to find a balance; it felt like listening to two different conversations at once and following neither.
Then, suddenly, they settled into harmony. No, not quite harmony … alliance. The teeth sang in her bones as two separate songs, uneasy but aligned for now. Glimpses of Niemi’s memories flared in her mind bright and sharp: a thousand conversations she had performed like a surgeon, slicing with backhanded compliments, stitching feigned sympathy, winching a tourniquet of rumor.
Tavin was asking her something. She blinked up at him, trying to focus. “S-so sorry, Your Highness, I was distracted by”—Fie waved a hand vaguely at a passing marble sculpture—“that statue. It’s quite…” It appeared to be a Phoenix queen stepping on a pile of dead invaders. “… lifelike.”
Tavin ran a hand over his mouth. Even with Jasimir’s features, the expression was wholly his own: she’d managed to sell herself to him as a fool, one who was only mildly amusing. “The Phoenix heritage is a glorious one,” he said, bland.
It was what he’d given her caste up for. Fie bit her tongue on that, but the curl of wrath went nowhere, searing up her spine.
The voice of Niemi rang in her head, borne louder and stronger now on the strains of Owl memory-song. You can still make him bleed for it, little fool. You know his every wound.
That she did. Besides, her head swam with the seasick feeling of burning dissonant teeth. She needed Tavin distracted before her fool act gave way.
And she didn’t need steel to make him suffer. “It must be terrible, losing your father like that. He was such a wonderful king.”
Tavin’s left fist curled, his Peacock glamour hiding the burn scars King Surimir had left.
“We all miss him,” Tavin said through his teeth.
She wasn’t done with him, not by a league. Not when she had mere weeks to save her kin from the death he’d chosen for them. “And the queen is also being crowned? Will you be consorts?”
He looked like he’d stepped in surprise dung, and nearly ran into a line of servants bearing perfumed garlands toward the Hall of the Dawn.
“No,” Tavin said quickly, “no. We will both rule, and both be free to find our own consorts. Come on, this is a shortcut.” He stepped off the walkway, leading them through hedges trimmed into tigers, phoenixes, gods; they passed grand lapis lazuli–encrusted fountains and beds of sunrise glory blossoms tentatively unfurling in the morning glow. The Owl tooth hummed steady in her bones, charting it all for her.
Part of her despised it, for every time she remembered this garden, she would be drawn back to Tavin once more.
A heady perfume flooded Fie’s nose, and a moment later, they strolled through a pristine archway into a grove of amber-pod trees wreathing an empty pavilion. Branches dangled like garlands, thick with waxy leaves and clusters of translucent gold petals. Some were painstakingly woven into the roof of the pavilion to make a ceiling of shimmering blooms.
“Here we are. You’ll be at the ceremony tonight?” Tavin unwound his arm from hers.
Fie tried to ignore how her side felt cold for his absence. “Ay—yes.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for you, Lady Sakar.” He caught her hand, bowed again, and brushed his lips to her knuckles.
She froze.
Tavin straightened, smiled, and slipped through the archway without another word.
All her teeth dropped from her command, cold and silent. The glamour vanished, the song died, and she was no longer a makeshift duchess but one more nameless Sparrow servant. A false one at that.
The amber-pods swayed before her, but it took a wave of belly-sickness to ken why. She sat hard on one of the pavilion’s stone benches, the chill of the carved granite creeping through her linen trousers. Barf emerged from the shrubbery a moment later and leapt up to curl beside her, grooming a forepaw as Fie rested her head between her knees.
She’d gone light-headed when she’d first learned to call three teeth at once, so of course calling two different Birthrights would turn her belly. It wasn’t quite alike; calling three of the same teeth felt like the difference between spotting a ship at sea and viewing it through a spyglass, if she were the spyglass. Balancing two different Birthrights at once, though …
They didn’t swell or howl or rattle her bones. They made her balance them like cogs in a great machine, finding just the way to turn one so it moved the other. But there was a curious strength in it: