Jasimir crashed into her, knocking them both to the ground. She swore, bewildered, and tried to shove him off. He rolled back to his feet and dragged her up. “Your legs—fire—” he wheezed.
Fie twisted and saw scorch marks burned into the backs of her wool leggings, the flesh beneath red and welting. A scattering of small white fires speckled the maize behind them, each no bigger than a fist.
An arrow whistled eerily through the air, then thudded into the trunk of a fir nearby. White fire sprayed from its shaft like syrup.
“Flashburn.” Fie sucked a breath through her teeth. “It’s flashburn.”
She had to hand it to the Vultures: if you wanted to kill a Crow and keep a Phoenix, fire was the way to do it.
Jasimir’s horror said he, too, had pieced it together. “Come on. They won’t have a clear shot in the forest.”
They raced into the firs. Any sign of Trikovoi vanished behind heavy, needled boughs. Shouts and cursing echoed behind them. The horsesweren’t built to weave through the thickets here, but they’d catch up sooner than later.
“We just—have to get—to Trikovoi,” Fie panted, staggering up a heap of rocks. The plague beacons would have to wait, and the Covenant would have to forgive her, and the dead gods would have to be kind if she and the prince were going to make it out of this damned—
The forest stopped.
That was false; it didn’t so much stop as empty out. The ground at their feet clogged with rocks and broken wood and old caked mud. Hundreds of trees stood before them, gray and clean, stripped of their bark and needles but for tufts near their dead crowns.
Pa called them ghost forests, stretches of trees that a mudslide had smashed in the pass of a few breaths. Right now, all Fie saw stretched ahead of her were a thousand-thousand royal ghosts, and the teeth of Trikovoi in the slopes less than a league away.
Hoofbeats pounded behind them.
She and Jasimir took off into the ghost forest, aimed dead for the fortress. The ground bucked and slipped beneath their feet, branches rolling, dried mud buckling, stones tipping every which way. Fie prayed that would foul up the riders even worse.
Then an arrow sailed over her head and into the trunk of a ghost tree.
Flames leapt from every drop of flashburn, spreading in a trice. Jasimir yanked her back as the tree groaned and splintered into a pillar of white fire.
Shielding their eyes, they veered round it, still pushing on toward the fortress. Almost there—they just had to get away from the Vultures, just had to clear these damned ghosts—
Another arrow hit, and another, sinking into the dead trees. Fie twisted but saw no riders. A war cry shrieked from the dark woods to her left, and its match echoed back from her right.
The Vultures had them flanked.
Arrows rained down around them, sending up belches of white fire wherever they hit. The earth beneath their feet began to hiss and steam. Flames outran her and the prince until the world was white-streaked fire, waves of blistering heat, air that reeked of flashburn and smoke, and a roar that near drowned out the skinwitches’ cries of triumph.
They’d run headlong into the Vultures’ trap.
A ghost tree screamed as it crashed to the ground not ten paces off. Fie swore and hid her face from the shower of embers, choking on air that scraped vicious at her lungs with every breath.
Jasimir wrapped an arm around her and barreled on. His voice barely sounded above the maelstrom. “Use a Phoenix tooth!” he shouted. “You can put out the fire like you did with the Oleanders.”
It had taken near everything she had to bring that tiny campfire to heel nigh a moon ago. But even if she wanted to argue now, she hadn’t the breath for it.
Fie called up a Phoenix witch-tooth. The one that answered gave her a song of battles and glory, a prince convinced his name would resound through history. Fie drew the power through her, then bent it to the fires ahead.
She might as well have bent it to an ocean. Wherever she pushed, the fire only flowed round. Fie cursed and tried again, tried to shove enough away to let them pass, but the white flashburn flames scratched and pried and slid about no matter how she willed them away.
Get out. You have to get out. You have to keep the oath—
But everywhere she looked, she saw only burning ghosts.
The seed of a notion sprouted. Fie licked her dry lips, tried to take a breath, couldn’t. The world began to flood with gray.
She closed her eyes and called up a second Phoenix witch-tooth.
A queen answered this time. And she fought furiously with the dead prince, circling and spitting like cats. But they were neither a match for Fie, the worst Crow they would ever cross.
