“You’re the only one keen to test that,” she snapped, then stopped cold.
Her eyes had adjusted to the little torchlight filtering through the hut’s canvas window screens. The lordlings were already tightly cocooned in linen shrouds on their red-stained pallets, a blot of blood seeping through the fabric at each throat.
Bundling up the dead was their job, not Pa’s.
“Maybe chief didn’t trust us to get it right.” Hangdog didn’t sound like he was grinning anymore.
That was nonsense. The two of them had handled shrouding for five years now, ever since Hangdog had come to her band for chief training.
“If Pa’s got reasons, he’ll tell us,” she lied. “Sooner these scummers are on the cart, sooner we clear the damn patchouli.”
There was a short, muffled laugh as Hangdog picked up one body by the shoulders. Fie took the feet and backed through the door, feeling every gaze in the courtyard alight on her—and then dart to the bloody shroud.
Quiet shrieks ruffled through the Peacock courtiers as Fie swung the body up onto the cart. Hangdog gave it an extra heave. It toppled onto heaps of firewood with an unceremonious thud, knocking over a pile of kindling. A collective gasp swept the galleries.
Fie wanted to kick Hangdog.
Pa cleared his throat, muttering pointedly, “Mercy. Merciful Crows.”
“We’ll be nice,” Hangdog said as they headed back inside. He’d just picked up the remaining body by the feet when he added, “Wager someone faints if we drop this one.”
Fie shook her head. “Pa can sell your hide to a skinwitch, not mine.”
The second body was met with another round of sobs as they loaded it. Yet once the Crows began to haul their cart toward the courtyard’s gateway, the Peacock courtiers miraculously overcame their sorrow enough to jostle at the lattices for a better look.
The spectators’ enraptured angst grated like a broken axle. The dead boys must have been favorites of the royal Phoenix caste if this many Peacocks battled to out-grieve one another.
Fie’s skin crawled. Of all the bodies she had ever dragged off to burn, she decided she hated these two most.
To reach the quarantine court, they’d been all but smuggled down cramped, plain servant passageways; now a stone-faced Hawk hustled them straight through the belly of the palace. The longer the bodies lingered, the greater the odds the plague would pick a new victim.
Fie’s spite grew with every marvel they passed. Their cart clattered over ceramic inlays in mesmerizing whorls, past gardens of amber-pod wafting its perfume through the damp late-spring night, and into arching corridors of alabaster and bronze. Every pillar, every alcove, every tile paid some tribute to the Phoenix royals: a sun, a gold feather, a curl of flame.
The Hawk threw open a set of enormous ebony doors and pointed her spear inside. “You’ll know your way from here.”
Pa motioned them on, and the cart creaked into what could only be the fabled Hall of the Dawn. They’d emerged at the head of the hall, which was crowned with a dais; the way out waited far, far down a grand walkway bracketed in more galleries. Great black iron pillars held up an arched ceiling, each cut like a lantern into the likeness of a dead Phoenix monarch. Fires burned within every column, hot enough to cling to Fie’s arms even from the door.
Most of the hall was lacquered in deep purples, scarlets, and indigos, but frothy gilt laced the railings of each gallery, and at the dais, a grand disc of mirror-polished gold sat on the far wall above a pool of fire. Gem-studded rays of gold fanned all the way to the roof. Every facet hoarded up firelight until the dais hurt to look at straight on. The whole mess made a sun that rose behind the Phoenix thrones.
The empty Phoenix thrones.
Fie sucked in a breath. No king, no queen, and neither the older prince nor the new one here to mourn the dead lordlings, yet the gentry wailed as if their fortunes depended on it. It didn’t make sense. But whatever this was, whatever had fouled up, Pa would get them out as he had every time before.
They rolled onto the walkway and began to march.
She hated the way the hall’s slick marble tiles whined against the nails spiking her sandal soles, dulling them with every step. She hated the perfume oils besmirching the stagnant air. And most of all, she hated the galleries of Peacock gentry, who shuddered daintily in their satins as if the Crows were no more than a parade of rats.
But behind the Hawk guards stood a silent legion in the brown tunics of Sparrow-caste palace servants, near outnumbering the courtiers above. Harrowed expressions said their grief was more than decorative.
The pinch in Fie’s gut returned with a vengeance. Nobody liked Peacocks that much.
This was bad business, treating with castes too high to fear the plague. At this rate Pa would be throttling their viatik fee out at the gate. At this rate, maybe they wouldn’t get paid at all.
Then, halfway to the door and ten paces ahead of the cart, Pa stopped.
At first Fie didn’t understand. Then her eyes skipped to the colossal palace gate, the final landmark betwixt them and the capital city of Dumosa. It had been built large enough for parades of dignitaries and mammoth riders alike; it would swallow the thirteen Crows and their cart easy enough.
And sure enough, a lone sentry stood at the gate, waiting to pay viatik for the dead.
The woman was a glittering specter, from her unbound cascades of silvery hair to the silk white gown that barely rippled in the sluggish breeze. Even from so far off, the telltale shatter of moonlight and torch-flame on her finery promised enough gems to feed Fie’s whole band of Crows—twelve hells, maybe the entire Crow caste—for her lifetime. But one thing carried more weight than the sum of her jewels: the collar around her neck.
Two hands of gold, cradling a sun that dawned below her collarbones. It was the royal crest. Fie had seen those hands stamped into every Saborian coin and woven into every flag, and now she could say she’d seen them wrapped around the neck of a queen.
Marriage had made the woman a Phoenix, but she’d been called the Swan Queen even before she left the courtesan caste’s pavilions. One of those empty thrones Fie’d passed belonged to her.
And in that moment, Fie kenned what part of tonight had fouled up.
It had been five hundred years, or somewhere near it, since the Sinner’s Plague had touched the royal palace. Five hundred years since Phoenixes had lit that plague beacon. Five hundred years since they’d called for Crows.
But if Queen Rhusana was here to pay viatik for these sinner boys, Fie knew sore plain who was under one of their shrouds.
The Crows were hauling the crown prince of Sabor to his funeral pyre.
CHAPTER TWO
THE MONEY DANCE
A dead prince lay in their cart like any other sinner, not an arm’s length away. Fie could scarce believe it. A prince. A Phoenix.
Some morbid part of her wondered if Phoenix boys burned like any other sinner. Maybe slower. At least they had the poor bastard beside him to compare.
But Pa didn’t move, still fixed to the spot even as the rest of the band pulled the cart nearer. And then Fie saw why.
The queen at the gate meant to pay them, to be sure; the steward at her side held the viatik in plain view. A viatik’s worth fit the family’s means, that was the rule. A Sparrow farmer might pay them in a sack of salt or dried panbread; a Crane magistrate might offer panes of glassblack. Viatik for royalty, though … Fie didn’t even know what would be proper.