Jasimir didn’t say anything, just staggered to a patch of seagrass and dropped. Fie cast a last look behind her, then found her own sandy hassock and allowed her legs to give out. The hilt of Pa’s sword jabbed into her ribs until she laid it aside.
Then, finally, she pulled the dumplings from her bag and took a bite.
Pa should have salted it for her first, as a Crow chief did.
Pa wasn’t there.
The pastry dough was dry, the maize and tripe gooey. It glued to the inside of her mouth and stuck there as she chewed, a thick wad that hurt as she gulped it down. A faint snore said Jasimir had already fallen asleep.
Through the bottlebrushes of sandpine needles, she saw the pale streak of sand, a gray blur of ocean, and, too far away, the unyielding walls of Cheparok.
The next bite was harder to chew, harder to swallow.
A faraway part of her wished for a drink of water. Then the absurdity hit. She’d had plenty of water today, from the gentry’s freshest reservoir to the canals of Third Market. She’d just been drowning at the time, was all.
A bubble of broken laughter turned to a shuddering cough, then a sob, and then Fie curled in on herself as she drowned again, this time in salt and fire running from her eyes, from her nose, from her mouth.
She wanted a campfire, she wanted a kettle of stew, she wanted Madcap’s jests and Swain’s nebbish sneer and Wretch’s scoffs. She wanted walking songs and salt. She wanted Pa’s voice.
She wanted her damned cat.
Fingers brushed her quaking shoulder, then vanished, a misstep corrected. Sand shifted at her right as someone sat.
“I’m sorry,” Tavin said.
Part of her shriveled with shame at weeping like this before him. The rest was too raw and furious to give a damn.
“I’m sorry about my cousin in the market,” he continued. “I’m sorry about my … about the Hawks, how they treated—how—how we treat you. And I’m sorry for making you keep the oath. I didn’t—I don’t—” His voice hitched, and he cut himself off a moment. “Rhusana gave the Crows over to the Oleanders, but Jas and I brought your family into this mess ourselves. I’m so sorry.”
She wanted to hit him. She wanted him to stay. She wanted him to be speaking true.
But the weeping didn’t go away. Neither did he.
The words spilled out like her tears, burning, unstoppable. “I hate it. I hate how, how we’re always the ones who have to keep our mouths shut and take it and keep doing our job, because we’re Crows. You can kick us around anytime because we all know if we kick back, you’ll just put on some white powder, call yourselves Oleanders, and cut every one of us down.”
She couldn’t stop.
“And even if you don’t, you just look the other way, and when they’re done you say we provoked them, we brought it down on our heads, we’re the ones who ought to hold our tongues, we ought to shut up and take the high road, we always pay so you don’t have to.”
Everything burned saltwater.
“And now I have to abandon my family, I have to save someone who didn’t give a damn for my caste until it was convenient. Your prince’s crown is coming out of my hide.” She hated herself for dancing up the oath. She hated Pa for making her the one to keep it. She hated Tavin for his silence, for not leaving, for driving her to spew up the sickening fire in her heart instead of letting it break her down to ash.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
It made her angrier, somehow. “You’re just as bad,” she snarled. “It’s easy, isn’t it? Believing whatever the prince tells you to believe. You keep telling yourself he has to be right because otherwise you’re dying for someone who isn’t worth it. You see how we’re treated on his family’s watch, and you still tell yourself he’ll be a good king.”
“I…” His voice cracked. “I can’t answer for—for Jas. But I swear if we make it out of this, I’ll do everything I can to help you. And yours.”
“Why should I trust you?” Her knees near swallowed her words. “Why should I trust any of you?”
A long wind dragged through the needles of the sandpines before Tavin said, bleak, “I don’t know.”
Then he stood, one more shadow tearing edges into the night sky.
“I’ll take watch.” He stumbled toward a break in the trees. “Get some rest.”
Emptiness curdled where he’d been. Fie swallowed, then scrubbed her face dry with tight fists and coiled down in the lukewarm sand.
Sleep dragged her off despite the hurricane in her head and her heart, and didn’t let her go until day broke across her face.
Fie woke to a mouthful of sand, a sliver of dawn slicing through the sandpines, and a strange sound drifting through the cool air. The tide had come in, pushing waves up only a score of paces from their camp. At the copse’s edge, Tavin sat, eyes on the sunrise, humming. If it was a song, she didn’t know it, halting and uneven, a melody meant for one voice alone.
Fie rolled to her knees. Tavin looked to her, the song halting. Something flashed through his eyes, something neither of them had words for, still somewhere between I need you and I’m sorry.
Then his head whipped about to stare at Cheparok. He shuffled back into cover. “Someone’s coming,” he muttered, and shook Jasimir’s shoulder.
Fie crept to the edge, peering through the brush. Two figures emerged from the dunes, looking to and fro before settling on the sandpines.
The sand at Fie’s back hissed as the prince sat up. “I think the one in gray is a local,” Tavin whispered. “The other is Viimo. She’s one of Rhusana’s best trackers.”
Fie guessed Viimo to be the ruddy-faced skinwitch with a cap of pale curls who looked a few years older than them.
A skinwitch. A Vulture. Fie’s heart began to pound.
The woman shushed the man at her side, then reached for a belt of narrow iron cylinders.
A Vulture. One of Tatterhelm’s trackers. One of the queen’s best.
Jasimir inhaled sharp. “That’s a flare. She’s calling for—”
They never found out. Tavin thrust out a hand, and Viimo and her guide fell to their knees, frozen.
Fie stared. She’d forgotten the Hawk blood Birthright meant more than healing.
“Hurry,” Tavin gritted through his teeth, and she saw red blooming in his eyes as vessels burst. “Knock them out, tie them up, whatever you do—hurry.”
Fie’s heartbeat roared in her ears.
Jasimir started to climb through the copse. Fie beat him to it.
She hurled herself at Viimo, knocking her to the sand, a furious scream rising above the roar of the sea. Fie clawed and scratched and rained blows upon any flash of skinwitch she saw. Her own fists split at the knuckles, but she didn’t care, spitting curse after curse through the blood and the pain until Jasimir pulled her off.
She’d been in a handful of scrapes in her life; she’d lived a handful of scrapes through the teeth of the dead. She wasn’t a particular gifted fighter, for that did not a long-lived Crow make.
However, she found it cruelly easy to hit someone who couldn’t hit back. Perhaps that was why the other castes liked it so.
“Not what I had in mind, but close enough.” Tavin pinned Viimo facedown in the sand, one knee on her back. Jasimir tossed him a length of hemp rope from the other man, lying bound and unconscious nearby. “Viimo. It’s been a while.”