to read or strategy games to work through. She said a sharp mind did more on the throne than a sharp sword. But Father would have preferred me to be”—he blinked through the campfire, where Tavin stretched on a sleeping mat—“someone different.”
“You know it’s his job to die for you.” The second the words flew out, Fie silently cursed herself. Tavin scarce needed her to fight his quarrels.
“It’s his job to keep me alive,” Jasimir corrected, stiff. “Just like it’s my job to keep the country alive. Mother raised us both to know our duty.”
“Oh aye, he’s supposed to take an arrow for you, and you’re supposed to suffer a crown for him. It all evens out.”
The jibe sailed clear over the prince’s head. “Exactly. Besides, when he’s not on duty, he gets to do whatever he wants. And unlike me, he can go right back to doing that once we return to Dumosa.”
“And if he doesn’t want that?” Fie’s writing stick stalled in the dirt. “To go back?”
The prince let out a baffled laugh. “As opposed to—to this? Cowering in bushes, washing in puddles, and eating scraps? He’s a Hawk. He has no business living like a—”
He cut himself off, but not near soon enough.
A log popped in the campfire, spewing up sparks in the silence.
“Like what?” Fie asked, just to make him say it out loud. Her hands shook.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Like a Crow?” She threw the stick down across the half-scrawled letter. “You palace boys, you’re too good for this life, aye? You don’t deserve to be treated like me.”
Jasimir held up his hands, voice rising. “I don’t know! There has to be some reason why the Covenant lets this happen to you—”
“You mean your pa,” Fie spat. “There has to be a reason your pa lets this happen.”
Tavin rolled over, yawning, and Fie’s gut lurched. She scuffed a foot through her letters swift as she could.
“What…” Tavin sat up. “Why’re both of you awake?”
“It’s naught,” Fie answered, at the same time Prince Jasimir said, “I was teaching her to read.”
Fie’s very skin crawled with fury and humiliation. “Was not.”
Prince Jasimir stared. “What is the matter with you? We’ve been at it for five days now.”
“Shut up,” Fie hissed, desperate. Maybe if Tavin went back to sleep, he’d forget he saw anything.
You reckon he’ll take you away and polish you up so much that the gentry forget what you came from? Hangdog sneered, a shadow on a creek bank long gone.
“You ungrateful little—”
“Jas.” Tavin cut the prince off. “Be quiet.”
Jasimir drew himself up, looking wholly betrayed. “Are you—”
Tavin held a hand up, brow furrowed, searching the dark. “Do you hear that?”
Fie sifted through the noises one by one: the creak of smoldering firewood. Leaves murmuring in a weak wind. The soft trill of faraway cicada song.
Just beyond it all, a thin, uneven whistle.
Not the sort Fie issued for marching orders or the steps of the Money Dance, nor even the sort Swain half hummed under his breath while he tallied inventory. The nearest thing Fie could recall was a hunched-up poppy-sniffer she’d passed in an alley years ago, a forgotten reed pipe resting on his slack bottom lip. Every wheeze had skimmed off a faltering note.
And somewhere beyond their campfire, it sounded as if scores of those poppy-sniffer whistles were closing in.
“Trees. Now. Grab what you can.” Fie had started keeping a few bowlfuls of earth near their campfires for moments like this. She threw the dirt over the flames, smothering them in an instant. Then she blinked away the deeper dark and shoved as much as she could into her pack.
The whistles whined louder.
Mercifully, the prince was not barefoot this time. He and Tavin had scaled a sturdy oak, and Fie followed them up, calling two Sparrow teeth. She settled on a thick bough, teeth alight, and tried not to think on all the supplies still left below.
The whistling rose to a soft shriek, mere paces from camp.
Fie had seen her fair ration of terrible things in her sixteen years: scummed sinners, long-dead Oleander victims, the aftermath of a plague beacon gone unanswered. She’d heard campfire tales of monsters, devils, ghosts of wretched souls even the Covenant refused. All stories, she’d told herself. The only monsters she’d seen were humans with something to hide behind.
But by every dead god, she was starting to believe now.
Fie heard the dull clang of a pot overturned, a flap of a sleeping mat, strange wet leathery sighs, and above all, the