” he said. Fie’s gut twisted, half-relieved she didn’t have to break the news, half-miserable for failing him so. “Don’t fret, Fie. It’ll come. Maybe it takes longer than we hoped, but it’ll come.”
“Your end’s kept, at least,” she whispered, ragged.
“Aye. Remember what I told you about earning your string?” Pa hefted a cooking pot by the handle. Without a little finger to grip tight, it wobbled bad. “I can’t deal mercy proper now. Could try with my left hand, but I won’t be fast or sure.”
“And that’s no mercy at all.” Fie swallowed, eyes on the broken sword. We both didn’t want who we were. “Pa, I’m too young to be chief.”
“You’re too young for near all you did the last moon and a half.”
I don’t want to be chief.
Fie stared at the table’s thick red lacquer.
“I didn’t want it, either,” Pa said, too quiet for the others to hear.
She looked up, startled. The confession burst free. “Pa, I—I carried steel, I learned to read, I left the roads. I liked it. I don’t want to be chief. I don’t know if I want to be a Crow.”
He reached over and took her hand. “No chief I’ve ever met looked down the road and wanted what they saw waiting for them. Hangdog never saw a way out for Crows. He gave up on us. But you, Fie … you changed that road. You made it one you could want. Learning your letters, carrying steel … Those don’t make you less of a Crow. They open ways for the rest of us. And when any of us look at your road, we see you’re bound to be one of the greatest chiefs the Crows will ever witness.”
“Tell that to Swain.” Fie’s voice cra
cked.
“He said it himself the night we cut the oath.” Pa gingerly tested his scarred, Hawk-healed knuckle. “Your ma said you were born vexed with the world, aye. And Swain said you were born vexed enough to turn it on its head.”
She had no answer, only eyes that burned wet. Pa gripped her hand tighter.
“The Oleanders, they say we bring our troubles on ourselves, aye?” He leaned in. “Spend enough time biting your tongue instead of spitting back and you start to believe them. But there’s good in your road. Aye, we walk a harder, longer way to get it, but it’s ours. It’s yours. You deserve it and more. Don’t let them take that from you, too.” He leaned back and sighed. “Where’s your string? Don’t need ten fingers to tie that, at least.”
Fie pulled her tooth string from a pocket and brushed off the ash, then handed it over. Pa circled round to her back and looped it about her neck once more. A moment later, he let it fall, knotted tight.
“By the Covenant’s measure and the dead gods’ eyes, you’re a chief,” he recited. “Deal their mercy. And look after your own.”
The string felt heavier than before. She’d looked after two false Crows; now she had a band of ten true ones. But she had Pa, and she had Wretch, and she had a prince’s oath.
And she had a bag of Phoenix teeth. That helped.
Pa sat across from her once more and raised an eyebrow. “So. You and the Hawk lad?”
She hid her face in her hands. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Naught to be ashamed of, either,” Pa said, treading cautious. “He saved all our lives on the road. Tatterhelm thought he had the prince and didn’t care to keep toting spare hostages. Your boy blew his own ruse to keep us alive, knowing he’d take twelve hells for it. He’s got his head on right.”
“It’s all a wash, anyway,” she sighed, searching her hems until she found a thread to pick. “I near got his brother killed. And I paraded his biggest secret about before half of Trikovoi. He hardly even looked at me. Reckon we’re done for.”
Pa gave her a narrow look. “I reckon he started shining to you the moment you punched him. By the time Tatterhelm brought him in, that boy lit up like a torch anytime he caught your name. That’s a dedicated kind of shine to be sure. I’d wager some faith on it.”
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