Sure enough, black lines adorned the Hawk guard’s unburnt wrist.
“Hear that?” Fie spoke loud enough for Pa to catch, trying not to think how close, how sharp the sword’s tip loomed. “He was just looking at your witch-sign.”
She counted one breath, then two, then three, never breaking Tavin’s stare.
Then the blade vanished in a hiss of a sheath, as swift as it had appeared. Tavin nodded, curt. “Of course I can hear him now. He’s figured out how to use his words.”
Fie dragged Hangdog over to Pa before he figured out words the prince or his guard dog found more offensive.
Pa shook his head as the last few globs of flashburn oozed from the jug onto cold wood. “Near one,” he said under his breath. “Hawk fools are still Hawks. Let’s not forget the claws, aye?”
“Aye, Pa.” Fie hated the shake of her hands, the old wrath curdling her veins. Oath or no, Hawk boys still liked to see Crows jump when they flashed steel. She wouldn’t forget twice.
Pa pressed something small, hard, and familiar into Fie’s palm. His voice rose. “You two will stay back to mind the fire. No call to salt it without sinners. Meet us at the haven shrine once it’s burned low. Everyone else, we’re clearing out.”
“Flint,” Hangdog called as the other Crows grabbed their cart-ropes. “It’s still in the cart.”
Pa shook his head, pointing at Fie. “No need.”
She uncurled her fist. A single milk tooth waited there, gleaming bright against her fingers. Startled, she looked to Pa.
He just nodded. “Go on, girl.”
Fie set her other hand over the Phoenix tooth, rolling it betwixt her palms like a gambler about to throw a shell. It only took a moment’s focus to find the spark of old life buried deep within, a ghost slumbering in bone. This was unlike any spark she’d dug up before—but Pa wouldn’t give her aught she couldn’t conquer.
Closing her eyes, Fie pulled her hands apart. The spark broke free.
She saw silk and gold, sandstone courtyards, a fist thrust into fire before a cheering, jewel-dusted crowd. No hunger, no fear, only the weight of terrible ambition. Then, like the beast before, it vanished—all but a flickering heat still in the palm of her hand.
She opened her eyes. The tooth was burning.
Fie felt no pain, even though the rag strips wrapped about her palm had begun to char. Fire wouldn’t harm a Phoenix, nor, it seemed, the witch who called royal ghosts. The small flame burned bright, pure gold, as if Fie held sunlight itself. She rolled her shirtsleeve from elbow to shoulder and focused on the spark once more. Fragments came to her: archery practice, a lover waiting in the amber-pod gardens, a ceremony committing the teeth of a dead uncle to the viatik stash … then, at last, what she’d sought. Candle-flame, winding round fingers like a purring kitten.
Fie clung to the way the dead Phoenix had threaded the fire with his will, then sought the answering hum in her own bones. One rattled up her spine. She’d called out the spark, joined it to her own power. Now it was time to make it sing.
With her head and her heart and all of her bones, Fie pulled.
The tooth erupted in her outstretched hand. Heat blasted through the clearing, gasps turning to awed curses as too-bright flames clawed at the stars.
The first time Pa had spoken to Fie of being a witch, he’d started with the gods.
Eons ago, he’d told her, when the thousand gods had founded their castes and chosen their graves, they’d left one final blessing before they died: a Birthright for every caste.
Every caste, that was, save the Crows.
The gods who begat the Crows had a bad sense of humor. Crows came into the world with no blessings, but their witches had a gift all the same. It was why other castes called them bone thieves: their gift was stealing Birthrights.
In the years after, she’d learned the ways of a Crow witch under Pa’s watchful eye. She could call any Birthright from the cast-off bones of the living or the dead, as long as its spark lasted for her.
But why, she’d asked long ago, did the thousand gods have to die?
And Pa had answered: Everything has a price, Fie. Especially change. Even Phoenixes need ash to rise from. Do you know how many witches there are in Sabor?
She’d shaken her head.
One thousand, Pa had told her. We had to rise from something.
She’d never wholly believed it. She’d never once felt like a god.
But with fire, the Birthright of royals, howling in the palm of her hand, Fie felt like one now.
She took a breath and reeled the fire back to a respectable blaze, but a prickle on her neck said eyes still lingered on her. Sure enough, the Hawk’s thin squint was one she knew too well. It belonged to someone adjusting how they’d first sized her up.
The prince, on the other hand, looked appalled. Fie reckoned he didn’t like the sight of divine Phoenix fire in her low-caste hands—then she saw that no witch-sign adorned either of his.
The dead gods had left their graves as havens for their castes, sites where Birthrights were heightened to rival even a witch’s power. The royal palace squatted atop every single Phoenix god-grave in Sabor, less a haven and more a show of strength. Within its walls, any of Ambra’s line could call some measure of fire, witch or not. But outside Dumosa—perhaps for the first time—Prince Jasimir was powerless.
She glanced to Pa. He was beating down a smile once more. He’d made his point loud and plain: the prince had his steel and his pet Hawk, but the Crows still had his teeth.
Fie tossed the tooth to the pyre. It would burn as long as she willed it, until its spark burned out. The flashburn caught with a crack, white flames chasing out a swarm of sparks. Fie dusted her hands off, took a few steps back, and shot a sideways look at the lordlings. Perhaps now they would bury their high-and-mighty nonsense.
But Tavin was peering into the beak of the mask. “Why is there mint in here?”
Pa just whistled the marching signal in answer.
“We’re moving out,” Wretch translated for the lordlings. The cart creaked an affirmation.
Fie turned back to the pyre and kept her eyes there. Soon enough, the footfalls and wooden groans faded down the road, into the night beyond the fire.
Her palm itched with the memory of tickling flame. The tooth had been so old, the spark so small—its owner had been dead for decades, maybe centuries. And yet for that brief moment, it had burned fierce enough to light Sabor ablaze from mountain to coast if she’d let it.
Part of her wanted to.
That was false. The thought rolled round her head like a tooth in her hand. It wasn’t that she wanted to burn the world down, no. She just wanted the world to know that she could.
“It’s a bad deal.”
Hangdog’s voice broke above the hiss of flashburn.
Fie shook her head, stuffing down thoughts of blazing tyranny. “It’s always a bad deal.”
“Not like this it isn’t.”
With neither Pa nor lordlings to puff up for, the ache of the long, long day clipped her temper even shorter. She might have softened her tongue for Hangdog long ago, when the two of them still slipped away to more private groves. They’d had an understanding of their own: Crow bands only had one chief in the end, so for their time together, they shared little more than short-lived need. But moons and moons had passed since they last reached for each other, and her patience had worn threadbare in more places than one.