“They’re here somewhere.” She shoved aside a roll of oilcloth, then frowned and held it out. “Do you need oilcloth?”
“Fie.” Pa gently pushed the roll back to her. “I don’t need oilcloth.”
“You sure? The rainy season—”
“It’s no use putting it off,” Pa said, not unkind. “The roads wait for no one.”
Fie suddenly became very fixated on restoring the oilcloth to its proper place in the cart.
“You’ve been spooked since Little Witness called you up.” Pa climbed into the cart to sit beside Fie. “What’s amiss, girl? What did she have to say?”
Scores of answers came to mind once more: That Fie was something she wasn’t. That she had failed, again and again and again. That she hadn’t kept their oath after all.
That if she couldn’t, he would pay the price.
Fie couldn’t say any of that to Pa, though, not moments before she left him alone in this empty home. A fragment of the truth would have to do. “She asked for Phoenix teeth.”
“Did you give them?”
“Aye.” Fie’s mouth twisted. “Didn’t like it, though.”
Pa leaned back on a sack of rice. “Doesn’t matter if you like it. Thedoing’swhat counts.”
“Is it enough?”
Pa shot her the look she’d seen a thousand times. He kenned the question beneath her question. “Never doubt it, Fie. Look at all you’ve done for us in the last two moons. It’s enough. You’re enough.”
She found her damned eyes welling up once more. Pa slung an arm round her shoulders and pulled her close.
“I’d never leave while you needed me,” he told her, “but you’ve gone and grown into a proper chief. And if you find you need me yet, I’ll be here.”
Fie wanted to say she’d always need him. Between the sniffles and the boiling lump in her throat, it came out as a squeaky croak, and she reckoned he knew anyway.
Pa let her cry her eyes dry, then scooted out of the cart and held out his hand. “Come, you’ve a prince waiting on you. And didn’t you tell that Hawk lad you’d walk his way?”
“Told him Crows go where we’re called,” Fie mumbled, blowing her nose on a bit of rag. “It’s different. Keeps Tavin on his toes.”
“Aye. Mind you, sometimes the call doesn’t always sound like one.” Pa helped her down. “And if I’ve one thing to pass on before I see you next, it’s this, Fie: we can’t always wait for a call.”
It felt wrong being on the road with Wretch, Madcap, Bawd, Varlet, but no Pa. The band had lost Crows before, but those were losses to Oleanders, to sickness, to hunger.
She’d never lost a Crow to time. And none of them were Pa.
Wretch in particular kept close to Fie once they set south on the flatway, and Madcap tactfully eschewed their standard vulgar walking songs to hum something sweet and forlorn under their breath. Lakima too asked no questions, only answering the marching order with a quiet “Yes, chief.”
About an hour past noon, a thread of yellow smoke from a league-marker beacon caught Fie’s eye. A town was calling for mercy and offering her one as well, a distraction from thoughts of Birthrights, Covenant oaths, and other things she’d left behind. She cleared her throat. “Look alive, all. We’ve a job on our hands.”
A chorus of ayes echoed behind her. Yet not half an hour later, a twinge of frustration wound through her gut as the beacon went out. “Never mind,” she called. “Someone must have beat us to it.”
Fie couldn’t help mulling over the Crow Birthright as they kept walking on. It was a puzzle she couldn’t quite fit together: a power they were all born with, yet even now was somehow beyond reach. Moreover, every witch had a stronger, more potent form of their caste’s Birthright, like how Owls all had near-perfect memories, but their witches could steal memories right out of one’s head.
So if Crow witches could draw Birthrights from bone… what power did ordinary Crows have?
And why would it need a kept oath to be found again?
An hour closer to sundown, Fie was dislodged from her puzzling when she saw a blue beacon light farther south, then a green beacon behind them to the north. Her lips pursed. When a town needed mercy, they lit a beacon that burned black smoke. Then the nearest league-marker posts lit beacons in purple, and then the ones that saw purple lit blue, and so on through green, yellow, orange, and red, calling for any band of Crows within seven leagues. The beacons were supposed to go out only when Crows passed the marker on the way to answer a call.
Yet Fie could have sworn this trail of beacons had gone out earlier, only to light back up again.
