“If he’s right, we’re losing time.” A third skinwitch twisted about to scan the canyon. Fie ducked from sight.
“It’s a bare-assed lie.” Viimo’s drawl echoed up. “Princeling doesn’t fancy girls. He ain’t running off with one. The double’s the one with a shine for the Crow.”
“No,” Tavin pleaded, “they left me,they left me—”
Fie knew it for a ruse. She kenned his game now: let them chew over the half-baked lie and never know they’d swallowed another whole.
The words still tore at her heart without mercy.
She’d abandoned him just like she’d abandoned her kin in Cheparok, in the hands of murderers, all for the sake of this damned oath.
“This one’s noisy for a Hawk,” another skinwitch observed. “I’m with Viimo.”
“You have to believe me,” Tavin babbled. “They’re getting away—”
“Pipe down.” Another crack and cry. Fie’s gut wrenched.
She wanted to set the canyon ablaze. She wanted to wipe the blood from his face. She wanted to leave naught of the skinwitches but scorched earth.
Broken steel shuddered in her hand, less than a finger-span from Jasimir.
“One way to know for certain,” Tatterhelm rumbled. “Test him.”
Test him?She didn’t dare try for another look. She caught a jingle, a thinscratch-scratch-scratch—then a hiss. Murmurs swept through the Vultures.
“Aye,” Viimo said. “It’s over. That’s our prince.”
“Pack him up,” ordered Tatterhelm. “We’ll send a message-hawk to the queen after we get back to the caravan.”
The air clotted with shuffling, grunts, and whickering horses. Fie kept still, kept steady, kept the broken blade trained on the prince’s eye lest he ruin it all, kept thoughts of Tavin at arm’s length.
She shivered. Tears streaked down her chin, landing in Jasimir’s dusty hair. She told herself she would not grieve.
Part of her knew she didn’t. Grief scarred over wounds. This, now—all this meant was she still couldn’t stop the bleeding.
A horn shrieked the marching order to a chorus of victory whoops. Slow and unstoppable, the hoofbeats and horns drained from the ravine, until only the howling wind remained.
Tavin was gone.
Fie rolled off the prince and, for a long moment, stared at the sky purpling like a bruise above.
She wanted Tavin’s smile. She wanted his arms around her, the warmth of him at her back, the moment not three days past where she believed, really believed, that perhaps they two could put things to rights.
But it didn’t matter what she wanted when it was far, far from her grasp.
In the long, fearful months after she’d found the ruins of her ma, night after night, she’d kept watch with Pa. Madcap, newer to the band than Fie, had called her Little Witness: the dead Crow god, a beggargirl who saw all misdeeds and recorded them for the Covenant’s judgment. Likely Fie looked the part, staring out into the dark from under Pa’s cloak with her wide, solemn, black eyes, her hair in ragged tufts that she wouldn’t yet let Wretch tidy.
It wasn’t long before someone told Madcap what had happened to Fie’s ma, and they never called her Little Witness again. But Pa told no one the truth of it: Fie only kept watch because she couldn’t bear to dream.
Instead, Pa told her stories.
He told her tales of tricksters and queens as they sat and watched the roads for strangers in the night. He told her of heroes who fought monsters from beyond the mountains and seas. He told her of Ambra and the tigers she rode, the villains she conquered, the fires she burned through Sabor. He told her how every witch of a caste was one of their dead gods reborn, even him. Even her.
And when Fie at last fell asleep, she did not see her mother. She saw adventures grander than her world of dusty roads and shrouded dead. And she wanted to believe Pa: once upon a time, she could have been a god.
She did not feel like that god now.
She felt like Little Witness. She’d done nothing but watch.
