A man stood at the shelves in the back of the office, digging througha wooden crate of what appeared to be various tools. “The entire point of havingmyoffice, Yula, is thatIdecide who’s allowed in.”
Yula rolled her eyes at him and shut the door behind Khoda and Fie, nearly catching Barf’s tail. The tabby flicked it out of the way with a disdainful glower. “Well, you can decide who’s allowed in,Ebrim, if you ever decide to answer your own wretched door.”
He vaguely waved a pair of pincers at her, then set them on a shelf, grumbling into his crate. A moment later he surfaced with another, smaller pair of pincers, frowned at those, and started for his desk. “You can speak freely here; at this hour there’s no one but us on this floor. Just keep your voices down. You’ll change into servant’s uniforms, and then we’ll stow you in the sick room for the Sparrows, long as there’s no need for it.” Ebrim shook out a plain roll of hide, and with a start, Fie realized it was a map of the palace grounds. “This can’t leave my office. Hawks check for it every day. Here’s where we are.” He jabbed a finger into a corner. “I have open repair requests for most every part of the palace, so you can go anywhere you need to search. Your first order of business is finding His Highness, right?”
When Ebrim looked up, Fie found a surprising amount of distress in the man’s eyes. He was younger than Yula by a good decade or two, his sandy-brown face clean-shaven but his dark hair still graying at the temples; likely he’d been in palace service before Jasimir was born and had watched the prince grow up.
Khoda shifted. “Our top priority is making sure the coro—”
“Crown prince is safe, then getting him out,” Fie interrupted. Khoda shot her a look. She ignored it. “I’m one of the Crows who came for him back in Pigeon Moon. No way he pulled that stunt off without help from your ranks, aye?”
Yula ducked her head. “His Highness was known for… intervening,” she said. “When the king was in one of his rages, or when a courtierwanted to show off how they toyed with us, His Highness would sway them to mercy as best he could. It cost him plenty of friends a royal could use. We owed him.”
“Aye. Sparrows were the only ones I saw mourning him for true.” Fie folded her arms. “We’ll need anything you can tell us about the coronation ceremony, too. If we can’t throw it off, the prince won’t have a crown to claim.”
Yula nodded. “They’ve had half my crew scrubbing down nigh every inch of the Hall of the Dawn. We’ll keep open ears.”
“There are some places they can’t possibly be holding the prince.” Ebrim scoured his desk, then picked up his pincers and dropped them on the Hall of the Dawn and the Hawk barracks. He added a pot of nails over the library, scraps of parchment over the servants’ quarters, and a small potted plant over the armory. “The library’s too open. Same with the armory, and we’d know if he’s in any of our buildings.”
Khoda stepped closer to the map, brow furrowing. “We’d be looking for a room that’s probably been cleaned out in the last week. It would be isolated, probably the only one on its floor in use, and somewhere one or two people could come and go without drawing much notice.”
“Let me look through our requests,” Yula said. “I’ll have a list for you this evening.”
“Our thanks,” Fie said, then squinted at the map as well. “Maybe look for aught that’s close to the royal quarters, too. Rhusana won’t want to inconvenience herself when checking on him.”
“Nor will that faithless bastard Hawk.” Yula’s face darkened. “All those years he’s been at His Highness’s side, and now he turns.”
That caught Fie like a sucker punch. Khoda must have seen, for he piped up. “I don’t know what the queen offered him. I can only hope it was worth it.”
My life.The knowledge burned at Fie like a coal caught in her throat. The price was not worth it, yet Fie had every intent to show Tavin the worth of what he’d bought.
That night, they narrowed down Yula’s list to seven rooms near the royal quarters, debating each by lantern-light in the servants’ quarters’ sick rooms as Fie reworked her chief’s string to add new teeth, more string, and a small clay Vulture charm-bead from Viimo. When she was done, it was long enough to be a belt, one she could hide under her plain linen shirt and royal servants’ golden sash if need be. She’d always found it easiest to call a tooth to life as it rolled between her palms, but the tooth just touching her skin would have to be enough. One glimpse of a tooth necklace and she’d give them all away.
They had only a few hours of sleep before Ebrim arrived with the toll of the palace hour-bells in the dim predawn, bearing repair request slips for each area. He also had day-old sweet rolls stuffed with dates and almonds for their breakfast and a fish head for Barf’s.
“Remember,” he told them, trying to ignore the tabby rolling gleefully on his sandals, “you say you’re there to assess the issue that needs repair. If anyone asks, show them the signed request. If a Hawk or Peacock tells you to clear out…”
“Aye, you don’t need to tell me,” Fie said around a mouthful of stale roll. “We’ll clear out.”
Ebrim gave her a meaningful look. “Yes.And you’ll do it with a bow and an apology.”
Fie swallowed with a grimace. “Yes.”
They tried to leave Barf shut in the room while they slipped down the dark, silent hall; most servants wouldn’t be up for another halfhour. However, they had not planned for her squeezing through the bars on the window, and they had no more than set foot out the door when she trotted up, chirping. Khoda swore under his breath.
“Pa said she’s lucky,” Fie said with a shrug. “And I’ve only three Pigeon witch-teeth, so we’ll need what we can get.”
They hurried first to the archives, where several large closets had been cleared out in a mostly empty tower. The Hawks on guard let them in with a yawn, and Barf entertained herself terrorizing the local rodent population, but their “assessment” only turned up the tax records for provincial grain farmers of a hundred years ago.
The next room was in a corner of an unused cellar near the icehouse on the other side of the palace grounds… or at least, that’s where Fie thought it to be. Khoda was the one who knew the palace’s layout.
The sun hadn’t quite climbed over the horizon, and by the easing gloom, all the buildings looked like coiling limbs of the same terrible creature, with their scaly tiled domes, fans of golden feathered trim, and spines of arched windows. The dreadful hum of dead Phoenix gods simmered beneath her soles like a drawn-out pulse.
Somewhere in this gilded beast was Tavin. Somewhere was Rhusana. Would they come to Fie, or would she have to carve them out herself?
She could only hope to end this all before she had any need to learn her way around the palace’s tripes.
They had just strolled past a row of columns, each large as one of Gen-Mara’s magnolias, when a shout echoed from the open walkway behind them. “You there! Sparrow!”
