“Remember,” he told them, trying to ignore the tabby rolling gleefully on his sandals, “you say you’re there to assess the issue that needs repair. If anyone asks, show them the signed request. If a Hawk or Peacock tells you to clear out…”
“Aye, you don’t need to tell me,” Fie said around a mouthful of stale roll. “We’ll clear out.”
Ebrim gave her a meaningful look. “Yes. And you’ll do it with a bow and an apology.”
Fie swallowed with a grimace. “Yes.”
They tried to leave Barf shut in the room while they slipped down the dark, silent hall; most servants wouldn’t be up for another half hour. However, they had not planned for her squeezing through the bars on the window, and they had no more than set foot out the door when she trotted up, chirping. Khoda swore under his breath.
“Pa said she’s lucky,” Fie said with a shrug. “And I’ve only three Pigeon witch-teeth, so we’ll need what we can get.”
They hurried first to the archives, where several large closets had been cleared out in a mostly empty tower. The Hawks on guard let them in with a yawn, and Barf entertained herself terrorizing the local rodent population, but their “assessment” only turned up the tax records for provincial grain farmers of a hundred years ago.
The next room was in a corner of an unused cellar near the icehouse on the other side of the palace grounds … or at least, that’s where Fie thought it to be. Khoda was the one who knew the palace’s layout.
The sun hadn’t quite climbed over the horizon, and by the easing gloom, all the buildings looked like coiling limbs of the same terrible creature, with their scaly tiled domes, fans of golden feathered trim, and spines of arched windows. The dreadful hum of dead Phoenix gods simmered beneath her soles like a drawn-out pulse.
Somewhere in this gilded beast was Tavin. Somewhere was Rhusana. Would they come to Fie, or would she have to carve them out herself?
She could only hope to end this all before she had any need to learn her way around the palace’s tripes.
They had just strolled past a row of columns, each large as one of Gen-Mara’s magnolias, when a shout echoed from the open walkway behind them. “You there! Sparrow!”
Fie caught her breath and turned. Twenty paces away, a Peacock lord was beckoning them, looking peevish.
“Keep looking,” Khoda muttered in a rush, shoving the repair request slips at her, “and use Viimo.” Then he shouted, “Right away, m’lord!” and jogged off before Fie could so much as squeak a protest. All she could do was watch him walk away with the Peacock lord, bowing intermittently, until they vanished round a corner.
For a moment, Fie couldn’t breathe.
She was alone in the home of her enemies. She didn’t know where she was going. She didn’t know how to get back to Ebrim’s office. She didn’t dare ask for help.
If she froze much longer, a Hawk patrol was bound to notice, and then it’d all be over.
Pa would know what to do. Fie’s hand crept toward his tooth—then dropped. It was too soon to burn it already. She had other teeth. And that had been all she’d needed before.
The rhythmic stomps of a patrol caught at the edge of her hearing. Fie reached for her Sparrow witch-tooth, then paused. The invisibility would only last so long, and unless she knew where to go, she could burn that tooth clean out and never find Jasimir.
Instead, she chose the Pigeon witch-tooth.
Pa had never given her a Pigeon witch’s tooth to use before now; he’d only had her practice burning two plain Pigeon teeth at once and tweaking fortune in small ways. The footsteps drew nearer. She ducked into an alcove, fishing under her shirt to pry the tooth free. If she was to call on one now, she’d do it proper.
The tooth keened as Fie rolled it between her palms, the spark popping free like a cork. She blinked. Abruptly, the world shifted, unshifted, and rattled with potential.
Naught looked different; naught looked the same. She could hear, see, taste the currents of fortune: a whorl of bad luck on the walkway where Khoda had been called away, a bloom of good fortune unfurling around her. The footsteps of the Hawk patrol stopped.
“Tell you what, soldiers.” The voice seeped out from beyond a nearby gate. “If we leave now, we can beat Unit Seventeen for breakfast.” A