Now here she was in front of a pyre yet again, but here Hangdog wasn’t after all. The beacons were telling her the last man between the throne and the Oleanders’ queen had died. But there was naught she could do about it now.
The smell of burning flesh began to drift from the pyre. Fie stepped back again, mouth twisting. A warning yowl made her jump. She turned and found Barf, the gray tabby she’d plucked from the royal palace, sprawled on the ground behind her.
If the cat kenned the dire tidings of dead kings and grim roads, she didn’t show it. Instead she chirped and rolled onto her back, paws tucked neat beneath her chin.
Fie knew that trick too well. Pa, however, crouched to rub Barf’s white belly. The tabby promptly latched onto his arm like a snare. He yanked his hand back as Wretch cackled behind them.
“Ought to know better, Cur,” Wretch called. Pa’s name sounded yet strange to Fie’s ear, now that her band called only Fie “chief.” “That beast doesn’t show her belly unless it’s a trap.”
“I do know better,” Pa grumbled. “Just hoped it’d be different this time.”
There was a crinkle as Fie’s fist tightened onThe Thousand Conquests.The parchment had turned gummy with sweat. She tossed it onto the pyre, just as she’d promised.
It smoked and caught almost immediately. Fie knew the value of scrolls, the time and effort that Owl scribes put into copying out a work likeThe Thousand Conquests, how each one was to be prized and protected. Scholar Sharivi had claimed, in a wholly unnecessary foreword, that the tales he’d scrawled within were the unblemished truth. Thatthey captured the history of Sabor, the might of rulers, the wickedness of traitors, the foundations of the nation itself.
Fie doubted with all her heart that Sharivi had captured the foundations of aught but a cowpat, from what she’d read. But in the end, she found he’d given her one scrap of joy: the wayThe Thousand Conquestswas there one moment and naught but smoke in the next.
The Oleanders came that night after all.
It went as it had the last few weeks: first, Barf sounded the alarm. The cat had no love of Oleander Gentry, not after they’d nearly burned her alive, and since then, she’d yowl and bush her tail out when she caught the rumblings of a dozen or more riders galloping down the road. Even better, she picked up those rumbles at least a full minute ahead of when Fie could.
First the cat howled, then came hoofbeats pounding down the road in the dark, the Crows gathering a bit tighter about the campfire but making no move to flee. The three Hawks on watch would plant themselves between the camp and the road and wait, while the three at rest would sit up, spears within reach.
After that was where Fie had seen the most variation. Once, the baffled gang of Oleanders had offered to assist the Hawks in arresting the Crows. Another time, they had tried to argue with Lakima, then to threaten her, until one rider took a swing at the corporal. Fie had collected the teeth Lakima knocked out of him with particular glee.
Tonight, the Oleanders slowed as they neared the camp, clearly flummoxed by the sight of spears at the ready. Their leader took in the scene from behind a rough rag mask and evidently decided to find some other amusement.
Near two dozen riders trotted past in an awkward, uneasy parade, muttering among themselves and gawking at the guards.
Once, their undyed robes and white powders had frightened Fie. Now she had fire. Now she had steel. Now she had Hawks. The Oleander Gentry looked like children playing dress-up to her, downright silly as they rode away.
She’d always known their kind only picked fights they’d win. She just hadn’t known how it felt when they turned tail and ran.
“Do you think they’re lost?” Khoda jested, leaning on his spear. “Should I offer them directions?”
“Off a cliff, maybe,” Fie muttered, and went back to sleep.
It took them another day and a half to reach the Jawbone Gulf.
On a clear day, word was you could see all the way out to the tiny island at the most northwestern corner of Sabor, just past Rhunadei. But clear days were rare, even in the summer, and as they crested the hill overlooking the city of Domarem, the noon sun made scarce more than a coin-shaped dent in the overcast sky. Heavy fog blanketed the coast as far as the eye could see—which was barely past the water’s edge before the mist swallowed the gulf whole. All that could be seen were the shadows of crumbling spires jabbing from the waves.
Legend said that some long-dead regional governor had gotten ambitious and tried to pry the gulf open for proper trade before the waters were known as the Jawbone. Gulls, with their Birthright of reading the winds, could navigate the fog and shoals in nimble sailboats; and smugglers, with their time-honored knowledge of the maze of rocks, could slip by like minnows through a shark’s teeth.
However, only a Gull witch could command the winds to steer aheavy merchant barge safely through. With less than a hundred of those Gull witches alive in Sabor, that safe passage came at a steep price, one merchants balked at paying simply to deliver to a backwater fishing town, where half the locals were like to strip the ship apart overnight.
Domarem, the governor believed, ought to have been a jewel of Sabor, as great a trading hub in the north as Cheparok was to the south. He also believed he could manage it without paying the Gulls. Instead he’d ordered dozens of watchtowers be built atop those shoals and fitted with beacons so captains knew where to steer clear.
He’d made one fatal error, though. The beacons worked fairly well at night, glowing through the heavy fog to mark safe passage.
They weren’t worth a damn during the day.
And since the governor had vexed the Gulls, their witches took his coin no more. So the governor never got his trading hub, and so the towers eroded into ruined fangs, and so the governor’s dream starved away, leaving only the mocking name of the Jawbone Gulf behind. Or so the legend said.
Fie reckoned Domarem involved far too many cliffs to make a practical trading port anyhow, though she knew that’d never stop a Peacock convinced of his own genius. Half the city seemed carved straight into the bluffs, and the other half looked as if it had just slid off the rock and piled up closer to the shore. The docks teemed with dinghies, coracles, and sails dyed the vivid, cheery blue that Gulls favored. The sails of southern Gulls tended to fade with sun and seawater, but the mussels they used for pigment grew so abundant here that the silver sands rippled with indigo streaks of crushed shell.
As they drew near the gates, Corporal Lakima asked delicately, “Will we be walking you in?”
It was a dance they’d near-perfected in the last few weeks, though it had taken time. The entire point of haven shrines was to have secretplaces where Crows, andonlyCrows, could seek refuge. It was one thing to sneak a prince and his bodyguard through two or three as Fie had done. It was an entirely different matter to lead six Hawk soldiers straight into every Crow shrine they encountered.
