CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
PLAYING THE FOOL
Tavin didn’t speak to her for an uncomfortable few minutes, pacing slowly down the sandstone walkway, her arm tucked into his. Fie didn’t know what awaited her, but from Jasimir’s face, it had to be something grotesque. Maybe it was a prison, or a scandalous exile from the palace grounds. Maybe something worse.
Fie dragged each breath in time with her steps, trying to steady her pounding heart. Rhusana would want her timid and trembling; Fie’d give no such satisfaction to her, nor to Tavin as her surrogate.
The silence swelled between them until a croak burst it like an overfilled water skin. Startled, Fie looked up.
Two crows perched on a nearby arbor shawled in purple wisteria. A third landed and cawed as she and Tavin drew closer.
Tavin’s brow furrowed at the sight.
“Are they not common in the south?” Fie asked after a moment. Her voice creaked from disuse. “Crows, that is.”
He blinked, almost as if he were startled to find her still there. “Not in the palace.”
Fie prodded the spark of Niemi’s tooth.If you ever wanted to flirt with a prince, now’s your chance.
The spark had kept its peace since Rhusana had cast them from the pavilion, no doubt seething that a Crow girl could tarnish her name so badly. The prospect of snaring a prince, though, was one too juicy for Niemi not to bite.
“I imagine there are much finer sights to see in the royal menagerie,” Niemi cooed through Fie. “Is it as marvelous as the rest of the grounds?”
“Well, it’s down a white tiger now,” Tavin muttered under his breath.
Fie felt her head tilt. “Is something amiss? I know I let myself get carried away earlier, but… we can still be friends, can’t we?”
She didn’t catch Tavin’s answer. A jolt had clutched her as they turned onto another pathway—the same strange, nameless dread that had clung to her in the hedge tunnels the night before, when she’d trailed him from the Hall of the Dawn. Every step seemed to send a clear, uncanny note through her bones until they hummed back.
Mercifully, if Tavin waited on a reply, he didn’t show it, marching stone-faced past another grand pavilion in shades of scarlet, violet, and orange—the Sunset Pavilion, no doubt. If he felt anything like the radiating tone ofwrong, he didn’t show that, either. Instead he steered them closer to the royal quarters, which swelled up above them to provide a better view of the gardens. They passed an arch with a stone phoenix perching on skulls at its crest, marking a set of stairs that descended belowground, and instead climbed a flight of marble steps, emerging to a small plaza under the main veranda of the royal quarters.
That was when Fie saw it, less than a pace away.
It was as if the gods had simply punched out a great, perfect circle in the middle of the paving stones. Fie reckoned she could lie her entire band down in a head-to-foot line and still not touch both sides. Its walls were slick, unbroken glassblack, and the surface of the water could have been one more unmarred pane, still and black and seemingly bottomless. It lay too far below to touch—
Too far below to climb out.
And suddenly Fie knew, without words, that the horrible ring in her bones was coming from below the surface.
“I take it they don’t talk about the Well of Grace in the north,” Tavin said quietly.
She jumped, and his grip on her arm tightened. The edge was much too near for comfort. “N-no,” Fie stammered.
He was staring at the water. “It’s against the law, and the Hawk code, to raise a blade against royalty. So that rules out beheading. And Phoenixes can’t exactly die by fire. So this”—he waved his free hand at the waters—“is for when a Phoenix needs to be executed. Thegrace, you see, is the ordeal—fighting not to drown for as long as you can. It can take hours, even days. It’s supposed to be terrible enough that when the Covenant weighs the sins that got you executed, it’s balanced out by the suffering you endured, and then you can be born a Phoenix again.”
“How many—?” Fie couldn’t finish the question. From what she’d seen in the memories of Phoenix teeth, they were inordinately fond of recreational murder. There could be dozens, perhaps more than a hundred bodies at the bottom of that well. No wonder her bones ached so, from all that wretched, hopeless death.
“No one can say,” Tavin admitted. “Sometimes they fish out the bodies once they start floating, if they’re still worthy of being buriedin the royal catacombs. Not always. And it’s not just for Phoenixes, but also for the people who cross them. Not even a Gull witch could summon enough wind to carry themselves out. They’ve tried.”
Fie shot him a sidelong look. Tavin was slipping, calling the Phoenixesthem.
But suddenly his eyes cut to her. “Lady Sakar,” he said, terse. “Do you understand why the queen asked me to bring you here?”
The people who cross them.
Fie froze.
It had been a long, long time since she’d looked at Tavin as a boy who could kill her.
