her. She couldn’t tell who had been who, arms twined about each other to the last, only that they looked to be long past breathing. A quick press of her finger to each of their teeth confirmed it. Sparks from a living person’s teeth would nigh roar in her bones, but these teeth barely sighed at her touch.
Something about the dead Hawk coiled with a dead lover made her furious.
Something about it made her think of Tavin.
Fie stood, breath coming quicker in a warm, sickly rush of mint. For a long moment she wished she’d stuck around to watch Ruffian cut the arbiter’s throat.
“Chief.”
Fie looked up to see Bawd floating down the stairs with a fine-woven red robe laid over her crowsilk cloak, twirling an ornate parasol.
“I’m the prettiest girl at the dance,” Bawd cooed as she draped her dainty self against the wall. It didn’t hold, crumbling round her elbow in a small shower of rotting wood. “Oops.”
Fie couldn’t help but snort. “I don’t know that red’s your color.”
“Right you are.” Bawd hung the robe off a tilting spear. “Always did fancy that Gull blue, though.”
Fie marked a ring on the door with her chalk. “Rather think you fancied just the trousers. No one else in the loft?”
“Not a soul.”
“Then let’s be off.” Fie glanced back, then shook her head, glad the mask hid her reluctant grin. “The parasol stays, Bawd.”
“You’re no fun,” Bawd grumbled. She stuck it in the spear rack, which promptly fell apart.
They left the next house with less cheer, fresh blood on Fie’s hands this time. By then, near every house in sight had been marked with rings or cross marks of chalk.
Fie didn’t have to tally many of the cross marks to know she had more mercy to deal today than ever before. She’d known, really, since they’d said five-score people had been left to rot in Karostei. She’d just not let herself think on it too long.
Steady. She was a chief. She was a Crow. This was part of her road.
Fie shook blood off her blade and headed to the next door.
At the third house, Bawd’s jokes dried up when a thin, gurgling voice inside cried, “Mama?”
At the fifth house, Fie handed her mask off to Bawd, too belly-sick for even the mint to help.
By the seventh, she’d stopped cleaning the Hawk sword afterward.
By the thirteenth, she’d no use for a mask anyway; the smell of blood had overrun the stench of the plague.
The rest of her band were waiting for her, passing water skins about, when she finally trudged back to the well. Their masks hung loose, a grudging concession to the cruel noon sun, which had conquered even the dreadful reek of dead and sick. It was an odd comfort to see the three bodies at the gate had been laid out on a proper pyre in the middle of the commons. It was a colder comfort to see the Crane arbiter lying beside them.
Wretch took one look at Fie’s hands, near black with blood now, and hauled up water with one of the few pails still intact. No one spoke to her, only patted her back or squeezed her shoulder, a mercy Fie was all the more grateful to let someone else deal.
Ruffian returned as Fie was scrubbing up. “Smart, that. If the blood dries, your rags turn stiff enough to chafe. Now your mercy’s done, half your band will go through the houses again for aught that’ll serve for kindling, and the other half will pile that and firewood between each house. One or two ought to take flashburn and splash the walls and the heaps, help the fire spread fast when it catches.”
Wretch stood. “Aye, we can manage that, chief. Spell yourself a bit.”
Fie nodded, wordless. She felt like she might be sick.
Ruffian studied her a moment. “Mind if I rinse off, too?”
“Go ahead,” Fie said dully as her band split off. She pulled her arms out of the pail and let them drip pink water on the dirt. This hot out, they’d dry fast enough.
Ruffian sat on the edge of the well, letting his mask fall to the dirt, and splashed his rag-wrapped hands. “Always hard when the Eater of Bones takes her due, but most ash harvests aren’t this big,” he told her. He didn’t have Pa’s way of talking to her, as if she should be at study; instead he sounded like a merchant passing a fellow trader a warning of stormy seas. “Only once