“As for how I spend my nights … you might win that wager, you know.” Tavin rolled off the branch, effortless, dangling from his fingertips as he flashed that damned grin up at her. “If you’re counting only the girls.”
He dropped. The branch sprang back and near flung Fie off. She swore and flailed for a handhold.
Tavin landed and gallantly stretched out his arms. “Let go, I’ll catch you!”
“Get scummed,” she spat, and made her own way out of the tree.
By the time Fie touched ground, Jasimir had gone to work fishing out any goods that could be salvaged from the still-burning wagon, ducking his head with embarrassment as Wretch and Madcap lauded each rescue.
Tavin in turn had commandeered the cat. He shook his head when Fie stalked over, frowning at Barf’s bloodied paw.
“Give me a bit,” he muttered, distracted. “Looks worse than it is. At least, now it does. She tried scratching her way out.”
Fie watched a torn toepad slowly knit together and swallowed her spite. Perhaps the Hawk witch had some usefulness to him yet. For all his pompous nonsense, the prince had proven as much for himself.
And from the drawn look on Jasimir’s soot-streaked face, he’d learned the fear of strangers in the night after all.
But one Crow still hadn’t returned from the dark. Fie thumbed a certain Crow tooth in her string, worry gumming in her belly. The milk tooth gave off a sullen but welcome simmer, kin to the one knotted beside it. One tooth from Pa, one tooth from Hangdog, both burning bright in her mind. Crow teeth had no Birthright to conjure, but they carried a spark if their owner yet lived. Either Hangdog hadn’t crossed the Oleanders yet, or they’d passed him by.
Half a weight lifted from her shoulders. The rest stayed as she and the other Crows bundled up their meager surviving supplies into makeshift packs.
Then, at last, the light of the still-burning wagon carved Hangdog from the dark of the road, fake feet coiled around one shoulder, eyes hollow. A long scratch left red trails across one cheekbone, the only wound Fie could spy.
“Did you see them?” Pa asked.
Hangdog blinked, then nodded. After a moment he cleared his throat. “Rode by.”
“How far?”
Hangdog didn’t answer, eyes on the fire.
When he’d first come to their band five years ago, he’d not spoken for nigh two moons. Another Crow chief had found him the dawn after an Oleander raid, the only survivor. That chief wouldn’t repeat what she’d seen in the ruined camp, aside from a silent scrap of a witch-boy still clutching a fistful of spent Sparrow teeth. But she did let one thing slip: what had happened to Hangdog’s kin, what Hangdog had witnessed that night … it was all in full sight of the finest Peacock manor in the region.
“Far,” Hangdog said after a heavy silence. Another dark bead welled in his bloody scratch. “They won’t be back.”
Tavin shifted the cat to tap his own cheek. “I can fix your f—”
“No.” Hangdog sat by Fie, setting his false feet in the dirt beside them.
Fie glanced back to the Hawk. He raised his eyebrows at her. She ignored him and returned to the heap of supplies.
“Did you hear?” she asked Hangdog under her breath, knotting a bit of twine in one corner of the grass mat she was fashioning into a pack. “The riders. They said our days were numbered. They said—”
“‘Long reign the queen.’” Hangdog tried to help her fold the pallet over its contents, but it slipped from his shaking hands. “Aye. I heard.”
“The lordlings spoke true,” she whispered. “The queen—”
“I know.” Hangdog swore under his breath as he fumbled the mat again.
Fie hadn’t seen him this shaken in years. Ever, perhaps. She couldn’t blame him. The threat was real. They’d been sold to the Oleander Gentry for a throne.
And if she couldn’t get the prince to his allies, every Crow in Sabor would pay the price.
This road had trapped her, trapped Pa, trapped them all in the way only roads could—no going back now. For her ma, for her kin, she would walk it to the end.
Or, part of her whispered into the night, she was bound to die trying.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TWELVE SHELLS
Pa kept more Pigeon teeth than they could ever hope to use. After all, teeth were the easiest and cheapest viatik at hand, and city folk of any caste seldom parted with anything valuable without a knife in their face to encourage