With three bands, this ought to be sorted before noon. We’ll need firewood, flashburn, and chalk.” At Jade’s signal, her own Crows began carrying loads of firewood to the gate, and Fie signaled for her Crows to follow suit. “We’ll split all our Crows into pairs to check every house,” Jade continued. “They mark a cross on the door for any still living, a ring if everyone’s dead or the house is empty. We’ll be following them to deal mercy, then leave the door open to show we’ve passed. Once we’re sure there’re none alive, the town burns, but we start with mercy. How’s your stock of teeth?”
Fie’s face ran hotter under the climbing sun. She tried not to let her shame show as she pinched at her string. “This is all. My bag was stolen this morning.”
Ruffian let out a laugh of disbelief. “Dena’s wrath, and you still answered the beacon? Aye, you’re Cur’s kin to be sure.”
“No doubt,” Jade said. “Do you know who took them?”
Fie gave an awkward shrug. “We found a band catching trouble last night for leaving Karostei. Their chief saw me run off Oleanders with Phoenix teeth and asked for some. I gave him six and told him I left more at Gen-Mara’s groves, but…”
I wasn’t enough.
Jade and Ruffian traded looks, and Jade’s lip curled. “Drudge.”
Ruffian shook his head. “He’d cut our throats to look after his band. Can’t fault him for it, but two-second clever doesn’t last. Here.” He started digging in his own bag. “We can spare enough to get you to a shrine.”
Jade slung a leather knapsack round to her front to rummage through as well, but she peered up at Fie through a curtain of gray-shot hair. “I have to ask. You’ve Hawks, and you had enough Phoenix teeth to be loose with them. Are you the one who’s got the queen so riled up?”
Fie’s mouth twisted. She stared at the dirt. “Aye—but—the queen’s got the Oleanders at her back. If she reaches the throne, they ride as they please. My band got the prince away from her, and I got him to his aunt, in trade for his Covenant oath that when he takes the throne … we all get Hawks.”
Ruffian sucked in a breath. “Truly?”
“Aye.” Fie braced for a scolding like the ones Little Witness and Drudge had handed her.
Instead Jade’s hand thrust into her line of sight, filled with teeth. “Now that’s a grand thing. Can’t say I hate having a prince owe us a favor.”
“No wonder the queen’s proper crossed,” Ruffian chuckled, passing another fistful of teeth to Fie. “Good for you, giving her throne a rattle. Wager it won’t be the last time you do.”
“Thanks.” Fie reached for her own bag to stow the teeth—and remembered where it had gone. There was a small pouch for her flint at her belt. She stuffed the teeth into that, feeling all the more humbled for how readily Ruffian and Jade had handed them off.
Jade wound her hair into a knot with a twist of rag and nodded to Ruffian and Fie. “Ready?” At their ayes, she twisted about to cry to her band, “Masks on!”
“Masks on,” Fie echoed, as did Ruffian. Leather and wooden struts creaked about them in a grim ballad.
“Chief.” Lakima caught her as she fetched their chalk from the wagon. Her voice lowered. “The civilians are bound to ask—can any of it be saved?”
Fie looked to the fields and found townspeople staring, bleak, at their homes about to go up in smoke. She’d seen loss before, loss and guilt and rage in a sinner’s family, but this was different.
This was familiar.
She’d left Pa behind. She’d lost the only teeth to ever make her feel truly dangerous. Even before then, she’d split from her kin, from her roads, from her ways, all for the sake of the oath.
This time, she knew what it was to lose nigh everything that made you safe.
Yet all Fie could do was shake her head. “It’s reached the walls. Everything has to burn.”
“Maybe they’ll remember this when they pick the next arbiter,” Khoda said, bitter.
“More likely one’s assigned.” Wretch’s voice turned muffled as she strapped on her mask. “Town’s under a thousand, aye? The governor of the region picks the arbiters for them when they’re that small.”
So the townspeople had had no say in the arbiter with a hundred deaths on his head.
And so Fie said to the corporal, “If it helps the townsfolk, tell them when they see the