identical as they could manage. So far they’d managed to fool Lakima thrice and the rest of the Hawks no fewer than seven times.
Varlet twirled a curl round a finger. “Must say, chief, I’m flattered you picked us to come along. Downright optimistic of you, even.”
“You two have survived this long, despite your best efforts,” Fie said. There was no mystery to why she wanted extra hands on a shrine visit: Little Witness’s watchtower was one of the three great shrines to dead Crow gods, and as such, they didn’t dare lose sight of the way in. Someone in every band always needed to know how to find it. “Figured if anyone’s safe to keep the way known for a while yet, it’s you.”
“No doubt Varlet will put that to the test,” Bawd drawled. “Cur, where do you reckon the keeper will send you?”
Pa scratched at his bald crown. He was more nervous about this than Fie’d realized. “They send witches to their own shrines, or so my old chief told me. We’ll see.”
A chill ran down Fie’s spine at that. Pa believed, as many did, that when the thousand gods died, they were born again as witches to lead the castes they’d founded. Fie had spent too much time tripping over her own feet to really believe she’d once been a god, though.
And the uneasy truth was that thinking on it felt like standing at the shores of an ocean on a moonless night—something terrible, vast, and unseen roaring before her, waiting to swallow her whole the moment she stepped beyond solid ground.
They soon left the dirt road for a worn footpath that wound through narrow black pines and hassocks of sharp-bladed grass, forking again and again. “Downhill,” Pa told the other three. “Always take the downhill branch.” Eventually it spilled them out into a cove walled round by basalt cliffs.
Fie knew the moment her sandal touched beach that they had reached Little Witness’s grave. Charcoal fragments still freckled the paler bands of sand, remnants of bonfires from the first night of Crow Moon, and even without that giveaway, the rumble of bone magic beneath her feet was all too familiar to miss. Pa strode toward a great mound of boulders crusted over with glistening black mussels, near buried in the white froth of crashing waves. As Fie followed him up onto the rock, the answering hum in her own bones swelled to a muffled roar.
Pa reached the edge of the boulders, then stepped off. By all rights, he ought to have dropped straight into the churning surf below, to be hammered to a pulp between the waves and the basalt.
Instead, he vanished.
“So that’s how you hide a watchtower,” Varlet said.
Fie made herself walk off the rocks as well. As expected, her foot met solid stone, and in a breath she’d broken through the walls of magic shrouding the shrine. Where water had rushed below, now more basalt rose to form the base of Little Witness’s tower.
Unlike the shabby towers bristling along the waters of the Jawbone, this one boasted of eight sides instead of four, standing taller, sturdier, and older than any of the governor’s ruins. The sea had gnawed away much of the watchtower’s ancient embellishments, but the most unsettling survivors were the bricks jutting out from each corner. They’d been stacked so that every other brick protruded, but saltwater and storm had worn them down to rounded shells, and they now looked like eight unfathomably long spines stretching to the tower’s rooftop. Windows cut into eight-pointed stars pocked the surface, letting light in but betraying naught.
Fie reckoned she could see straight to Dumosa from that roof. As a god, Little Witness had taken the form of a beggar girl who saw everyone’s misdeeds and recounted them for the Covenant’s judgment. Likely she’d also need a watchtower like this to do it from. If Little Witness really had started recounting the misdeeds of Dumosa, it was no wonder she’d died before she could ever leave.
A groan made Fie jump. The iron door at the base of the tower had split diagonally, the two halves sliding away, behind the walls. In the entryway stood a little girl, no more than seven, barefoot and clad only in an overlarge shift of black crowsilk. Her hair had been tied back with a careless hand, dark strands falling about her round brown face, and two black eyes burned straight into Fie.
Pa cleared his throat. “Cousin, we’re here to see the keep—”
The