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, sinners, 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