“I don’t know.” Jasimir stared into the cold night. “No. I do. I just don’t know how she did it. I… I haven’t told anyone. Not even Tavin.” Jasimir shivered. “Maybe I should have sooner, but… he would have thought I was… weak for doing nothing.”
“Tavin or your father?”
His mouth twisted, bitter. “Both.”
Almost daybreak. Fie wasn’t awake, not truly, just staring into the hazy dark.
Jasimir’s mouth moved, forming words scarce above a whisper. He’d muttered the chant to himself enough times that Fie had lost count. “… I will not run from my fear,” he mumbled. “I will not forsake my blood. I will not dishonor my dead. By my steel, I swear.”
It wasn’t a watch-hymn, but Fie supposed the pretty words of the Hawk code worked near as good.
“I will follow until I must lead. I will shield until I must strike. I will fight until I must heal. By my nation, I swear.”
Another pinprick of torchlight pierced the night. Jasimir jostled her elbow.
They watched it bob and weave through the woods, finally fading from sight.
Jasimir started up again: “I will serve my nation and the throne above all,” he recited. “I will not dishonor my blood, my nation, or my steel. And I will not abide a Hawk who does. By my blood, I swear.”
Pretty words. Words of a prince.
At the eastern horizon, the weight of the night began to ease.
The dawn broke.
When Jasimir told Fie to sleep, she didn’t fight, curling in the hay. She woke with the sun square in her eyes a few hours later. Not near enough rest, but it’d tide her over.
They split more dried fruit, shook off the straw, and staggered to their feet.
“Here.” Jasimir held out Tavin’s sword.
She sheathed it, then bit her lip.
“Where…” Fie’s voice came out a squeak. She cleared her throat. “Where did we leave off with reading?”
“Ta… Trilo…?” Fie scowled at the flatway signpost. “Is it Trikovoi?”
Jasimir moved his finger along the symbols. “Ta, thenri, becomestri.Ka, theno, becomesko.Va—”
“Withoiisvoi.Trikovoi. Aye. I know.” The prince had shoved letter after letter before her nose for the past four days, even carrying about a scrap of slate and a soft, pale rock to write with. This far northeast, the flatways wound quiet round the mountains, their dry dust only stirred by wandering Owl scholars and Sparrow farmers carting vegetables and livestock to the markets of the Marovar. By day, there were precious few distractions from Jasimir’s academic zeal.
It hadn’t been easy. The first evening, they’d tussled when she told him to be stingy with their dwindling dried meat. He’d stormed off into the firs again, carrying a length of rope and his dagger. Dinner had been thin and their words short, and after sundown the whistles of skin-ghasts had driven them into the trees once more.
Then she’d woken to grouse roasting on an improvised spit, a dead pheasant lying in a rope snare nearby, and the prince kneeling to the dawn.
Jasimir had straightened and held up a scrap of slate. A few plain letters were scrawled across it. “Let’s try this again.”
And from there they’d slowly jostled each other into a routine. She still felt it, the hard ache of silence where Tavin’s laugh ought to have been, the cold absence of fingers that had brushed against hers, the longing to catch him watching her again. The prince didn’t hum any watch-hymns; she didn’t wake to find that someone had covered her with a spare pelt. In all the small things that ought to have been there and weren’t, she missed Tavin the most.
But she had an oath to keep. So did the prince.
And so they did. They shared the quiet as Oleander torches lit the woods, as skin-ghasts prowled beneath the trees they’d climbed. And when the danger passed, silence filled in with letters on slate, stories of the court and of the road, memories traded and admired and mourned.
He said foolish things sometimes, asked questions only someone who’d grown in a palace would have. And when Fie told him as much, sometimes he frosted over again and kept quiet awhile. But more and more often, he simply nodded and listened to why.
“Next challenge,” Jasimir said. “How many leagues to go?”
Numbers. Those were even worse than the alphabet. Fie squinted at the end of the sign. “Two tens and… five?”
