Fie waited for another guard to crack the door, then flitted back into the halls of Trikovoi, bound for her room, her swords, her teeth.
Bound for the prince.
Bound for the Fallow Vale.
Whether or not she burned her crown on a pyre, she was a chief. It was time she looked after her own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE SLAUGHTER BELL
Fie didn’t intend to stir the ashes where she tread, but she did all the same.
Fie didn’t intend to feel bad for Jasimir, either, but that happened, too, as he stumbled on the hobbles round his ankles. She yanked him upright, none too gentle, and prodded him on with the point of Tavin’s short sword. Her pity had only extended to a stolen—liberated—Hawk cloak about his shoulders to ward off the predawn chill.
He shot her a dark look but kept walking, hands bound before him. Fie suspected the prince had choice words for her.
That was partly why she’d gagged him with a twist of rag before dragging him into the Fallow Vale.
She’d been here before, or at least near enough to watch it burn. Once, the valley had held a village. Once, that village had cut a chief’s husband and child down. And once, a plague beacon went unanswered. Now all that was left was blackened earth, and a mark on her map that read ashes.
As she marched the prince on, a fretful wind picked at long-cold cinders and scraped grit over crumbling stone walls and barren fields. Every hut, every corpse, every field had been put to the torch; everywhere the plague had touched. That alone could halt an outbreak: burn all to ash and leave it be for years, for generations, until the grass at last grew green over the remains.
Fie had to give Tatterhelm his due: with a shifting haze of windborne cinder and myriad walls to shelter behind, he couldn’t have picked a better place to hole up.
Especially if he had untold numbers of skin-ghasts to hide.
Gray light leached into the dark over the valley’s eastern wall, warning of a sunrise the prince wouldn’t see today. Fie’s throat knotted. All this had begun in the Hall of the Dawn; so, too, would it end with the rising sun.
“Faster,” she muttered to Jasimir. Tatterhelm might not wait before taking another piece of Pa. The prince gave her a look of pure disgust, but she pushed him on. They slowed as they passed the first burned-out house, peering for any slip of the skinwitches or their skin-ghasts.
It’s a trap, Draga rasped in her memory.
Fie’s sandal-nails crunched through something black and brittle. A whisper of escaping bone-sparks told her what she’d trod upon.
“That’s far enough.”
Tatterhelm’s voice clapped like thunder ahead. Fie started and gave Jasimir’s shoulder a sharp jerk.
The Vulture rounded a scorched corner, one hand locked about the back of Tavin’s neck. The other held a dagger to Tavin’s throat.
Still alive. Fie froze. Tavin was still alive. They’d bound his wrists before him. A lattice of dried blood streaked the side of his face, and bruises darkened his jaw, his arms, nigh everywhere she looked. Why hadn’t he healed himself? Had they simply beat him until he couldn’t keep up?
But he walked yet, breathed yet. He was there.
She hadn’t really believed she’d see him alive again. Not since he’d cut the bridge.
A heavy ring tolled with Tavin’s every step. It took Fie a moment to find the culprit.
Tatterhelm had knotted an iron slaughter bell round Tavin’s neck.
Tatterhelm stopped. The tolling didn’t. More shadows split from the blackened bones of the ruins: ten Vultures, ten Crows, ten more slaughter bells ringing dull at ten more throats.
Tatterhelm’s meaning cut all too clear. But this was the way of one who’d been a hunter all his life; he wanted her rattled and scattered.
Instead, Fie spat in the ashes. Her anger was a curious thing, sometimes jagged and broken as Pa’s sword, sometimes heavy and storied as the bag of teeth. She’d left them both behind to reckon with Tatterhelm. He would not shake anger from her here.
She counted each Crow’s face, every one her home. Madcap, their chin stuck out. Pa, rag bound about the knuckles of his right hand. Wretch, her lips moving frantic as Viimo kept a dagger at her throat.
She did not see Swain.
Tears boiled into her vision before she could wrest them away. Swain, with his scrolls and figures, his dry jests, the trench that dug in his brow when he pored over maps or coin. No matter