done, everything you said about my father … why do you still care about saving him?”
“I don’t.” She tilted her head back, letting her eyes close just a moment. If ever Fie had felt like mincing her words, it wasn’t now. “He’s been a bad king to me, and he doesn’t sound like all that good of a father to you. But it gets worse if Rhusana takes his place. And I can’t save any of them alone. Not Tavin, not my kin, not even the king. Not without the master-general’s help.”
“Aunt Draga will get your family back,” Jasimir said. “She already has to rescue Tavin, since they’re blood relatives. The master-general will follow the Hawk code.”
Part of her dared to hope he was right. The rest of her called it foolishness. She couldn’t think on which one hurt more. Instead she said, “I’ll take watch.”
“We should split it.” Jasimir sat upright.
She shook her head. “If the Oleanders come round, I’ll need to set off Sparrow teeth soon as I can.”
Jasimir rubbed his face. “Then I’ll help you stay awake. We can take turns sleeping around dawn.”
If Fie was too tired to argue with that, then she needed the help. “Do what you like,” she sighed.
The night returned to quiet, broken only by muffled lowing of cattle and the iron toll of slaughter bells.
One of Fie’s untamable questions broke loose: “Why didn’t you go with the Oleanders?”
Jasimir didn’t answer for so long, she wondered if he’d fallen asleep anyhow. “I had a tutor,” he said at last. “A scholar on the ethics of ruling—everything I need to weigh when I make decisions for the good of the kingdom. She’s written dozens of scrolls on political power and rulers who succeeded and rulers who failed. There’s a wing in the royal library named for her. She was one of my mother’s best friends before … before.”
He blinked, as if searching the stars for answers to a question he couldn’t ask aloud yet.
“She said exactly what you did. That people pay me, in loyalty and in blood and in coin, because if enough people do, then I can repay them by making their lives better as their king. But…” He shook his head. “She didn’t say anything about the Crows. Not that the nation would collapse without you. Not how the other castes prey on you anyway. Her life’s work is the architecture of countries. She—she has to know. But she didn’t even talk about it once.” He swallowed. “There’s … no real reason for me not to know, is there?”
“No,” Fie said quiet. “There isn’t.”
He buried his face in his hands again. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “The most powerful people in the kingdom can’t even say the problem is real.”
“They know it is,” Fie said grimly, scanning the dark for torches. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be so hell-bent on pretending it isn’t.”
“I don’t know how to fix it.”
And I don’t think we can.
Fie’s eyes burned. “Tavin said that, too,” she said, hoarse. “You can’t fix it, not everywhere and not all at once. But you can begin by keeping the oath. By telling the Splendid Castes and Hunting Castes that we’re part of Sabor.”
“I hate it,” Jasimir admitted. “I hate being the heir. Nothing can ever be simple or easy. Most of the time it just feels like … like choosing which finger to cut off that day.” He glanced over at her and sighed. “And here I am whining about hard choices to the girl whose family is being held hostage by my enemies.”
Fie laughed.
It was not a happy laugh.
But nor was it an angry one this time.
“Now you’re catching on,” she said wearily.
Iron bells clanked soft across the pasture. A thin cloud smeared the moonlight across the sky. A rider passed down the distant road, and both of them held their breath, listening for the whistle of skin-ghasts, until the hoofbeats faded.
“I’m sorry,” Jasimir said. “I thought … I thought I knew who I had to be, to deserve the crown. But all that’s done is brought you pain.”
Before Fie could answer, a flicker of torchlight kindled in the woods at pasture’s edge. She and Jasimir both went still, then shrank into the hay. A Sparrow tooth sparked to life.
A woman strode out of the trees, flanked by two hollow-eyed skin-ghasts. Her linen cloak flapped like the skin-ghasts’ lank arms as she swept her torch about; the skin-ghasts’ empty faces followed that flame.