She broke the surface. Everything was on fire, her eyes, her throat, her belly—she spewed up the bloody water and aught else she’d eatenthat night, gasping and wheezing and crying as hands held her until she steadied.
“We don’t have much time,” Corporal Lakima grunted, and pulled Fie ashore.
Her band waited there, faces taut with fear and relief. Two huddles of armor and limbs marked the Hawks who’d tried to drown her. Fie didn’t care to find if they were alive or dead.
Wretch wiped Fie’s face down with a rag and laid a spare cloak round her shoulders.
“H-how?” Fie stammered to Lakima.
The corporal produced a bag and a string: Fie’s teeth. A stitch dug in the side of her jaw. “She’s trying… but… she can’t make me want to hurt you.”
“What about the lordlings?” Madcap asked.
Fie couldn’t choke back a sob. She shook her head.
“They’re not—she didn’t—” Bawd faltered.
“She’s taking J-Jas captive,” Fie forced out. Lakima held out her swords. Fie took them, then dropped the one from Tavin in the mud. “Tavin is… siding with the queen.”
After a moment, Lakima picked the sword up, wiping mud off the hilt, and handed it back. “We have a saying in the legions: waste no weapons, least of all your foe’s. Don’t throw this away.” Her stern face turned even harder. “Return it.”
Fie wanted to throw it into the river. She wanted to bury it in Tavin’s heart. She wanted—
Her grief was a wildfire, her fire was a flood, and both would devour her whole the moment she let them. She couldn’t. Shecouldn’t.
“You need to go,” Lakima said. “Don’t tell me where—she’ll know. You need to get out before she can look through my eyes.”
Varlet’s voice broke through the hush. “Do we try to take the prince with us?”
Fie swallowed, agony in her every bone. No fire teeth, only one Hawk, and half-drowned—yet she’d overcome greater odds before. She might die trying to get the prince out, or she might save him yet.
She’d given up everything to keep her end of the oath; she’d left her kin, she’d left her roads, she’d left their ways.
And in this life, same as any other, still she had failed.
She could hear Jas still:Don’t give up on me.
But she’d been raised on words older and harder than that:Look after your own.
That was how Crows had survived. For years, decades, centuries, that was how they’d lived for another dawn.
She’d tried, Covenant help her, she’dtriedto do right by Sabor, but at the end of the day… none of it—not her swords, not her teeth, not her oaths, not the scrolls she read, not the boy she loved—noneof it would save them.
She might be able to save Jas, but Jas couldn’t save them.
Fie shook her head. “We need to go.”
Lakima led them along the riverbank, past the eerie quiet of the wrecked camp, up to the bridge over the river. No Hawks blocked the flatway anymore.
“They’ll send riders after you. I’ll hold the road as long as I can.” Lakima planted herself in the pale, moonlit dust as Crows spilled onto the road behind her, and Fie realized she would not see the corporal again.
“Just buy us an hour or two,” Fie said. “Then get yourself clear.”
“Yes, chief.”
Fie’s vision streaked with tears. “You’re a terrible liar, Lakima.”
“Yes, chief.” The Hawk allowed a stiff shade of a smile, then turned her back. “Please… tell your father I kept my promise.”
