Fie laughed.
It was not a happy laugh.
But nor was it an angry one this time.
“Now you’re catching on,” she said wearily.
Iron bells clanked soft across the pasture. A thin cloud smeared the moonlight across the sky. A rider passed down the distant road, and both of them held their breath, listening for the whistle of skin-ghasts, until the hoofbeats faded.
“I’m sorry,” Jasimir said. “I thought… I thought I knew who I had to be, to deserve the crown. But all that’s done is brought you pain.”
Before Fie could answer, a flicker of torchlight kindled in the woods at pasture’s edge. She and Jasimir both went still, then shrank into the hay. A Sparrow tooth sparked to life.
A woman strode out of the trees, flanked by two hollow-eyed skin-ghasts. Her linen cloak flapped like the skin-ghasts’ lank arms as she swept her torch about; the skin-ghasts’ empty faces followed that flame.
The Oleander woman’s gaze passed over the hay heaps. She took a few steps closer.
Please, Fie begged the Sparrow tooth, the dead gods, the Covenant, aught that was listening. She was so, so tired of monsters at her door.Please, just let her pass.
A goat grazing nearby raised its head and bleated, the slaughter bell clanking at its throat. Another goat joined in.
The woman hesitated, then turned back to the woods. Soon enough the shadows swallowed her and the skin-ghasts both.
Fie let the Sparrow tooth go, eyes blearing. A long, long watch lay ahead. But at least she wasn’t keeping it alone.
“I… owe you another apology,” Jasimir said, twisting straw round his fingers. “You were right. I thought all Tavin saw in you was company in his bed. I thought that was all he could possibly want with… with a Crow. But you were more.”
The stars above blurred and burned with tears. Fie squeezed her eyes shut again.
“He looked at you the same way you look at roads.” Jasimir’s voice cracked. “Like where they go frightens you, and you love them for it.”
“Tavin told me you’d be a good king.” Fie’s voice stayed rough and low. “He believed it enough to give himself up. So maybe you earned the crown after all.”
Jasimir attempted a wan smile. “You can’t start being nice to me. It’s terrifying.”
Maybe they could make it like this. Fie didn’t want to let herself hope, but she hadn’t wanted to get attached to a mouthy Hawk, and that hadn’t square worked out, either.
Maybe they could make it to Trikovoi and get her kin back, get her Hawk back, save the Crows.
Maybe they could change Sabor.
“You get Nice Fie until sunrise,” she told the prince. “Then I am never letting you forget that you barfed on a corpse.”
The moon hung at an hour past midnight.
“Was your ma like the master-general?” Fie scraped the question from the exhausted fog in her skull.
Jasimir hesitated. “She… she was and she wasn’t. The army called her and Aunt Draga the Twin Talons for a reason, but in private, they were very different. Mother had more of a mind for diplomacy and court games. She could ruin anyone in one breath if they crossed her. Most of court quickly figured out not to.” His voice hitched. “Fie, I think—I think Rhusana murdered my mother.”
Fie straightened. “What?How?”
“Father uses Swan pavilions to host smaller events of state. He started going to Rhusana’s more and more one summer, then bringing her to the palace itself, and then by winter solstice…”
Fie remembered that day in cold Hawk Moon, when every beacon in Sabor lit up in black smoke. “What happened?”
“The doctor said Mother was ill, but they wouldn’t let anyone see her until… until the pyre. There were marks all over her throat, I saw them. And two moons after they burned her, we had a new queen.”
“So Rhusana poisoned her?”
