of Surimir’s armies was personally ushering the crown prince—the one Rhusana had repeatedly tried to assassinate—back to his home, Fie reckoned the queen might be keeping a low profile.
“Why did you take the scroll?” Corporal Lakima asked.
Fie had a score of answers to that: Because it made her feel better about cutting the throat of a girl her own age. Because that scroll told the nobility they were always good, and told Fie she would always be a monster. Because no one in the fine Peacock manor behind them knew that in Crow story and song, the monsters usually wore silk.
“They would have burned it anyway,” Fie said instead. “This way I get to watch.”
Lakima coughed again. “Ah. Must be The Thousand Conquests.”
* * *
Fie shed her mask once the roughway led into the trees, but she kept her eyes nailed to the road, only glancing back every so often to be sure no spiteful mourner tailed them. Five years might be enough for the woods to reclaim the campsite where Hangdog’s kin had died, but Crows were raised with an eye to spot potential sleeping grounds, and Fie didn’t feel like laying hers on that sad clearing.
She didn’t feel like thinking much on Hangdog at all.
Fear had spurred him to turn traitor, that she knew. Fear of what lay down his road as a Crow chief, fear that it would end as the rest of his kin’s had. She couldn’t fault him for that.
But she could fault him for thinking treachery was his only way out.
Fie felt the flatway before she saw it. The air savored hotter and dustier, the roughway began to even out, and full sunlight stabbed more frequently through the green canopy overhead. Finally they emerged onto the broad, smooth dirt road. Pa and their two other Hawks were sheltering with the supply wagon on the other side of the flatway, in the shade of an ivy-choked hemlock.
Fie’s heart gave a familiar sort of pang when she saw Pa, as it had done many a time since he’d asked her to lead them to the Jawbone. Then she kenned the look on his face, and that pang wormed into a deeper worry.
It was a rare look. Fie remembered the last time she’d seen it, all too close, all too clear: when Pa had handed her the sword, the teeth, and the prince, and sent her and the lordlings over the bridge in Cheparok.
It said something had fouled up, and in a way they might not be able to outrun now.
“What is it?” Fie called, striding across the dirt road—but the moment she broke into the sun, she saw.
To her left, a black string of smoke frayed the horizon, half a league away. To her right, another black thread unspooled. Beyond them, even more black trails rose until they’d striped the noon sky like teeth in a giant’s comb.
Fie had seen such a sight only twice before, but she knew square what black beacons for leagues and leagues meant.
Even with Prince Jasimir’s armies nigh at her door, Rhusana had made her move.
The king was dead.
CHAPTER TWO
STOLEN
“Welcome to our roads, cousin.”
Fie cast a palmful of salt onto the pyre, then took a step back from the flames licking up the dead Peacock’s shroud and thought a quick prayer to the dead Crow goddess who claimed the plague-dead, the Eater of Bones. Most of Sabor believed the sinner girl would be born as a Crow in the next life, to atone for whatever she did that made the Covenant snatch her so swift from this one.
Fie didn’t know if that were true, but if it were, she sore hoped the girl would learn to be less of a hateful hag.
“Didn’t sound like you meant that welcome,” Pa said by her side.
The Thousand Conquests twisted in Fie’s other hand. She’d washed up with soap-shells and salt, yet firelight still painted her fingers red against the pale, crumpled parchment. “I don’t.”
“She’ll be a babe when she comes to us as a Crow,” Pa said.
“Better come to someone else’s band.”
“Fie.” Pa set a hand on her shoulder. “It changes naught.”
He didn’t mean the girl on the pyre.
“It’s the last day of Crow Moon and the king dies? They’ll put us at fault for it, Pa.”
Pa ran a hand over his beard. “And it’s been two moons since we were there. Anyone who faults us for it is just looking for something new to blame on Crows. Likely they’re already riding with the