broke through the fear and fury. Cold reckoning ratcheted through her head. The Pigeon courier would be back any moment with some ugly surprise. She couldn’t leave the sinner. Or Tavin. The sinner was dead. Tavin was—
Silent.
Jasimir stripped off Tavin’s mask. Blood trailed from the Hawk’s nose and shuttered eyes.
Terror sucked Fie’s cold reckoning under.
“He breathing?” Her own voice rang pitifully high and strangled in her ears.
Jasimir held a trembling hand over Tavin’s mouth, then nodded.
The flood ebbed. Still alive. She had to get them out.
“Flashburn,” she barked, pointing a bloody finger at her pack.
For once, the prince didn’t argue. Maybe he distrusted his voice as much as she’d doubted her own. He passed the jug to her without a word.
Fie gritted her teeth and turned her back on Tavin. She knelt by the dead sinner, forced her fingers into his mouth, and upturned the jug. Clear ooze slid over her knuckles and down the man’s throat, its bitter reek running roughshod through the air.
“Water.” She snatched up her stump of a sword, spun on a heel, and held her arms out to the prince. “Hands and blade.” He emptied a water skin over her palms and sword until the wet rags on her hands ran near clear.
Cloth scuffed over stone behind her—but neither Jasimir nor Tavin had moved. Where had the sound come from?
Another scrape gave her the dreadful answer.
Still alive. The Sparrow butcher was still alive.
His shriveled hand convulsed, the same shiny red-black as a strip of smoked pig. One bloodshot eye wandered to her broken blade.
“Crow,” he whined.
Fie’s throat closed. She knew what came next.
“Mercy.”
Not again, she couldn’t cut another throat again; only sinners could ask for mercy from Crows—that was the way of it, right? But perhaps the Covenant had sent her instead of waiting for the plague, and if she didn’t send them on it’d bring a hell down on their heads—
“Mercy,” the butcher begged.
“I’ll do it.”
Tavin groggily shoved himself up, blood smeared from cheek to jaw where he’d tried to wipe it off. The blood vessels in his eyes had burst, dyeing their whites bright as poppies.
“Don’t push yourself,” Jasimir protested.
Tavin ignored him, staggering to his feet with a spit-weight of his usual grace. For a moment he looked near ready to collapse again. Then he drew one short sword from a hip, and the weight of a hilt in his hand seemed to tip him into focus once more.
“I’ll do it,” he said again. His gaze reeled to the street leading to the sewer. “Oh. That’s a … problem.”
Fie followed his gaze, even as a hollow clatter on paving stone told her what she’d find. Greggur Tatterhelm rode for them, the Pigeon courier pointing the way.
She’d been right about the sinner.
Tavin had been right about the trap.
A bell pealed. No, not a bell—the scraping toll came from Tavin’s blade. The Sparrow gaped at the sky, any last dregs of life emptying from his eyes. The Hawk had dealt mercy for her.
Tatterhelm was nearly upon them.
But she still had a sinner to burn—still had a duty to the Covenant—
She still had an oath to keep. And to keep it, she needed to get them out.
Then Fie saw the flashburn sheen spreading across the sewage. It had leaked from the red split in the dead man’s throat.
She pried a Phoenix tooth from her string. It lit in her hands, burning away the rag in a flash of steam as she bolted for Tavin.
Tatterhelm was only paces away, sword raised.
Fie hurled the tooth toward the dead sinner, feeding the strength of her own bones to that hungry spark, then threw herself at Tavin. He fell beneath her with a startled wheeze.
White flames blasted from the channel with a fluty, ear-shattering howl.
The fires clawed at the sky, rolling past the sewer’s walls to lick at the city’s stones. Tatterhelm’s horse screamed and danced back, and a cry rose from the market as thatch roofs caught sparks.
Fie held fast to the tooth-spark of Phoenix Birthright, reminding the flames who had called them forth, and breaking them round her and Tavin as best she could. Bright yolk-gold plumes of Phoenix fire roared from the sinner’s charring corpse as Fie’s eyes watered again. A poorer pyre than the sinner deserved, but if it burned hot enough, it would do.
They only had a few moments before the flashburn ran out and Tatterhelm blocked their way once more. “The gate,” she cried to Jasimir, who stood unbothered by the fire. “Go!”