“What would you have done?” Fie snapped.
Hangdog’s face turned harsh as the flashburn began to fade out, yielding to the bloody orange of wood-flame. One hand grazed his jaw. “I would’ve cut their throats back in their ugly palace.”
“And let the Oleanders run loose?”
He spat on the fire. “Does it matter? That piss-baby prince can’t keep that oath.” His eyes turned hollow. “If they knew a damn thing about the Oleanders, they’d know better than to try scaring us with them.”
Fie bit her tongue. For all his talk of cutting throats, she saw the way Hangdog pinched his ragged sleeve between a thumb and forefinger. The question was which was stronger: his fear of the Oleander Gentry, or his hate of the actual gentry.
“They should know better,” he said again, and his voice pulled distant and furious all at once.
She held out her hand. He took it, holding tight enough for his pulse to drum against her fingers where Phoenix fire had burned moments ago.
The false pyre raged and roared before them, devouring its empty shrouds. If they’d been full, Pa would have tossed salt into the fire and welcomed them to the Crow roads in the next life. The lordlings hadn’t even had to die to start walking Crow ways.
Fear crept up Fie’s spine, whispering that they would be caught, whispering that Pa would be bound to the oath forever, whispering the worst of all: that Hangdog was right.
She held his hand, minded the pyre, and tried not to think of Phoenix teeth.
* * *
Morning came too soon and found Fie too quick. She hid her face from the slashes of sun through reed screens as long as she could, curling deeper into her thin blanket. In the end, it was the smell that pried her up from the sleeping mat: fresh panbread sizzling on a griddle. She sniffed again and caught fried soft cheese and honey, her favorite.
Only Pa cooked panbread that way, and when he did, it meant one of two things: either she’d earned a treat, or he needed a favor.
Curiosity and hunger rolled her to her feet, and she stretched in the empty haven shrine. It had been halfway to dawn before she and Hangdog had finally made it to the camp. The handful of hours she’d slept weren’t near enough, but they’d have to do.
Fie peered about the small room, trying to remember which god had been buried here. Urns of teeth huddled about a central idol’s base, but those sat in every shrine to a Crow god. Fie’s bones hummed with the drone of hundreds of teeth at work: lowly Sparrow to keep the shrine unnoticed, lordly Peacock to weave an illusion of trees in its place.
No Oleanders would find them here, nor in any other haven shrine. Pa said nigh two hundred of them were stashed about Sabor; he also said the Crows would be lost without them. Only shrines gave them a safe place to raise tots until they were old enough to walk the roads, or to tend the sick and wounded, or to leave spare goods for another band short on luck.
Crude, flaking murals stained the clay walls with dead gods everywhere she looked, scrawling out the crafting of the world. In one corner, the first gods made their thousand god-children; in another, the thousand gods struck the Covenant, bringing death, judgment, and rebirth into the world. Until that moment, humans had been naught but the gods’ playthings, with no will of their own.
Fie wasn’t sure they’d improved much since.
A few Crow gods loomed in the murals: Loyal Star Hama guarding sleeping Crows, Crossroads-Eyes leading them away from treacherous roads, Dena Wrathful and her hundred-hundred teeth. Pa had left Fie and her ma in Dena Wrathful’s own ruined temple for Fie’s early moons; Ma had told her that they’d known Fie for a witch when, soon as she could crawl, they’d found her giggling among the shrine’s bones night after night.
This shrine’s idol splayed six worn hands, clasping a compass, hammer, staff, blanket, basket, and crow. A cart wheel made her crown.
Maykala. Patroness of weary travelers. Proper to be sure. Fie bowed to her ancestor and pushed through the doorway’s faded crowsilk curtain, scooping up her sandals from the threshold.
Hangdog slept yet in a heap beneath the shrine’s eaves. The other Crows shuffled about the clearing, rolling up sleeping mats and shaking out cloaks. They gave a strange wide berth to the fire, where Pa tended to a smoking griddle and a growing stack of panbread.
A rasp-rasp-rasp drew Fie’s eye to the culprit: the lordlings sat across the fire from Pa. One of them dragged a whetstone along an unsheathed blade; the other stared, grim, into the flames. They’d changed to mismatched crowsilk shirts and trousers from the shrine’s viatik stash. Both wore the castoffs like ill-fitting costumes.
Beside them sat Besom, the shrine’s keeper and maybe the oldest Crow Fie had ever known, with Barf the tabby curled in her lap. Not many Crows lived long enough to feel the ache of old bones. Those who did spent their elder years keeping the teeth-spells of a haven shrine alight, passing rumors and warnings from band to band, and pointing them down different roads so no one region wound up glutted with Crows. Besom’s hair had grayed long before they’d met, her brown hands stained night-purple from picking and weaving the crowsilk lichen that bearded the tree boughs. Though her fingers were gnarled as old vines, they worked a web of thread nimbly enough as she mumbled to Pa.
“Three?”
“Three, aye. We’ll stretch them as long as we can.”
Fie headed over as Besom fished in a bag lying in the sun-yellowed grass. No doubt the old keeper was knotting Phoenix teeth into a chief’s string for Pa. Neither lordling glanced up from fire or sword-whetting. It was a blessing in disguise, for even by daylight Fie couldn’t mark which of the two was the prince.
As soon as Fie sat, Pa plucked the puff of panbread from the griddle, dropped it into a clean rag, drizzled it with honey and a pinch of salt, and handed it to her. “Here.”
One lordling paused the scrape of stone on steel. “Oh, are we eating now?”
That amiable act could only be the Hawk boy. Both lordlings eyed the stack of panbread like tax owed to the crown; Fie recalled them saying they hadn’t much to eat for three days.
She looked the Hawk boy square in the eye and bit off a chunk of panbread.
“Aye, we can eat now.” Pa twisted about to call to the rest of the Crows, and likely also to hide his grin. His voice carried across the clearing. “Breakfast time, you lot.”
Tavin flicked his hand at her. “Pass a couple for me and Jas, will you?”
“Can’t. Hands’re full.” Fie took another monstrous bite.
The Hawk muttered a curse and scrambled to reach the panbread heap before the others. Pa scarce had time to dash salt over two rounds before Tavin snatched them away. Prince Jasimir shot Fie a dirty look over the campfire, waiting while Tavin bit off a scrap of each, chewed them over, then tore off the untouched halves and handed them to the prince.
There was a moment’s peace as Pa salted panbread and passed it to Crows. Then Prince Jasimir spoke up. “Your glamour’s wearing off.”
Tavin swallowed with a grimace. “We can leave it for a few days.”
“Don’t they have Peacock teeth? They can fix it.” The prince jerked his head at Pa.
Pa raised his eyebrows. “You’ve a Peacock glamour, then?”
Tavin nodded. “For my face. I mean, I’m Jas’s double for a reason, but you can still tell us apart without one.”