He crossed the space between them before she could finish, pulling her into his arms.
Then, to her surprise, they stayed that way: up to their waists in the river, her forehead resting against his rattling heart, his arms woundalmost too tight around her. Tavin didn’t speak, didn’t stir, didn’t do aught but hold her as close as he could.
First she realized he was shaking; then she felt his chest shudder beneath her cheek and knew something was wrong.
“Tavin?” She tilted her head up to look him in the eye.
Fie thought she’d seen more than enough terrible things for one week, but clearly she was wrong. The boy she loved was crying.
“What is it?”
“I—” He cut himself off, looking like he was about to be sick. He shook his head. “I can’t—”
Fie laid her hand against the side of his face, and he closed his eyes, leaning into her palm. “Show me,” she said, and moved her fingers to brush his mouth. He sucked in a breath, then nodded, lips parting just enough for her fingertip to catch on a tooth.
The teeth of the living always sang brighter than the dead, even more so when they were still part of the person. There was no need to call Tavin’s ghost from a spark in a bone, for there was no spark—only a rush like wildfire that swallowed her whole.
She felt his stab of fear when he’d realized Rhusana had painted targets on the Crows. Unending needle-pricks of anxiety, of impatience, of growing anger as he bartered with his mother for permission to find his chief. The brief reprieve as Viimo traced a steady, clear trail to lead them to the tooth bag.
Then—horror, when he reached it.
Tavin had told Fie he’d found the bag at the roadside, and that much was true. But Drudge hadn’t emptied it out and cast it aside like she’d assumed.
Instead, she felt the moment Tavin rounded the bend in the road, found a still-smoking ruin of corpses and ash strewn across the flatway, and drew a catastrophic conclusion.
She felt something irreparable break in Tavin as he all but threw himself from his horse, stumbling through the embers toward a figure burned beyond recognition, lying beside a charred leather bag.
He’d always known she wasn’t immortal, that she could bleed and weep and fall like anyone else. But deep down, he’d never really believed it. He’d never believed she’d do anything but simply refuse to die.
And even after Viimo shook him from his screaming, after she told him that wasn’t Fie lying dead in the burning grass, that his chief was still alive—it didn’t mend what had been broken.
It didn’t matter that he’d found her again just hours later, furious and filthy and beautiful in the wreckage of Karostei. For those few, terrible moments, he’d known what it was to see the girl he loved dead. And that could not be unbroken.
Fie jerked her hand back and found tears streaking down her own face. “Oh—hells, Tavin.”
Tavin bowed his head until his brow met hers. “I thought you were gone,” he said, voice cracking. “I thought if I was faster, or if I’d left with you, or… I thought Ilostyou, Fie.”
“You didn’t.” She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to fight. She wanted to find Drudge and give his band a proper funeral. She wanted to kick Drudge’s fool skull off a cliff. She’dtoldhim not to call two Phoenix teeth at once, that he’d lose control. He’d done it anyway, and from what Fie had seen in those fleeting, awful glimpses, it had cost all his Crows their lives. “I’m fine. I’m still alive.”
“I know,” Tavin said, but his hands still shook as he brushed her hair back from her face. “I just—can’t stop seeing it, and then—you’re gone again.”
She drew him nearer the shore, nearer to her, until their lips met, and whispered against his mouth, “I’m here.” Then she kissed him likeshe’d wanted to since the moment she’d left Trikovoi: like a jealous god hungry for tribute.
She dug her fingers along his spine, grazed her teeth along the pulse in his jaw, seized tangled handfuls of his damp hair tighter and tighter until he gasped her name like a prayer. She answered by dragging them both to their knees. If the fear of losing her had overthrown him, she would be the fire and flood that drove it out.
She took his hand again, no salt between them now, and slammed it over her heart. “Feel that,” she ordered, fingers locked in the curls at the nape of his neck, her stare boring into his as her heart thundered against his palm. “Is that gone to you?” He shook his head, wordless. “AmIgone to you?” she demanded.
He stared at her, wide-eyed and breathing hard. Then he pulled her closer, his voice low and fierce and desperate in a way she hadn’t heard before. “Never.”
He said it against her lips, against her throat, against her hipbone after they’d managed to drag themselves mostly ashore and free themselves of their sodden clothes. He spelled it on her with his mouth, with his hands, until it was her turn to make a prayer of his name, and even after that as they fell into the same dance they’d taught each other a moon earlier. Between moments when all he could say was her name and moments when neither of them could speak at all, still he sworenever.
The sky ripened to sunset well before the ghosts between them were laid to rest. For a while they lay together in the quiet, watching sparrows flit across gold-soaked clouds as cicada-song drifted from the trees.
Eventually, the last of Fie’s ghosts shook its chains too loud for her to ignore.
“I—” she started, and her voice broke. She coughed and tried again. “I… had to give mercy to—to children today.”
Tavin had been tracing an idle pattern across her collarbone; he stopped and shifted to look at her. “Oh, Fie,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
