measure of fire, witch or not. But outside Dumosa—perhaps for the first time—Prince Jasimir was powerless.
She glanced to Pa. He was beating down a smile once more. He’d made his point loud and plain: the prince had his steel and his pet Hawk, but the Crows still had his teeth.
Fie tossed the tooth to the pyre. It would burn as long as she willed it, until its spark burned out. The flashburn caught with a crack, white flames chasing out a swarm of sparks. Fie dusted her hands off, took a few steps back, and shot a sideways look at the lordlings. Perhaps now they would bury their high-and-mighty nonsense.
But Tavin was peering into the beak of the mask. “Why is there mint in here?”
Pa just whistled the marching signal in answer.
“We’re moving out,” Wretch translated for the lordlings. The cart creaked an affirmation.
Fie turned back to the pyre and kept her eyes there. Soon enough, the footfalls and wooden groans faded down the road, into the night beyond the fire.
Her palm itched with the memory of tickling flame. The tooth had been so old, the spark so small—its owner had been dead for decades, maybe centuries. And yet for that brief moment, it had burned fierce enough to light Sabor ablaze from mountain to coast if she’d let it.
Part of her wanted to.
That was false. The thought rolled round her head like a tooth in her hand. It wasn’t that she wanted to burn the world down, no. She just wanted the world to know that she could.
“It’s a bad deal.”
Hangdog’s voice broke above the hiss of flashburn.
Fie shook her head, stuffing down thoughts of blazing tyranny. “It’s always a bad deal.”
“Not like this it isn’t.”
With neither Pa nor lordlings to puff up for, the ache of the long, long day clipped her temper even shorter. She might have softened her tongue for Hangdog long ago, when the two of them still slipped away to more private groves. They’d had an understanding of their own: Crow bands only had one chief in the end, so for their time together, they shared little more than short-lived need. But moons and moons had passed since they last reached for each other, and her patience had worn threadbare in more places than one.
“What would you have done?” Fie snapped.
Hangdog’s face turned harsh as the flashburn began to fade out, yielding to the bloody orange of wood-flame. One hand grazed his jaw. “I would’ve cut their throats back in their ugly palace.”
“And let the Oleanders run loose?”
He spat on the fire. “Does it matter? That piss-baby prince can’t keep that oath.” His eyes turned hollow. “If they knew a damn thing about the Oleanders, they’d know better than to try scaring us with them.”
Fie bit her tongue. For all his talk of cutting throats, she saw the way Hangdog pinched his ragged sleeve between a thumb and forefinger. The question was which was stronger: his fear of the Oleander Gentry, or his hate of the actual gentry.
“They should know better,” he said again, and his voice pulled distant and furious all at once.
She held out her hand. He took it, holding tight enough for his pulse to drum against her fingers where Phoenix fire had burned moments ago.
The false pyre raged and roared before them, devouring its empty shrouds. If they’d been full, Pa would have tossed salt into the fire and welcomed them to the Crow roads in the next life. The lordlings hadn’t even had to die to start walking Crow ways.
Fear crept up Fie’s spine, whispering that they would be caught, whispering that Pa would be bound to the oath forever, whispering the worst of all: that Hangdog was right.
She held his hand, minded the pyre, and tried not to think of Phoenix teeth.
* * *
Morning came too soon and found Fie too quick. She hid her face from the slashes of sun through reed screens as long as she could, curling deeper into her thin blanket. In the end, it was the smell that pried her up from the sleeping mat: fresh panbread sizzling on a griddle. She sniffed again and caught fried soft cheese and honey, her favorite.
Only Pa cooked panbread that way, and when he did, it meant one of two things: either she’d earned a treat, or he needed a favor.
Curiosity and hunger rolled her to her feet, and she stretched in the empty haven shrine. It had been halfway to dawn before she and Hangdog