on the moon before the summer solstice, so that her people could seek the Covenant’s mercy for them.
She was reborn again, and they had begun to forget what it was to be gods, all of them.
By the third life, they called people like her witches.
By the hundredth, they called people like her Crows, for their black robes and the masks they wore if someone called for mercy. They still offered their teeth once a year, and now they called it Crow Moon.
Too many lives had passed when the ones gifted with fire stole her first bones from her grave, claiming the goddess of rebirth could not possibly belong to Crows who served death. They hid her in a well, so deep she would never be found. They called her the Mother of the Dawn. They called themselves Phoenixes.
They called her Ambra when the Covenant sent her among the fire-bearers to set it right. And that was when she began to fail.
She was invincible. She was vicious. She was a conqueror. She reveled in it: the ability to destroy anything she touched, the security in knowing that destruction could never strike back. She called herself a Phoenix, and the other Phoenixes called her the first queen. And when the Covenant sent its plague to collect her, she conquered it too.
Until it became clear that the Covenant would not forget her oath.
She saw crows in her dreams, every night. She saw them in her shadows. She saw them in looking glasses, in glassblack, in even the waters of her beloved lantern-lily pond.
She stayed in her palace, she banned the Merciful Crows from Dumosa. When Crow Moon came, for the first time, the Phoenixes kept their teeth.
And royal habits caught on.
The Covenant tried twice more, sending her as an heir to the throne so she could put it right, then sending her as a distant relative to spare her the temptation of the crown. But it could not be undone; the Phoenixes were fireproof, and they were forgetting what it meant to burn.
By the time the Covenant sent her back to her own, they called her Hellion, and she found it a colder world. Teeth were not given freely; they were kept for payment. Crows were not called to tend to every body, only to those struck with plague. The memory of their Birthright had trickled away with the last of the Phoenix teeth. Payment was scarce, and meager when it came, and so they took to the roads to find work where they could.
Life after life, she failed her oath. She had joined the Crows, but she had no crown to forsake. Life after life, Sabor grew crueler to her own, because it could. Without fire teeth, without the full weight of their Birthright, they had little to offer but a swift death, and little to threaten but mutual destruction.
And then, in a life where she was called Fie, a plague beacon lit over the royal palace and called her home.
* * *
Fie saw the nights they gathered teeth in Crow Moon. She saw Ambra on her tiger, laying waste to her foes. She saw twelve Crows holding twelve teeth, standing over a figure condemned with the Sinner’s Brand.
She saw what had been, she saw what could be, she had the bones of a dead god on her tongue, she had all her lives in her skull, she had the weight of Tavin dragging them to the bottom of the Well of Grace—to the bottom of her own grave—
She was the Eater of Bones. Mercy was her gift.
Covenant be damned, she was going to give it.
She didn’t have twelve Crows; she had herself. She didn’t have twelve teeth, but the dust of thousands of bones. And she had a boy who had told her it was enough.
Fie called the sparks from the water.
It was like calling the Money Dance at the gates, but so much worse: the answer was a cacophony, a primal scream that felt like it would tear her apart. Twelve songs from a thousand throats ripped through her skull. Fie couldn’t help but scream back, clutching her head—a metallic tang soured the water in her mouth, she was bleeding—Tavin slipped from her—
She’d promised him she wouldn’t let go. She’d come here to keep her oaths.
She let the sparks go, anchored her hand in Tavin’s as they sank, and called what she knew by heart: the bones of the Crows. One by one she worked in the Common Castes, the