Ruffian sucked in a breath. “Truly?”
“Aye.” Fie braced for a scolding like the ones Little Witness and Drudge had handed her.
Instead Jade’s hand thrust into her line of sight, filled with teeth. “Now that’s a grand thing. Can’t say I hate having a prince owe us a favor.”
“No wonder the queen’s proper crossed,” Ruffian chuckled, passing another fistful of teeth to Fie. “Good for you, giving her throne a rattle. Wager it won’t be the last time you do.”
“Thanks.” Fie reached for her own bag to stow the teeth—and remembered where it had gone. There was a small pouch for her flint at her belt. She stuffed the teeth into that, feeling all the more humbled for how readily Ruffian and Jade had handed them off.
Jade wound her hair into a knot with a twist of rag and nodded to Ruffian and Fie. “Ready?” At their ayes, she twisted about to cry to her band, “Masks on!”
“Masks on,” Fie echoed, as did Ruffian. Leather and wooden struts creaked about them in a grim ballad.
“Chief.” Lakima caught her as she fetched their chalk from the wagon. Her voice lowered. “The civilians are bound to ask—can any of it be saved?”
Fie looked to the fields and found townspeople staring, bleak, at their homes about to go up in smoke. She’d seen loss before, loss and guilt and rage in a sinner’s family, but this was different.
This was familiar.
She’d left Pa behind. She’d lost the only teeth to ever make her feel truly dangerous. Even before then, she’d split from her kin, from her roads, from her ways, all for the sake of the oath.
This time, she knew what it was to lose nigh everything that made you safe.
Yet all Fie could do was shake her head. “It’s reached the walls. Everything has to burn.”
“Maybe they’ll remember this when they pick the next arbiter,” Khoda said, bitter.
“More likely one’s assigned.” Wretch’s voice turned muffled as she strapped on her mask. “Town’s under a thousand, aye? The governor of the region picks the arbiters for them when they’re that small.”
So the townspeople had had no say in the arbiter with a hundred deaths on his head.
And so Fie said to the corporal, “If it helps the townsfolk, tell them when they see the smoke, it’s the pyres for their kin. That’s when they ought to pray. And if that doesn’t help… tell them the arbiter burns, too.”
She pulled her own mask on, the world dimming to a welcome relief of darkness and a beak full of wild mint. For the briefest of moments, she shut her eyes.
The weight of teeth round her neck and at her belt, the weight of her swords, the faith of her Crows, the respect of two stranger chiefs—they all meant something, if she let them. They all could steady her, if she let them.
No matter what Little Witness said, no matter how Drudge had treated her, she was one of them.
She was a chief, with a harvest of ash beckoning.
Fie let the mint flood her lungs, then strode toward the gates.
They’d been barred from the outside, but at first, even with the bar lifted, the gates refused to budge no matter how Varlet and Bawd pushed. Then Jade shook her head with rue and said, “Eater of Bones, this’s bound to be a rough day. Try giving it a pull.”
Jade was right. The gates swung open with only a little fight when the twins dragged on them, and Fie saw straight away what the older chief meant.
Three bodies lay beneath a shroud of dead bloodflies on the threshold, where they’d collapsed trying to get out. The gates had jammed on them.
“Steady,” Jade whispered, and patted Fie’s shoulder. “Hand out your chalk.” Her voice rose. “My band, start with the western houses.”
“My band, we go north,” Ruffian called, and shoved the arbiter none too gently over the dead at Karostei’s doorstep. Half the bloodflies rose from the corpses with an irate, sluggish buzz. The others rained off in stiff curls, legs folded up in surrender to the plague. “I’ll follow once I’ve dealt with… this.”
“We’ll take east, then.” Fie passed out the chalk to her band. “Suppose you all did this with Pa before?”
“Pair up, leave a ring for dead or empty, a cross mark for mercy,” Wretch said. The others nodded.
“Then I’ll follow. Once every house is marked, gather by…”Fie took a look around the town commons, trying not to grimace at the sight. Dead goats and dogs lay in misshapen heaps, rats huddled like graying warts on the hide of dusty ground already speckled with more fallen bloodflies. Sickly rot wept from nigh every foundation she saw. The market stalls looked about two days gone, canopy stands tilting or buckled in twain where gray ate through the wood and canvas.
