Tavin flinched so swift Fie barely saw, but he nodded. “Understood.”
Whispers swept around the pavilion, but what rattled Fie most was the glimpse she saw of Jasimir’s glamoured face in his Sparrow disguise, standing just on the other side of the pavilion’s bronze lattice screens. He looked stricken. Khoda had his elbow in a pale-knuckled grip.
“My lady.” Tavin was offering his own elbow, stiff and grim.
“Your Highness.” Fie bowed again, took it, and let him lead her from the Midday Pavilion, into the west.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PLAYING THE FOOL
Tavin didn’t speak to her for an uncomfortable few minutes, pacing slowly down the sandstone walkway, her arm tucked into his. Fie didn’t know what awaited her, but from Jasimir’s face, it had to be something grotesque. Maybe it was a prison, or a scandalous exile from the palace grounds. Maybe something worse.
Fie dragged each breath in time with her steps, trying to steady her pounding heart. Rhusana would want her timid and trembling; Fie’d give no such satisfaction to her, nor to Tavin as her surrogate.
The silence swelled between them until a croak burst it like an overfilled water skin. Startled, Fie looked up.
Two crows perched on a nearby arbor shawled in purple wisteria. A third landed and cawed as she and Tavin drew closer.
Tavin’s brow furrowed at the sight.
“Are they not common in the south?” Fie asked after a moment. Her voice creaked from disuse. “Crows, that is.”
He blinked, almost as if he were startled to find her still there. “Not in the palace.”
Fie prodded the spark of Niemi’s tooth. If you ever wanted to flirt with a prince, now’s your chance.
The spark had kept its peace since Rhusana had cast them from the pavilion, no doubt seething that a Crow girl could tarnish her name so badly. The prospect of snaring a prince, though, was one too juicy for Niemi not to bite.
“I imagine there are much finer sights to see in the royal menagerie,” Niemi cooed through Fie. “Is it as marvelous as the rest of the grounds?”
“Well, it’s down a white tiger now,” Tavin muttered under his breath.
Fie felt her head tilt. “Is something amiss? I know I let myself get carried away earlier, but … we can still be friends, can’t we?”
She didn’t catch Tavin’s answer. A jolt had clutched her as they turned onto another pathway—the same strange, nameless dread that had clung to her in the hedge tunnels the night before, when she’d trailed him from the Hall of the Dawn. Every step seemed to send a clear, uncanny note through her bones until they hummed back.
Mercifully, if Tavin waited on a reply, he didn’t show it, marching stone-faced past another grand pavilion in shades of scarlet, violet, and orange—the Sunset Pavilion, no doubt. If he felt anything like the radiating tone of wrong, he didn’t show that, either. Instead he steered them closer to the royal quarters, which swelled up above them to provide a better view of the gardens. They passed an arch with a stone phoenix perching on skulls at its crest, marking a set of stairs that descended belowground, and instead climbed a flight of marble steps, emerging to a small plaza under the main veranda of the royal quarters.
That was when Fie saw it, less than a pace away.
It was as if the gods had simply punched out a great, perfect circle in the middle of the paving stones. Fie reckoned she could lie her entire band down in a head-to-foot line and still not touch both sides. Its walls were slick, unbroken glassblack, and the surface of the water could have been one more unmarred pane, still and black and seemingly bottomless. It lay too far below to touch—
Too far below to climb out.
And suddenly Fie knew, without words, that the horrible ring in her bones was coming from below the surface.
“I take it they don’t talk about the Well of Grace in the north,” Tavin said quietly.
She jumped, and his grip on her arm tightened. The edge was much too near for comfort. “N-no,” Fie stammered.
He was staring at the water. “It’s against the law, and the Hawk code, to raise a blade against royalty. So that rules out beheading. And Phoenixes can’t exactly die by fire. So this”—he waved his free hand at the waters—“is for when a Phoenix needs to be executed. The grace, you see, is the ordeal—fighting not to drown for as long as you can. It can take hours, even days. It’s supposed