out. The loyal Hawks are still trying to keep the peace, but they can only do so much.”
The figure at the end of the crypt let out a rattling cough.
Jasimir’s eyes near bugged out of his head. “Twelve hells, is it still alive?”
“Aye.” Fie drew the chief’s sword from her belt. “I’ll handle it.”
Tavin and Jasimir followed her as she walked to the sinner. The closer she got, though, the clearer it became: this was not one of the people Rhusana had crammed into the catacombs, their arms barely mottled with the Sinner’s Brand.
This man’s skin was so ruined with sores, with the Brand, that everywhere she looked was dried black blood and weeping red along ridges of ribs. His fingernails had withered to half moons of gray, the flesh of his hands gnarled and black; his feet were the same. From the smell, he’d fouled himself, and crusts of long-dry sick streaked down the sides of the stone slab he lay on.
There was something sickeningly familiar about the cut of the man’s face, despite his sunken cheeks and bloodstained mouth.
Tavin stiffened at Fie’s side, but Jasimir was the one to put a name to the wreckage before them:
“Father?”
Rhusana’s lie hadn’t been that King Surimir had been claimed by the Sinner’s Plague.
Her lie had been that it killed him.
Surimir’s eyes opened, wandered, closed again, little left but gray cataracts and burst veins. Fie didn’t think he knew they were there. If the Covenant had any mercy at all, he would be too lost in delirium to feel the plague’s ravages.
Then again, if the Covenant had any mercy for the king, he would have died in Crow Moon.
“How long has it…” Fie trailed off, counting the days. “Three weeks since they lit the beacons for his death. He’s been down here at least that long.” The chief’s broken sword shook in her grasp. “This is all wrong. The Covenant doesn’t…”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
“Why wouldn’t it kill him? Why drag it out like this?” Tavin stared at the king’s shivering, fevered form.
“Because,” Jasimir said, in awe, in despair, in revelation, “it wanted people to see.” He didn’t look away. “That’s what the plague really is, isn’t it? A reminder that no one can … can be like him, treat people the way he treated them, and get away with it forever. Not even a king.”
Fie found Tavin’s hand again, belly-sick. “Rhusana knew that if he died, it would spread. So she tried to hide him where it couldn’t reach her, but the Covenant spread it anyway.”
She watched Surimir’s chest rise and fall in shudders.
Near a whole moon he’d been down here in the dark, slowly burning. Only the Covenant could keep him alive this long.
It was speaking to them now, as clear as the crows flocking to the palace, as clear as the Sinner’s Brand creeping through even the highest castes.
It was in the way the Peacocks had watched the queen beat a man bloody without so much as a cross word, then let her savage the one who spoke up. It was in the way the Hawks, sworn to serve the nation first, bowed to a queen who served no one.
It was in the monument to a slow and terrifying death that sat above their heads even now, with centuries of bones at its heart. It was in every inch of the palace, its golden feathers, its cruel-cut iron, the games it played, the ashes from which it rose. It was in the way Khoda and his Black Swans seemed to think they could trade one Phoenix for another like changing sandals, and that alone would be enough to put the country right.
It was a palace built to remind people that only Phoenixes were fireproof. It was built to demand tribute from the rest of Sabor. It was built to make every other caste hunger for scraps of that gold, that power, that fire; to make them swear their lives for just a taste.
Fie was Ambra reborn, by rights the Queen of Day and Night, by rights the heir to the throne, by rights the owner of the crown on Rhusana’s head.
But if the Covenant had meant for her to save all this, to set things to rights as a queen, it could have sent her as a Phoenix.
Instead, it sent a Crow.
This is a gift, Little Witness had said, something to remember. You are not what you were.
Fie knew what she had to do.
“All those people with