the crest of a stone ridge and looming over a field of maize ahead.
“Almost there.” Wariness dangled each word at arm’s length. The next beacon could lead them down some roughway, giving the Vultures time to cover ground.
Fie opened her mouth to answer—then froze.
A soft, dangerous shiver crept up through the soles of her sandals from the road below.
She knew it. She knew that tremble like the voice of kin.
And in that moment, she knew exact where they’d fouled up.
Jasimir stopped dead, eyes widening as he too read the signs.
“The trail,” he whispered. “We weren’t tracking the skinwitches, we were tracking Tavin—”
The shiver swelled to a rumbling high tide. Fie heard a scream just beyond the bend of the road at their backs.
“Run—run—!” Jasimir bolted off the road, Fie at his heels.
They scrambled over a splinted fence and plunged into maize stalks near as tall as Fie. A dark border of firs waited at the field’s end, and beyond it, not one league off, lay Trikovoi.
She couldn’t run a league straight. Not with a pack weighing her down. They weren’t going to make it—
Fie thought of the starving wolf and ran.
Maize leaves bit at Fie’s face and hands as she and Jasimir stumbled over furrows of crumbling earth. She didn’t waste time trying to call on Sparrow teeth: the sway of stalks betrayed nigh every step they took.
They only have to catch you once.
A Vulture whoop streaked the air. Moments later, the drumbeat of hooves muddled into the wet crackle of breaking stalks.
Almost there—almost out—they were only a few paces from the woods—
Something splattered at her feet, speckling the back of her legs. She caught a whiff of acid and burnt wool—then pain burst across her calves.
Jasimir crashed into her, knocking them both to the ground. She swore, bewildered, and tried to shove him off. He rolled back to his feet and dragged her up. “Your legs—fire—” he wheezed.
Fie twisted and saw scorch marks burned into the backs of her wool leggings, the flesh beneath red and welting. A scattering of small white fires speckled the maize behind them, each no bigger than a fist.
An arrow whistled eerily through the air, then thudded into the trunk of a fir nearby. White fire sprayed from its shaft like syrup.
“Flashburn.” Fie sucked a breath through her teeth. “It’s flashburn.”
She had to hand it to the Vultures: if you wanted to kill a Crow and keep a Phoenix, fire was the way to do it.
Jasimir’s horror said he, too, had pieced it together. “Come on. They won’t have a clear shot in the forest.”
They raced into the firs. Any sign of Trikovoi vanished behind heavy, needled boughs. Shouts and cursing echoed behind them. The horses weren’t built to weave through the thickets here, but they’d catch up sooner than later.
“We just—have to get—to Trikovoi,” Fie panted, staggering up a heap of rocks. The plague beacons would have to wait, and the Covenant would have to forgive her, and the dead gods would have to be kind if she and the prince were going to make it out of this damned—
The forest stopped.
That was false; it didn’t so much stop as empty out. The ground at their feet clogged with rocks and broken wood and old caked mud. Hundreds of trees stood before them, gray and clean, stripped of their bark and needles but for tufts near their dead crowns.
Pa called them ghost forests, stretches of trees that a mudslide had smashed in the pass of a few breaths. Right now, all Fie saw stretched ahead of her were a thousand-thousand royal ghosts, and the teeth of Trikovoi in the slopes less than a league away.
Hoofbeats pounded behind them.
She and Jasimir took off into the ghost forest, aimed dead for the fortress. The ground bucked and slipped beneath their feet, branches rolling, dried mud buckling, stones tipping every which way. Fie prayed that would foul up the riders even worse.
Then an arrow sailed over her head and into the trunk of a ghost tree.
Flames leapt from every drop of flashburn, spreading in a trice. Jasimir yanked her back as the tree groaned and splintered into a pillar of white fire.
Shielding their eyes, they veered round it, still pushing on toward the fortress. Almost there—they just had to get away from the Vultures, just had to clear these damned ghosts—
Another arrow hit, and another, sinking into the dead trees. Fie twisted but saw no riders. A war cry shrieked from the dark woods to her