“Why are we stopped?” Prince Jasimir demanded, sweating beneath his hood.
Wretch spat in the road and pointed to a string of deep-blue smoke rising over the treetops.
“I say let ’em rot,” Hangdog grumbled.
“Aye, and then the farmers rot, and their fields rot, and our pay rots, lackwit,” Fie shot back. She’d watched Swain tally up their supplies. Duty to the Covenant was the pretty side of it. The hard truth was that they also had two more mouths to feed.
“But what is that?” the prince asked.
“Really?” Hangdog gave him a look of disgust. “When was the last time your powdered ass set foot off palace grounds?”
“Enough.” Pa cleared his throat, scowling at the sky. “It’s a plague beacon.”
CHAPTER FIVE
FEED THE CROWS
The sun hung at an hour past the noon mark when they reached the village. They had followed the beacons down a twisting eastbound roughway, passing first the blue smoke beacon, then the violet. Both beacons snuffed out in their wake. Pa, Hangdog, and Fie all used the walk to wrap their hands and forearms in clean rags, the better to keep blood off their sleeves.
Now Pa rang the bell at the base of the village’s signal post, where black smoke smeared a charcoaled thumb into the clear sky. A Hawk guard peered over the edge of the platform, found fifteen Crows in fifteen masks and cloaks (and one grumpy gray tabby), and nodded before vanishing again. The smoke began to choke out.
Barf had fled the wagon once they’d turned down the narrower, bumpier roughway, but Fie stowed her back inside the hold now. “You’ll thank me later,” she muttered over outraged mewls. There was no telling how the village would receive them, but Fie had an educated notion. She couldn’t chance they’d take their spite out on the Crows’ pet, too.
Pa looked over Fie’s head and picked out the prince and his Hawk. “We’ll handle the heavy lifting, lads,” he muttered. “You keep clear of the body.”
Behind Fie, Tavin grumbled into his mask, “How do you people even tell one another apart like this?”
The answer was the way Swain rolled up his sleeves so neat in the damp warmth. Or Wretch’s habit of swaying in place, never wholly still. Or how Hangdog’s fingers dug into his palms every time the lordlings spoke.
But all Fie said was “You two are the only ones who walk like we should get out of your way.”
And then she followed Pa into the village common.
The locals clustered near the communal oven, huddled like their round-shouldered thatch houses. Most doors bore the mark of Common Castes; the one beside the town’s god-grave brandished a Hunting Caste crest and the painted border of a Crane arbiter.
The silver-haired Crane stepped forward as Pa approached. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her faded orange smock marbled with faint bloodstains that soap-shells couldn’t break. As the village arbiter, she served as their judge, doctor, and teacher. Likely she’d known the sinners since birth.
She pointed a shaking oak-brown finger to a nearby thatch house. “They’re in there.”
“More than one?” Pa asked.
The woman’s lined face crumpled a moment before steadying. “Two—two adults. A husband and wife.”
“Naden and Mesli,” a man spat. “They have names.”
Had, Fie thought, grim, studying the onlookers. No crying moppets, no wailing family. Anger still simmered below the surface. They hated the Crows for being here. And they hated themselves for calling them.
But if the corpses didn’t burn by their second sunset, plague would spread faster than rumors through a Swan pavilion. Fie knew too well what happened after that: By week’s end, no one in the village would be left untouched. Two weeks in, the dead would be piled up, the crops blackening in the fields. By moon’s end, only rotten timber, ruined earth, and bitter ghosts would remain.
Pa led the cart as far down the path to the thatch house as it could go, stopping before mud could glut the wheels. The nearby field stretched half-tilled, its mossy sod a green island in the sea of dark earth. Pigeon Moon was for sowing; Peacock Moon would be for waiting.
That field wouldn’t be touched again until the thatch house had been burned down and built anew. This time, as they walked up to the door, Fie caught the true, familiar stench of plague and death.
“Hangdog. Watch the cart.” Pa crooked a finger at Fie. “You come with me, girl.”
Fie swallowed. Pa had cut throats in front of her before, but only when