Fie caught her breath and turned. Twenty paces away, a Peacock lord was beckoning them, looking peevish.
“Keep looking,” Khoda muttered in a rush, shoving the repair request slips at her, “and use Viimo.” Then he shouted, “Right away,m’lord!” and jogged off before Fie could so much as squeak a protest. All she could do was watch him walk away with the Peacock lord, bowing intermittently, until they vanished round a corner.
For a moment, Fie couldn’t breathe.
She was alone in the home of her enemies. She didn’t know where she was going. She didn’t know how to get back to Ebrim’s office. She didn’t dare ask for help.
If she froze much longer, a Hawk patrol was bound to notice, and then it’d all be over.
Pa would know what to do. Fie’s hand crept toward his tooth—then dropped. It was too soon to burn it already. She had other teeth. And that had been all she’d needed before.
The rhythmic stomps of a patrol caught at the edge of her hearing. Fie reached for her Sparrow witch-tooth, then paused. The invisibility would only last so long, and unless she knew where to go, she could burn that tooth clean out and never find Jasimir.
Instead, she chose the Pigeon witch-tooth.
Pa had never given her a Pigeon witch’s tooth to use before now; he’d only had her practice burning two plain Pigeon teeth at once and tweaking fortune in small ways. The footsteps drew nearer. She ducked into an alcove, fishing under her shirt to pry the tooth free. If she was to call on one now, she’d do it proper.
The tooth keened as Fie rolled it between her palms, the spark popping free like a cork. She blinked. Abruptly, the world shifted,unshifted, and rattled with potential.
Naught looked different; naught looked the same. She could hear, see,tastethe currents of fortune: a whorl of bad luck on the walkway where Khoda had been called away, a bloom of good fortune unfurling around her. The footsteps of the Hawk patrol stopped.
“Tell you what, soldiers.” The voice seeped out from beyond anearby gate. “If we leave now, we can beat Unit Seventeen for breakfast.” A chorus of assent later, the footsteps had retreated in the opposite direction.
Fie let out a breath, then tried to focus. She needed to find Jas. If there was any time for a stroke of fortune in her search, it would be now.
Another servant passed them, looking almost bewildered by the tray in his hands. Barf perked up, shedding ripples of good luck like a winter coat. She chirped and scurried over to follow the Sparrow man, the end of her tail twitching like a flag in a trifling wind.
Fie didn’t see any other sources of luck; Pa seemed to have been right about the tabby after all. She followed her cat.
They turned into a peculiar parade, the servant weaving through gates and corridors as Barf mewed at his heels, Fie darting behind statues and columns every time he turned to try to shoo the cat away to no avail. The few Hawks in sight peeled off from their posts as fortune nudged them away, recalling an errand or struck with an urge to use the privy.
The hum of Phoenix god-graves rose the farther they went, until they turned into a grand, arcing hall. Rich gilt and scrollwork crawled up the columns, and six towering golden statues stood sentinel in alcoves along one wall, facing six more across the way. Fire wreathed the bottom of each in a shallow moat, enough to deter anyone from laying hands on the towering statues, but not so much to damage the urns, lesser icons, and other trappings clustered into the alcove with them.
Fie didn’t know the Phoenix gods all too well, but their graves sang below her feet loud enough to tell her where she stood. Ebrim’s map had showed two great curved chambers flanking the Hall of the Dawn to the north and south, standing over the two burial grounds of the dead gods. They’d been labeled as the Divine Galleries.
The servant slipped behind a statue, fiddled with something, sent one more furtive look around, and tried to take a step back.
Barf had coiled round his ankles. He toppled to the ground with a yelp and a clang as the tray went flying. The smell of fish stew reached Fie even from the tapestry she’d ducked behind, as did the man’s flurry of curses. Moments later he stormed out of the hall, mumbling something about finding the cleaning staff.
Fie bolted to the back of the statue. Barf was far too fixed on cleaning up the fallen stew to pay her much mind, looking very satisfied with herself. Fie’s Pigeon witch-tooth was starting to burn low, but it didn’t take a work of fortune to see that the head on a guardian dog statue had turned at a strange angle, one that didn’t match the dog statue beside it. She pushed it all the way around.
A door-size section of the statue’s pedestal lowered over the flames, carving a path across them and into the statue’s base.
The fading currents of fortune had little to say about this development. Whether that meant going in would be good or bad, Fie couldn’t tell.
“Stay here,” Fie muttered to the cat, knowing she had absolutely no say in the matter, and headed in.
Firelight cut the darkness, revealing a marble staircase that wound down in a spiral, studded in cut-iron lanterns burning with a pale flame. Fie had made it halfway down when a voice echoed up, distant and familiar.
It was a voice that nailed her in place where she stood.
“… talk to me.” A long pause. “Please, Jas. I-I’ll get you out of here, I’ll get you somewhere better. Just sayanything.”
Fie had thought quite a bit about what she would do the next time she saw Tavin. Mostly it involved knives, and demanding answers, and leaving him bleeding out in despair; always it made her weep.
She found now that for all her fury, more than anything, she just wanted to run.
There was a low mumble. Tavin didn’t answer for a moment. When it came, all he said was “You wouldn’t understand.”
