know what happens when they attack Crows in the open.” Fie pointed to a vale on the map near Trikovoi. The lone Crow mark there said “ashes.” “There was a village here once. They decided the chief asked too much for viatik and cut down her husband and child. The band carried word out, and next time that village lit a plague beacon, no one answered until after the whole valley rotted. Saw it burn myself. Any town that lends Tatterhelm their plague beacon knows they’ll meet the same.”
Tavin stood, arms crossed. “He may not give them much of a choice in the matter.”
“I still have to answer,” she fired back. “It’s my duty. I don’t get to only do it when it’s easy, any more than you get to guard the prince only when he’s safe. And if you think the rest of the region won’t lash out at Crows for a shirked beacon—”
“I won’t risk thousands of lives to the plague,” Jasimir said, abrupt. “She’s right. Besides, we need more supplies or we’ll never last in the mountains. The only way we’ll get them is the viatik.”
“Easier to say when your caste hasn’t caught the plague since Ambra,” Tavin grumbled. “But fine, I’m outvoted.”
“I’ll handle the body.” The hilt of Pa’s broken sword prodded Fie in the side. “All you two need to do is hope it’s not Gerbanyar.”
* * *
“I suppose I could have hoped harder,” Tavin admitted the next morning.
A black serpent of smoke writhed into the sky above, whelped from the signal post of Gerbanyar.
“Masks on,” Fie ordered, unhitching hers from her pack. “From here on out, keep your mouths shut and your eyes sharp, ken me?”
Tavin glanced sidelong at her. It was one of his many-sided looks, saying we’re walking into trouble, saying none of us are ready, saying none of us can walk away.
But what won this time was “Yes, chief.”
Fie strode to the post and rang the bell. The Hawk guard leaned out from the platform long enough to give her a curt nod. A whistle pierced the air as the plague beacon sputtered out.
A man strolled through the gate in Gerbanyar’s plain stone wall. He matched his city well enough: his face was the grayish sort of brown, and the painted stripes of his hide vest matched the stripes of granite and basalt stacked into nearby house walls. Those stripes marked him for a Pigeon and a courier; the twitch of his gaze marked him for a man Fie wouldn’t trust at her back anytime soon.
“This way,” he announced, a smirk tugging at his lips.
For a moment, Fie couldn’t make her feet work. It reeked of a trap.
“Right behind you,” Tavin said under his breath.
“I said mouths shut,” she mumbled, and headed for the gate.
The Pigeon courier led them down the main road, where mismatched stones sank into usurping moss. Gerbanyar was nowhere near as large as Cheparok, and though it too spilled across a hillside, the gray stack-stone houses jutted up as they pleased.
But the messenger’s path didn’t curve toward the houses. Instead, he took them past an open market, where merchants laid one hand on the purses at their belts; past pens of goats and chickens and cattle and the flint-faced shepherds who stopped to watch; and at last toward a stone-lined channel at the lowest ground within Gerbanyar’s walls.
Fie’s gut sank. “You scummed the sinner,” she said flatly.
“You took too long getting here.” The courier no longer bothered hiding his smirk. “So we took matters into our own hands.”
She strode over to the channel’s edge. Gutter-mouths punctured the rim of a far wall, their contents plopping into murky water padded in yellow algae. Scant paces below Fie, fetid waters lapped sleepily at the breast of a man lying in the waste.
The marks of the Sinner’s Plague burned clear enough on him: lips dark with bloody tracks, skin bruised with the Sinner’s Brand, eyes pasted shut in crusts. Flies clotted his air, crawling in and out of a mouth agape. A dirty sleeping mat carpeted the rough hewn steps nearby. Fie wondered if the sinner had started on the mat and rolled into the cesspool in his fever dreams, or if the scummers had tossed him in, mat and all, not caring where either landed.
Sometimes sinners got scummed because they’d earned their plague at their neighbors’ expense, and those trespasses had come home to roost. And sometimes sinners got scummed because their neighbors wanted Crows to wade around in