Fie handed half the bag over. He dropped his shells into two rows of three, and she followed suit.
“There are twelve rounds,” Tavin continued. “Each round, you can either take a shell from my side…” He reached for a shell on her side of the line. She seized his wrist out of habit. He snorted a laugh. “Or try to stop me from trying to take one from yours, just like that. Once you touch a shell, it’s yours. After twelve rounds, whoever has the most shells wins.”
She let go of him and blamed the flush up her neck on the campfire. The one a solid dozen paces off. “That’s all?”
“For the basic game. At court we play a couple different variations”—his voice hitched for the briefest moment—“but those are more … complicated. Any questions?” She shook her head. “Then on the count of three. One—two—three.”
He tried for the same shell as before. She caught his hand before it came close.
“Well done,” he said, and drew a tick mark to the side. “Round two.”
This time she caught him again, reaching for an outside shell.
“Beginner’s luck,” he huffed, the corner of his mouth tilting up even as he sat back.
“You’re easy to read,” Fie returned. That was a half-truth. She’d sorted a handful of truths about the prince’s Hawk by now, though most ran as deep as the line in the sand between them. Yet one was clear enough: she’d met holy pilgrims who put less effort into getting to their dead god’s tombs than Tavin did trying to make it onto her good side.
Time to sort out an uglier truth, then.
“Round—”
“It wasn’t right,” Fie interrupted. “What Hangdog said about you.”
About us, that ugly voice whispered. Fie kept that to herself.
Tavin blinked at her, wordless. She’d managed to throw him off-balance once more. The question was if that meant Hangdog had the truth of it.
“Thank you,” Tavin said quietly. “If you’re concerned I’m going to hurt him—”
“He shouldn’t have said it,” she said, cutting him off again. It’d take a harder push to crack the Hawk. “We have two more days to Cheparok. He’s going to keep saying things he shouldn’t.”
“And I’m going to keep ignoring them.” Tavin glanced across the fire to the prince, then back to her. “My … the old queen, Jasindra, had a favorite Hawk proverb: ‘When you act in anger, you have already lost your battle.’”
Fie reckoned that hadn’t worked out too well for the dead queen. She also reckoned she’d best keep that to herself as well. Instead, she asked, “Did you see her much?”
“Every day.” Tavin’s voice roughened at the very edges. “She raised me like her own, though … King Surimir made sure Jas and I remembered who was the prince. But you could say the queen and my mother were close.”
He’d not mentioned his mother before. Not with the prince in earshot. “Is she with the palace Hawks?”
A shadow slipped across his face. “No. She’s a mammoth rider in the Marovar.”
Fie whistled under her breath. Mammoth lancers had to be hammered of stern stuff. Only the sternest guarded the ancestral Hawk stronghold of fortresses scattered about the northeastern Marovar mountains. “Sure it’s a proper holiday, riding for the master-general.”
Tavin cracked another honest smile. “You want to know a secret?”
“Aye.”
“My mother once told me Master-General Draga just wants to be left alone with her spears, her mammoths, and her husbands and wives. But she’ll bring all twelve hells down on anyone who takes her away from that.” Tavin tossed a shell from hand to hand. “In retrospect, maybe that contributes to the ‘don’t get angry’ philosophy.”
Fie wrinkled her nose. “Reckon ‘don’t get angry’ is a lot easier to say from the back of a mammoth, too.”
“The mammoth probably helps,” Tavin admitted. “Round three.”
Fie came away with a shell this time, snatching it before he could stop her.
“You know what else helps?” Tavin asked, grimacing as she added the shell to her side. “A bag of Phoenix teeth. Round four.”
“Teeth burn out. Phoenix witches don’t.”
“One. Two. Three.”
They both seized shells. Tavin stayed silent as he placed his stolen shell in the gap she’d made in his rows. Something was amiss; he always had a parry to every strike.
“There are Phoenix witches, aren’t there?” Fie asked.
His mouth twisted. “Right now? Only King Surimir. If Rhusana kills him before another witch appears…”
Fie filled in the blanks herself. With all of their dead gods buried under the palace, any Phoenix stood near as good as a witch