Corporal Lakima was perhaps the stoniest Hawk Fie had yet met; at a decade older and a head and a half taller than Fie, she did not so much stand on decorum as plant both feet into it and wordlessly dare anyone to push her off. She was not prone to a mummer’s theatrics. And so when Fie caught an exasperated wheeze before the corporal answered, “Understood, chief,” Fie thought at first it had come fromthe cart. She’d expect a dead Peacock to grumble sooner than Corporal Lakima.
“Did you just sigh?” Fie asked, incredulous.
Lakima coughed. “Did she say when they’ll arrive?”
“Just tonight. Suppose I ought to have asked for specifics before I cut her throat. Yousighed.”
“These lowlanders seem to have a surplus of time on their hands.”
Fie snuck a look back. Lakima kept her face blank, her eyes locked solely on the road ahead, but a divot between her brows said the corporal was vexed. Oleanders meant a late night for her and her Hawks.
Three moons ago, before they’d smuggled Prince Jasimir across Sabor, Oleanders would have meant rolling gambling shells with disaster. If Pa had been promised a visit from the masked riders, he would have hurried them along through the night, not even stopping to burn the sinner until dawn peeled the cover of dark from the roads.
But Fie was chief now. Fie had Hawks now. And Pa…
He’d asked her to bear northwest to the Jawbone Gulf a week ago, and that was when she knew his time had come.
That was a trouble Fie’s Hawks couldn’t remedy.
Instead, she said to Lakima, “Maybe they’ll show up early and get it over with before dinner.”
Corporal Lakima lifted her spear in salute. It took Fie a moment to realize it wasn’t to her but to the Hawks on duty at the manor’s signal post above. Helmeted heads jerked back over the small tower’s platform when Fie turned to look their way. A thin wisp of black smoke still lingered from the plague beacon they’d lit to call Crows here.
Likely the Hawk soldiers couldn’t fathom why some of their own would accompany Crows. Fie failed to stuff down a smirk at that. She’dwon her Hawks fair and square from Master-General Draga, and more importantly, she’d won Hawks to guard the whole Crow caste once Prince Jasimir took the throne. Those soldiers just might be escorting their own band of Crows soon enough.
Rumors had already floated past Fie, rumors of Crown Prince Jasimir, who’d survived the Sinner’s Plague like his legendary ancestor Ambra, and tales of Master-General Draga’s showy procession to return Jasimir to the capital city of Dumosa. Nobody spoke of Queen Rhusana, but Jasimir had always sworn the queen’s first move in a takeover would be to remove King Surimir from power, and so far it seemed the king breathed yet.
Considering the leader of Surimir’s armies was personally ushering the crown prince—the one Rhusana had repeatedly tried to assassinate—back to his home, Fie reckoned the queen might be keeping a low profile.
“Why did you take the scroll?” Corporal Lakima asked.
Fie had a score of answers to that: Because it made her feel better about cutting the throat of a girl her own age. Because that scroll told the nobility they were always good, and told Fie she would always be a monster. Because no one in the fine Peacock manor behind them knew that in Crow story and song, the monsters usually wore silk.
“They would have burned it anyway,” Fie said instead. “This way I get to watch.”
Lakima coughed again. “Ah. Must beThe Thousand Conquests.”
Fie shed her mask once the roughway led into the trees, but she kept her eyes nailed to the road, only glancing back every so often to be sure no spiteful mourner tailed them. Five years might be enough forthe woods to reclaim the campsite where Hangdog’s kin had died, but Crows were raised with an eye to spot potential sleeping grounds, and Fie didn’t feel like laying hers on that sad clearing.
She didn’t feel like thinking much on Hangdog at all.
Fear had spurred him to turn traitor, that she knew. Fear of what lay down his road as a Crow chief, fear that it would end as the rest of his kin’s had. She couldn’t fault him for that.
But she could fault him for thinking treachery was his only way out.
Fie felt the flatway before she saw it. The air savored hotter and dustier, the roughway began to even out, and full sunlight stabbed more frequently through the green canopy overhead. Finally they emerged onto the broad, smooth dirt road. Pa and their two other Hawks were sheltering with the supply wagon on the other side of the flatway, in the shade of an ivy-choked hemlock.
Fie’s heart gave a familiar sort of pang when she saw Pa, as it had done many a time since he’d asked her to lead them to the Jawbone. Then she kenned the look on his face, and that pang wormed into a deeper worry.
It was a rare look. Fie remembered the last time she’d seen it, all too close, all too clear: when Pa had handed her the sword, the teeth, and the prince, and sent her and the lordlings over the bridge in Cheparok.
It said something had fouled up, and in a way they might not be able to outrun now.
“What is it?” Fie called, striding across the dirt road—but the moment she broke into the sun, she saw.
To her left, a black string of smoke frayed the horizon, half a league away. To her right, another black thread unspooled. Beyond them, even more black trails rose until they’d striped the noon sky like teeth in a giant’s comb.
Fie had seen such a sight only twice before, but she knew square what black beacons for leagues and leagues meant.
