Fie followed him into the study. Sure enough, Rhusana had clearly made camp in here, but from the way Jasimir was trailing fingers over his bursting, dusty shelves, the queen hadn’t had the time or care to clear them out. They were crammed with scrolls, with rolled-up maps, even rare bound tomes from across the sea. One shelf was a great collection of seashells and dried starfish; another was cluttered with strange spiral rocks, like snail shells turned to stone. A window seat overlooked the waterfall Fie had stood beside the night before, the lantern-lilies still violently red by day.
But a map of Sabor had been tacked over the far wall. Tiny flags dotted dozens of spots that might have seemed random to a stranger’s eye, matching no label or symbol on the map itself. Fie drew closer, throat closing.
Rhusana couldn’t have—
She had.
Little Witness’s watchtower, marked with a flag.
The shrine of Maykala, marked with a flag.
The groves of Gen-Mara, marked with a flag.
Crow shrines, the only places left for them to seek shelter in Sabor,marked with flags. Not all of them, though; Fie saw blanks where she knew shrines lay, like Dena Wrathful’s temple, and Crossroads-Eyes’ great tree. But so, so many. Too many.
They should have been unfindable. Peacock teeth to weave an illusion, Sparrow teeth to ward off attention—these were sown in every shrine. Fie had never heard of anyone but Crows finding the way in on their own, not unless the keeper wanted them to.
She found the answer in a dish beside the map: a skein of hair and scraps of skin. Her own memory supplied the rest. The first and last time she’d tried to use a Sparrow tooth on skin-ghasts, there had been no gaze for her to turn away. A Peacock glamour would fail too.
Rhusana was using her ghasts to scour every last bit of Sabor, until she found every last shrine.
“Fie.” Jasimir’s voice said he’d found something near as bad. She turned and found him thumbing through one of the many stacks of parchment on the desk. He looked ill. “These are official decrees. This one bans Crows from owning property within Sabor. This one bans anyone from representing Crows before a magistrate. This one says anyone who does business with a Crow will be jailed for a year.” He flipped through more. “You… you get the idea. Rhusana has signed them all. They’ve even got the royal seal. But they can’t go into effect without signatures from ‘Prince Jasimir’ and Draga.”
It felt like a nail pounding into Fie’s heart, each order, with the horror of the map on the wall. She pointed a shaking hand at it. “Those are all Crow shrines, Jas. She’s—she’s going to tell the Oleander Gentry where the shrines are.”
Jasimir put a hand to his mouth. A breath later, it curled into a fist.
“All right,” he said swiftly. “We’re not going to panic.”
“We aren’t?” Fie asked, trying and failing to keep her tone from hitting a glass-shattering high.
“No. This is bad, but—we can do… something.” He snatched up a blank parchment and a quill, laying it flat over one of the orders. “I’m going to try to copy her signature and we’ll figure out the seal. We’ll draft an order to cancel those orders, or postpone them, orsomething.We can’t take the map—Rhusana will ransack the entire palace to find it—but you can move the flags around.”
Fie pulled a flag out, then stopped. “They leave holes. She’ll know where they belong.”
“Then put more holes in,” Jasimir said with a strained kind of calm. “Really, Fie, since when do I need to tell you to stab things?”
“I’m starting to think helping you fake your death was a good thing,” Fie said under her breath. She started with the great shrines, Pa’s and Little Witness’s, poking the flag in a few times before settling somewhere off the mark, then she carried on to the smaller shrines. But it was slower work than she thought, and she’d only scattered a dozen or so flags before Rhusana’s voice carried down the hall.
“Window seat,” Fie hissed, shoving a final flag wildly off its marker.
Jasimir grimaced at his copied parchment. Fie could see Rhusana’s signature was mostly done, but there was no time. He shoved it under the other parchment sheets, dropped the quill in the inkwell, closed the study door, and rushed to join her on the window seat. Fie called the Sparrow witch-tooth back to life a moment before the door slid open.
“—take long. You just need to sign some decrees.” Rhusana breezed in.
Tavin followed in her wake, face stormy. “They won’t be legally binding until after the coronation, you know.”
“I’d rather avoid any unnecessary delays.” Rhusana swept up the parchment slips and handed them over. “Here.”
Tavin scanned one after another, a trench deepening between his brows. “You want to send Hawks to raid Crow shrines?” he demanded,tossing the parchments back on the desk. “What is the matter with you? Why can’t you just leave the Crows alone? They’ve done nothing but their job.”
Rhusana narrowed her eyes, then, surprisingly, leaned against the desk. Perhaps it was the fact that she needed him to sign the decrees; perhaps it was that, with plague swelling in the palace and spies in every shadow, the queen wanted just one person to speak plain with, and Tavin was the one who couldn’t betray her without risking his own neck.
Either way, a forlorn crack wormed through her porcelain façade. “Do you know what my mother told me, when I was old enough to know I was neither a Swan nor a Vulture?”
Tavin stared back, then folded his arms. “Fine. I’ll bite. What childhood trauma doyouthink justifies mass murder?”
The queen shook her head. “Hardly. I asked my mother how I could be a witch when witches are supposed to be the old gods born into their own caste, but I was born of two. And she told me what I’ll tell you: that just makes us new gods. Do you get it?” She waved a hand glimmering with pearls and white gold. “The old gods are dead, andwe’resupposed to keep the caste system they locked us into?Forever?That’s nonsense. Only children look at the world and think twelve little boxes is enough. It’s no way to live.”
