When she whirled about, Tavin had dropped to his knees, coughing.
Dark whorls of the Sinner’s Brand were tracing up his arms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE WELL
By the time she seized his arms—why, part of her thought,you can’t stop this—a sweat had already broken out over him. “No,” Fie breathed, crashing to the ground before Tavin, “no, no,no, no, no,” and it became a chant, a scream.
“It’ll be all right,” Tavin started to say. The words drowned in a choking cough.
No no no no no no—Fie lifted his face, only to find the Sinner’s Brand carving lattices beneath his eyes. “Don’t,” she begged, as if he could do anything about it. “Don’t, we can—we can—”
Nothing. There was nothing she could do.
She let out a sob like a howl of rage. Overhead, the crows wheeled and wept with her.
Someone was always going to pay a price.
A hand gripped her shoulder. “I can do it for you,” Jade said quietly, broken sword in hand.
The thought of Tavin’s blood on the tiles made Fie want to vomit.
Crow-song wailed in her ears. She shook Jade’s hand off, pulled Tavin to her. His head rested on her shoulder; his shivers rattled them both, terrible and dissonant in the sweltering midsummer heat. She’d spent nigh seventeen years with the plague. She knew damn well what it did, and she knew now: the Covenant was not tarrying with him.
The sky above warped like glassblack with her tears.
“I DID EVERYTHING YOU ASKED,” she screamed to the Covenant. If it could speak to her with its crows and its plague and its teeth that never died, she could speak back, she could demand answers. “I GAVE HIM MERCY. I CALLED FOR CROWS.”
If the Covenant had an answer for her, it did not give it.
Little Witness had said she’d failed, life after life. If this was success, she didn’t want it. She’d let the plague take all Sabor, she’d head merrily into the twelve hells if it could stop this. But that had been her sin all along. Little Witness had said as much: she’d wanted more than a Crow was meant to have.
Jade set her hand on Fie’s shoulder once more. “Don’t drag it out.”
She twisted, hissing, ready to bite the hand off.
Then a flash of blood-red gold jabbed into her sight. The last gasps of sunset were tracing over the cliffs behind the royal quarters, through the hands of the Mother of the Dawn, through the Hall of the Dawn itself. Just as the monarchs could watch the sun rise from their thrones, she could watch it set from where she knelt in their miserable courtyard.
It was all one straight line, the line of the sun: The Hall of the Dawn. The false grave for the Mother of the Dawn. The royal quarters.
The Well of Grace.
The Well of Grace, where she’d felt the hymn in her bones, like standing on Little Witness’s grave.
The Well of Grace, where, every time she’d gone near it, teeth she’d burned cold had burst back to life.
You know the price. Will you pay it?
They were the words of the chief of centuries past, holding a hand out to Ambra as she lay dying in her bed.
Ambra, so beloved by the dead gods, it was said, that not even the plague could claim her, no matter how it tried.
You think wanting more makes you less, Little Witness had said,when you just want what was stolen.
Fie’s hands shook as she cut her satchel of Phoenix teeth loose, then handed it whole to Jade.
“Make sure every chief gets some,” she said swiftly, and yanked Tavin’s arm around her shoulders. “I’ve enough to last on my string if need be. Don’t call more than one at a time—they’ll eat you alive. And try to save them for the skin-ghasts.” She braced herself on the tiles. “Bring out the sick, fast as you can, get them to the gardens and deal no mercy.”
