The Faithless Hawk

by Margaret Owen

  “You two have survived this long, despite your best efforts,” Fie said. There was no mystery to why she wanted extra hands on a shrine visit: Little Witness’s watchtower was one of the three great shrines to dead Crow gods, and as such, they didn’t dare lose sight of the way in. Someone in every band always needed to know how to find it. “Figured if anyone’s safe to keep the way known for a while yet, it’s you.”

  “No doubt Varlet will put that to the test,” Bawd drawled. “Cur, where do you reckon the keeper will send you?”

  Pa scratched at his bald crown. He was more nervous about this than Fie’d realized. “They send witches to their own shrines, or so my old chief told me. We’ll see.”

  A chill ran down Fie’s spine at that. Pa believed, as many did, that when the thousand gods died, they were born again as witches to lead the castes they’d founded. Fie had spent too much time tripping over her own feet to really believe she’d once been a god, though.

  And the uneasy truth was that thinking on it felt like standing at the shores of an ocean on a moonless night—something terrible, vast, and unseen roaring before her, waiting to swallow her whole the moment she stepped beyond solid ground.

  They soon left the dirt road for a worn footpath that wound through narrow black pines and hassocks of sharp-bladed grass, forking again and again. “Downhill,” Pa told the other three. “Always take the downhill branch.” Eventually it spilled them out into a cove walled round by basalt cliffs.

  Fie knew the moment her sandal touched beach that they had reached Little Witness’s grave. Charcoal fragments still freckled the paler bands of sand, remnants of bonfires from the first night of Crow Moon, and even without that giveaway, the rumble of bone magic beneath her feet was all too familiar to miss. Pa strode toward a great mound of boulders crusted over with glistening black mussels, near buried in the white froth of crashing waves. As Fie followed him up onto the rock, the answering hum in her own bones swelled to a muffled roar.

  Pa reached the edge of the boulders, then stepped off. By all rights, he ought to have dropped straight into the churning surf below, to be hammered to a pulp between the waves and the basalt.

  Instead, he vanished.

  “So that’s how you hide a watchtower,” Varlet said.

  Fie made herself walk off the rocks as well. As expected, her foot met solid stone, and in a breath she’d broken through the walls of magic shrouding the shrine. Where water had rushed below, now more basalt rose to form the base of Little Witness’s tower.

  Unlike the shabby towers bristling along the waters of the Jawbone, this one boasted of eight sides instead of four, standing taller, sturdier, and older than any of the governor’s ruins. The sea had gnawed away much of the watchtower’s ancient embellishments, but the most unsettling survivors were the bricks jutting out from each corner. They’d been stacked so that every other brick protruded, but saltwater and storm had worn them down to rounded shells, and they now looked like eight unfathomably long spines stretching to the tower’s rooftop. Windows cut into eight-pointed stars pocked the surface, letting light in but betraying naught.

  Fie reckoned she could see straight to Dumosa from that roof. As a god, Little Witness had taken the form of a beggar girl who saw everyone’s misdeeds and recounted them for the Covenant’s judgment. Likely she’d also need a watchtower like this to do it from. If Little Witness really had started recounting the misdeeds of Dumosa, it was no wonder she’d died before she could ever leave.

  A groan made Fie jump. The iron door at the base of the tower had split diagonally, the two halves sliding away, behind the walls. In the entryway stood a little girl, no more than seven, barefoot and clad only in an overlarge shift of black crowsilk. Her hair had been tied back with a careless hand, dark strands falling about her round brown face, and two black eyes burned straight into Fie.

  Pa cleared his throat. “Cousin, we’re here to see the keep—”

  The girl pointed dead at Fie. “What do you call yourself?”

  Fie wobbled and nearly fell on a bed of mussels. “What?”

  “In this life,” the girl said, crossing her arms. “What do you call yourself?”

  Fie shot a look to Pa, who shrugged, mystified as she. “Fie,” she answered.

  “Fie. You’re first.” The girl turned on a heel and walked away from the doorway.

  “I’m not—” Fie sputtered as a wave crashed into the boulders she stood on, spraying her with foam and brine. “We’re here for Pa, not me.”

  The girl poked her head around the doorframe. She blinked at Pa, then vanished again. “Gen-Mara, the Messenger. We can speak in a moment.”

  “He’s to keep Gen-Mara’s shrine?” Bawd asked, clapping Pa on the back. Gen-Mara’s groves were another of the great shrines. “Now that’s a place to settle.”

  “The Messenger’s to keep his own shrine,” the little girl’s voice called from the tower’s depths. “You all wait inside—all but you, Fie or Sebiri or whatever it is you’re calling yourself now. You come with me.”

  “That’s the keeper?” whispered Varlet.

  Pa slowly shook his head. His eyes had gone wider than Fie could ever recall seeing. “Lad … that’s Little Witness.”

  Bawd and Varlet both swore with equal parts reverence and imagination. Fie stayed stock-still, frozen to the rock, mind reeling. They hadn’t come here for Fie. Whatever this was—she wasn’t supposed to face it, not yet.

  Pa nudged her. “Go on, girl.”

  The ocean roared round her. “But, Pa—”

  “Best not to keep a dead god waiting,” he said, and strode into the tower. Fie had no choice but to follow.

  Inside was nothing like Fie had expected. Light streamed in from the open windows, catching on wheels, pulleys, and levers lining the walls, and on shelves cluttered with scrolls and stacks of parchment. Most shrines kept a statue of the dead god whose grave they stood on, and while Little Witness’s tower was no exception, apparently her recent incarnations had felt the statue could serve a more practical use. The crude stone carving of the little beggar girl now bore planks of wood across her outstretched arms, which hosted dusty jars, roughly folded blankets, and bolts of crowsilk. Clotheslines had been strung between the statue’s fingers, splaying out laundry that looked as if it had dried a week ago and simply remained there.

  Once all four Crows were inside, Fie heard another creak and snap, and then the iron door’s crooked halves slammed shut behind them. A tiny figure darted over to a wooden platform on the ground as wide and as long as the wagon. Thick ropes were fastened at each corner, stretching into the shadows overhead.

  Little Witness pointed at the platform and ordered, “Get on.”

  Fie swallowed and stepped onto the planks.

  Little Witness hopped on as well and flipped a lever. Fie heard a rush of water below, and then, to her astonishment, the platform began to rise. “Don’t touch anything,” Little Witness shouted to the others. “If you need to sit, sit on the floor.”

  The steps, which seemed reasonably easy to climb, coiled in a slow spiral round the tower walls. As they passed level after level, Fie saw one floor covered end to end with sleeping pallets, no doubt to shelter visiting bands; another held what looked like a viatik stash, the largest Fie had ever seen. A whole level was dedicated solely to jars upon dusty jars of teeth—mostly Sparrow to hide the watchtower and Peacock to weave an illusion in its place. That floor made Fie’s own teeth ache and sing in answer, and she was grateful when it sank below them.

  “Who put a water-lift in your tower?” Fie asked, anchoring herself on a rope and trying not to look down.

  “I did,” the dead god answered shortly.

  Fie looked pointedly up at the ropes, which seemed to run all the way to the top of the tower. “Wouldn’t think you were tall enough for that.”

  “I used to be. Ten-and-eight lives ago, I fell down the tower steps and died. I prioritized transportation in the next one. And I have time on my
hands.” She frowned out a passing star-shaped window as Domarem slipped through its frame. “I was the god of remembering. From the moment I am born, I remember everything, in every life and from all the lives before, Huwim or Hellion or Fie.”

  “Except my name,” Fie muttered.

  “You’ve worn a lot of names,” Little Witness fired back. “You’ve worn a lot of lives. Ten-and-seven lives ago, you pushed me down those stairs.” She peered up at Fie with a grandmother’s eyes in a child’s face. “See? Now if you push me off, I will take you with me.”

  All Fie saw was that, by now, it was a very long way to fall. She tightened her grip on the rope. “I don’t feel like killing a dead god today.”

  “You haven’t, the last three times we’ve spoken.” Little Witness smiled in a way that was tired and sweet and bloodcurdling all at once. “You’ve been a Crow those times.”

  “Those times?”

  The platform drew even with the top of the staircase, and Little Witness hopped off without answering. Fie followed.

  “Those times?” she repeated. “I’m a witch. If—if we’re all dead gods reborn, then wasn’t I a Crow god?”

  “Aren’t you, indeed?” Little Witness led her up five more steps and into a room that could hardly be called one. It spanned the entire width of the tower, but its walls were stone cut with so many of those eight-point stars that they might as well have been screens. Wind whistled through the gaps, and weak light poured in from the overcast sky, giving the room an unearthly pewter glow.

  “What you were doesn’t particularly matter,” Little Witness said, heading for a heap of worn cushions, where she promptly sat. “What matters is what you carry. So first: What will you leave in my viatik stash?”

  Fie swung the pack down and settled beside it. “Food, cooking gear—Pa’s got the rest of it in his pack—”

  “I’ll have the teeth.” Little Witness pointed to the bag fastened at Fie’s belt.

  Her heart skipped a beat. She had a sudden horrid hunch where this was going, but she undid the bag’s straps anyway, fingers shaking. It was a beautiful work of stamped leather, with pockets and compartments inside to help her order her teeth instead of having to fish around pouch within pouch. Tavin had gifted it to her before she left Trikovoi, with a particular charm stitched into one hidden corner: a milk tooth of his own. His mother had kept them.

  In Fie’s darkest moments, when she doubted she’d ever see him again, she’d reach for that tooth and the spark still burning within, and know she could yet find her Hawk.

  “Not that one,” Little Witness said as Fie’s fingertips strayed to that tooth now. She pointed to the largest compartment, where the Phoenix teeth were stored. “Those.”

  Fie couldn’t hide a flinch.

  “What’s the matter?” Little Witness asked. “You’re not using them.”

  A thousand refusals howled in Fie’s ears. They keep us safe. They make us feared. I earned them.

  I need them.

  Little Witness’s cockeyed smile said she knew square what she asked for. And that only vexed Fie more.

  “H-how many?” she gritted, unfastening the compartment.

  “How many can you spare?” Little Witness returned. “You’ve two swords, six Hawks, thousands of fire teeth. How much is enough for you?”

  Fie went still.

  The dead god leaned forward, her eyes too knowing for her child face. “Truth is, you always like your fire too much. You claimed every Phoenix tooth in the land. Did that fix your problems? You took a Hawk’s steel. Was that enough? You cut an oath from a prince, one to change all Sabor. Do you feel safe?”

  Wind whistled through the tower. Fie clutched her bag tighter and met Little Witness’s gaze with her own. “No Crow is safe with Rhusana climbing the throne.”

  “But it’s not just Rhusana, is it?” Little Witness asked.

  Something in Fie’s gut rankled at that, and in the back of her skull, a dead Peacock girl whispered, The Covenant made you as a punishment.

  “When the prince is on his throne, will you let your fire teeth go then?” Little Witness pressed. “Will that be enough?”

  “You know it won’t,” Fie snapped before she could rein herself back in. “Aye, it’s not just Rhusana, it’s the people who ride for her. The ones who know she’ll let them. It’s everyone who thinks Crows are naught but sinners to abuse as they please. And why shouldn’t they? You’re the one who can remember clear back to the dawn of days, so you tell me now: Why did the gods make us like this? Why don’t Crows have a Birthright?”

  Little Witness leaned back, eyes narrowing, as smug as Barf with a mouse in her claws.

  “And who said you didn’t?” she asked.

  For a terrible moment, Fie knew sore how that mouse felt.

  “Wh-what?” she stammered.

  “It eats at you every time,” Little Witness said, almost sad. “You think wanting more makes you less, when you just want what was stolen. You’re right! Rhusana isn’t the whole of your problem. She’s just the newest thief on the throne.”

  Fie stared at her. “Stop. Forget Rhusana. We had a Birthright?”

  Little Witness wagged a finger at her. “Forget Rhusana and you’ll just die again, and you’ll never make it here in time in your next life.”

  “Enough.” Fie didn’t know if her heart pounded with fury or wonder, but she knew which ruled her now. “The rest of Sabor thinks we have naught to offer but cutting sinners’ throats. And you’re telling me you knew we had a Birthright this whole damn time?”

  “You can’t—”

  “Crows have died while you sat in your tower!” Fie lurched to her feet, Phoenix teeth rattling across the basalt floor. Her very breath came bitter with memories of every pyre she’d lit for her kin, starting with her own mother. “And you couldn’t be bothered to, oh, tell anyone we had a Birthright until now?”

  “It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

  “YOU TELL MY MA IT WOULDN’T!” Fie screamed.

  “I do hope you don’t kill me this time,” Little Witness said. “I just grew tall enough to work the lift without a stepstool.”

  Fie’s fists balled at her side. “If you don’t start speaking plain—”

  “I was, at least about the stepstool.” Little Witness sighed. “Here’s as plain as I can get with you: Aye, we Crows had a Birthright. It was stolen. And if you want to take it back, you’ll need to keep your oath.”

  Fie froze at that. “My—my oath? My Covenant oath?”

  “Aye.”

  “Prince Jasimir’s safe with his aunt,” Fie said, head spinning. “I delivered him to his allies. Twice, if we’re being picky. Our end of the deal is kept.”

  If it wasn’t—somehow—

  Pa had struck the oath with the prince. And a Covenant oath followed you from life to life, until it was fulfilled.

  “Why wasn’t that enough?” Fie demanded.

  “You tell me. Six Hawks, two swords, every Phoenix tooth in the land, and that isn’t enough for you.” Little Witness undid her hair-tail and set about sorting her long black locks into a plait. “Keep your oath and you’ll find our Birthright. You’ll not find it sooner. I can speak no clearer.”

  “What is our Birthright, then?”

  “Ah.” Little Witness smiled one of her dreadful smiles again. “It would be cheating to tell you.”

  “You told Pa he was Gen-Mara not a half hour ago.”

  The god in the girl shook her head. “Gen-Mara hasn’t failed his duty for hundreds of years. I can’t say the same for you.”

  “I see why I keep killing you,” Fie muttered, stuffing teeth back into her bag. When she looked up, Little Witness was holding out her hand.

  “I asked for teeth,” she said.

  “And I asked you what Birthright I’m supposed to find for us. Seems we’ll both leave empty-handed.”

  Little Witness’s laugh was even worse than her smile. “Oh, I do miss this, you and me. It was a cru
el thing, putting such a spark in you but telling you not to love the fire.” She gave a twitch of her hand. “I want twelve, for the chiefs that will come to me in the next moon. We all know the storm’s coming; only a fool waits for the lightning to tell them to find shelter.”

  That was hard to argue with. Fie counted out a dozen Phoenix teeth, feeling the weight of each like lead in her belly.

  A dozen teeth she’d never use to defend her own.

  A dozen teeth another chief will use instead, her Chief voice reminded her.

  It chafed, how she’d never held a Phoenix tooth three moons ago, and now she could scarce bear to part with them.

  Fie dropped her teeth into the dead god’s waiting palm anyway. Little Witness’s fingers closed.

  She looked Fie dead in the eye, suddenly sharp. “I can’t tell you your own story, little god. Life after life, you’ve failed, and none worse than when I tell you outright what to seek. But this is why the Covenant needs a Crow to play your part, do you see? Your Birthright, your oath, they are truths no one can give to you. You must find them yourself.”

  “And Rhusana?” Fie snapped. “Can you tell me aught about her? Or am I to go on some journey of self-discovery while she chases all of us into early graves?”

  Little Witness began stacking the teeth into a tidy pile. “Only this: she feeds a monster, and each day it grows, and each day she lies to herself that she commands its teeth. She will be Sabor’s ruin, if you are not hers. Though I will say, if you want your grave, you’ll certainly find it in the palace.”

  Fie scowled. She’d no patience for more riddles. “I was hoping for something more like ‘Here’s exactly how she plans to murder the Crows.’”

  “You already know how.” Little Witness tilted her head. “There’s a young man waiting for you downstairs. He isn’t a Crow.”

  The most terrible question yet arose before Fie could stuff it down: “Am I?”

  Little Witness blinked. “What else could you be?”

  “I spent a moon and a half sneaking a prince and a half across Sabor while they mummed at being Crows,” Fie said. “They wore our clothes and ate our food and walked our roads, but that didn’t make them Crows. Am I any different?”