Her nose. Fie tasted salt and copper tracks flaking on her lips. She scrubbed them away with a sleeve. “It doesn’t matter.”
Tavin nodded, still oddly off-balance, but a heartbeat later, humor glossed over his face once more.
“As for how I spend my nights … you might win that wager, you know.” Tavin rolled off the branch, effortless, dangling from his fingertips as he flashed that damned grin up at her. “If you’re counting only the girls.”
He dropped. The branch sprang back and near flung Fie off. She swore and flailed for a handhold.
Tavin landed and gallantly stretched out his arms. “Let go, I’ll catch you!”
“Get scummed,” she spat, and made her own way out of the tree.
By the time Fie touched ground, Jasimir had gone to work fishing out any goods that could be salvaged from the still-burning wagon, ducking his head with embarrassment as Wretch and Madcap lauded each rescue.
Tavin in turn had commandeered the cat. He shook his head when Fie stalked over, frowning at Barf’s bloodied paw.
“Give me a bit,” he muttered, distracted. “Looks worse than it is. At least, now it does. She tried scratching her way out.”
Fie watched a torn toepad slowly knit together and swallowed her spite. Perhaps the Hawk witch had some usefulness to him yet. For all his pompous nonsense, the prince had proven as much for himself.
And from the drawn look on Jasimir’s soot-streaked face, he’d learned the fear of strangers in the night after all.
But one Crow still hadn’t returned from the dark. Fie thumbed a certain Crow tooth in her string, worry gumming in her belly. The milk tooth gave off a sullen but welcome simmer, kin to the one knotted beside it. One tooth from Pa, one tooth from Hangdog, both burning bright in her mind. Crow teeth had no Birthright to conjure, but they carried a spark if their owner yet lived. Either Hangdog hadn’t crossed the Oleanders yet, or they’d passed him by.
Half a weight lifted from her shoulders. The rest stayed as she and the other Crows bundled up their meager surviving supplies into makeshift packs.
Then, at last, the light of the still-burning wagon carved Hangdog from the dark of the road, fake feet coiled around one shoulder, eyes hollow. A long scratch left red trails across one cheekbone, the only wound Fie could spy.
“Did you see them?” Pa asked.
Hangdog blinked, then nodded. After a moment he cleared his throat. “Rode by.”
“How far?”
Hangdog didn’t answer, eyes on the fire.
When he’d first come to their band five years ago, he’d not spoken for nigh two moons. Another Crow chief had found him the dawn after an Oleander raid, the only survivor. That chief wouldn’t repeat what she’d seen in the ruined camp, aside from a silent scrap of a witch-boy still clutching a fistful of spent Sparrow teeth. But she did let one thing slip: what had happened to Hangdog’s kin, what Hangdog had witnessed that night … it was all in full sight of the finest Peacock manor in the region.
“Far,” Hangdog said after a heavy silence. Another dark bead welled in his bloody scratch. “They won’t be back.”
Tavin shifted the cat to tap his own cheek. “I can fix your f—”
“No.” Hangdog sat by Fie, setting his false feet in the dirt beside them.
Fie glanced back to the Hawk. He raised his eyebrows at her. She ignored him and returned to the heap of supplies.
“Did you hear?” she asked Hangdog under her breath, knotting a bit of twine in one corner of the grass mat she was fashioning into a pack. “The riders. They said our days were numbered. They said—”
“‘Long reign the queen.’” Hangdog tried to help her fold the pallet over its contents, but it slipped from his shaking hands. “Aye. I heard.”
“The lordlings spoke true,” she whispered. “The queen—”
“I know.” Hangdog swore under his breath as he fumbled the mat again.
Fie hadn’t seen him this shaken in years. Ever, perhaps. She couldn’t blame him. The threat was real. They’d been sold to the Oleander Gentry for a throne.
And if she couldn’t get the prince to his allies, every Crow in Sabor would pay the price.
This road had trapped her, trapped Pa, trapped them all in the way only roads could—no going back now. For her ma, for her kin, she would walk it to the end.
Or, part of her whispered into the night, she was bound to die trying.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TWELVE SHELLS
Pa kept more Pigeon teeth than they could ever hope to use. After all, teeth were the easiest and cheapest viatik at hand, and city folk of any caste seldom parted with anything valuable without a knife in their face to encourage them. With the Birthright of luck, Pigeon teeth could bend fortune in the smallest ways: a timely look to catch a pickpocket, a spare three-naka coin in the gutter, a solid guess on six out of twelve gambling shells.
Pigeon witches, though, could play fortune like a flute. They wrought havoc or blessings as they willed, inviting a flush harvest as easy as a citywide scourge of rats. Lucky for Sabor, witches of the Common Castes were among the rarest, and their wayward teeth even rarer.
And at dawn, Pa hoisted the only Pigeon witch-tooth he had into the clammy air, knotted his fist around it, and closed his eyes.
Fie saw no change, but after a moment Pa lowered his arm. “Done.”
Hangdog just shook his head and began walking down the road. He’d called it a waste; he’d been the only one. The rest of the band knew that with half their supplies burned up in the ruined wagon, they were sore overdue for good fortune.
“What comes now?” Tavin asked, standing behind Jasimir.
The prince knelt in the packed dirt of the flatway, face turned to the east and the rising sun, lips moving in a silent prayer. Barf sat beside him, tail flicking in the dust. Fie had heard the Phoenix caste kept rituals to honor the dawn. At the moment, she would have rather honored some breakfast.
“No telling,” Pa answered, rubbing a hand over his beard. “But we’ll know when it finds us.”
His eyes locked on the empty road behind them, where naught lurked but dirt washed in dawn-gray shadow. Then he slung a weighty sack from his back and fished inside, emerging with two teeth.
“Fie.” His hand twitched toward her.
She took the teeth. Twin Pigeon sparks burned inside—not witch sparks but the plain kind.
“It’s time you learned to use two at once. That was too close last night.” That should have been his Pa voice. Instead it was his Chief voice, quiet, immovable—unsettling. It rose as he turned to the rest of the band. “Swain. How far left to go?”
The lanky Crow tweaked a rolled-up map jutting from his pack. “We’re near the coast. One day until we walk the Fan region proper. From there, two days to the Cheparok fortress.”
“I sent a message-hawk to our contact in Cheparok before we were quarantined.” Tavin helped Prince Jasimir to his feet. “He’s a Markahn stationed in the markets. His commanding officer will alert the governor to light the fortress’s plague beacon once I give them the signal. That gives us an excuse to walk right up to Governor Kuvimir’s front gate.”
Pa nodded and whistled the marching call, casting one final look behind him. “Then let’s hope our good luck holds out awhile.”