Her red-stained fingers shook too much to undo the knot on the bag of Phoenix teeth. She pushed it at Jasimir. “Get this open.”
“What are you planning?” His face blurred and swayed back into focus. She was running out of time.
Fie looked dead at Tatterhelm. Then she looked back to the prince.
“Leave your pack here and make a run for the gates. I’ll hold the road.”
Another arrow sighed in passing, ringing off the dry earth.
Jasimir’s face hardened. “Not an option. I’ll carry you.”
Fie blinked away patches of red as she shook her head. “I’ve got one waking minute left, maybe two. The second I black out, they’ll ride you down.”
“I won’t—”
“Youhaveto,” she yelled, voice cracking.
“No one else is dying for me,” he spat back.
She seized a fistful of his shirt, smudging dirt and blood on the crowsilk. “You get caught and it’s all rutted. It’s all a waste, everythingyou’ve given up, everything I’ve given up to get this far. All of it. You get caught and Rhusana wins. You have to be king.You have to keep the oath.”
Even as she said the words aloud, the last lit Phoenix tooth slid from her grasp.
The flames sputtered into thin air, revealing a line of skinwitches across the road, dim phantoms in the haze. Tatterhelm rode at their heart, the notch-cut helm carving an unmistakable crown on his hulking silhouette; behind them swayed the drooping shadows of even more skin-ghasts.
Tatterhelm nudged his horse into a deliberate, unhurried stroll. Each ambling hoofbeat fell like the slow toll of a slaughter bell.
“Go,” Fie hissed. If she pulled together, she could light one more tooth, one more fire—she couldn’t burn it all, but by Ambra, she could burn her name into history—
The crown prince of Sabor got to his feet.
And then he planted himself between Fie and the Vultures.
“No,” he said. “They have to go through me. Rhusana wants me alive. So we’ll see how many of them it takes.”
Tatterhelm paused, the helmet’s eye-slits betraying naught. Then he flicked his reins and rode on.
Fie wanted to fight. She wanted to drag Jasimir to the gates of Trikovoi herself. She wanted to tell Tavin she’d done it, she’d kept the oath.
She wanted to see Pa again.
The earth shuddered.
At first, she thought thunder had rolled off the mountainsides. But that was wrong: the blue skies were only mottled with smoke.
Then she thought it might be more skinwitches. But that too was wrong: Tatterhelm dragged on his reins less than five paces from the prince, and twisted in his saddle to peer into the murky road behind him.
And then Fie saw the tusks.
They broke through the billowing smoke like warships through fog, a landslide of muscle and coarse fur. Weak sunlight picked out the steel spikes bristling the deadly bone arcs of each tusk, the plates strapped to every massive skull and trunk and leg, the razor-sharp lances lashed in clusters within reach of their riders.
Fie had seen mammoths before. At a distance. In a pasture. She had never seen them ridden to war.
She couldn’t tell if the Vultures had, either, but at least they had the sense to scatter when the mammoth riders charged.
Tatterhelm’s mount reared and whinnied. Fie heard a growled curse. He kicked at the horse’s sides until it dropped and shied toward them. Fie’s heart lurched as his hand swiped for the prince—
And a spear thudded into the road one hair away from his fingers, its shaft reverberating like a warning rattle.
