But what won this time was “Yes, chief.”
Fie strode to the post and rang the bell. The Hawk guard leaned out from the platform long enough to give her a curt nod. A whistle pierced the air as the plague beacon sputtered out.
A man strolled through the gate in Gerbanyar’s plain stone wall. He matched his city well enough: his face was the grayish sort of brown, and the painted stripes of his hide vest matched the stripes of granite and basalt stacked into nearby house walls. Those stripes marked him for a Pigeon and a courier; the twitch of his gaze marked him for a man Fie wouldn’t trust at her back anytime soon.
“This way,” he announced, a smirk tugging at his lips.
For a moment, Fie couldn’t make her feet work. It reeked of a trap.
“Right behind you,” Tavin said under his breath.
“I said mouths shut,” she mumbled, and headed for the gate.
The Pigeon courier led them down the main road, where mismatched stones sank into usurping moss. Gerbanyar was nowhere near as large as Cheparok, and though it too spilled across a hillside, the gray stack-stone houses jutted up as they pleased.
But the messenger’s path didn’t curve toward the houses. Instead, he took them past an open market, where merchants laid one hand on the purses at their belts; past pens of goats and chickens and cattle and the flint-faced shepherds who stopped to watch; and at last toward a stone-lined channel at the lowest ground within Gerbanyar’s walls.
Fie’s gut sank. “You scummed the sinner,” she said flatly.
“You took too long getting here.” The courier no longer bothered hiding his smirk. “So we took matters into our own hands.”
She strode over to the channel’s edge. Gutter-mouths punctured the rim of a far wall, their contents plopping into murky water padded in yellow algae. Scant paces below Fie, fetid waters lapped sleepily at the breast of a man lying in the waste.
The marks of the Sinner’s Plague burned clear enough on him: lips dark with bloody tracks, skin bruised with the Sinner’s Brand, eyes pasted shut in crusts. Flies clotted his air, crawling in and out of a mouth agape. A dirty sleeping mat carpeted the rough hewn steps nearby. Fie wondered if the sinner had started on the mat and rolled into the cesspool in his fever dreams, or if the scummers had tossed him in, mat and all, not caring where either landed.
Sometimes sinners got scummed because they’d earned their plague at their neighbors’ expense, and those trespasses had come home to roost. And sometimes sinners got scummed because their neighbors wanted Crows to wade around in filth while they watched.
From the collection of onlookers Fie found when she turned round, she wagered it was the latter.
But that body wasn’t about to drag itself onto a pyre. She’d wrapped her arms hand-to-elbow in rags, yet she hadn’t wagered on fishing a corpse out of a sewer. “We need a cart,” she announced. “And firewood. That’s our viatik.”
“You’ve got his mat,” another man said, sporting a Sparrow butcher’s pattern-work apron. “Drag him out on that. Firewood’s at the gate. You can have his teeth for viatik.”
She gave the man a snide look before remembering it was wasted behind her mask. “Aye, I’ll drag a leaky sinner all the way through your city, right on by all your livestock and all your markets, and then I’ll wait for that plague beacon to light back up for the rest of you. I want a cart.”
“I see one sinner and three bone thieves. Carry him out.”
Fie bit her lip. She couldn’t risk the lordlings touching a plague body. A gate to the eastern road yawned on the other side of the channel. Maybe she could haul the body that far herself.
Then the Pigeon man nodded to the Sparrow and jogged off. The Sparrow butcher hid a smirk behind a hand.
Something else was coming.
“Fie—” Tavin started.
“I’ll handle it,” she interrupted. There was no time for lordling nonsense. She had to get them out before the Pigeon courier came back.
“On your own?” Tavin whispered.
“Aye, Pissabed,” she said, “on my own. Stay up here.”
She marched down the steps. The mint in her mask’s beak couldn’t overpower the foul stench of plague and dung, so she sucked each breath through her teeth.
“There she goes,” someone laughed above. “Told you. Crows are right at home in the scum.”
Fie set her pack down on the steps, pulled the filthy sleeping mat to the sinner, then took hold of his nearest arm and yanked. The man didn’t budge.
Instead, he screamed.
Fie dropped him faster than a hot coal. A cloud of flies spewed up. A terrible chill swept down her own limbs, fingertips buzzing; the broken sword swayed at her side like a noose.
Still alive. Somehow, the sinner was still alive. And that meant one thing.
When, not if.
A needle-thin rasp faltered from the man’s bloody mouth:
“Mercy.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DEAD GODS’ MERCY
The first time Fie tried to take hold of the broken sword, it slipped free and clattered down the stone steps, resting against the sinner’s side.
The second time, she kept her grip, but daylight shivered along its chipped blade, the rag-bound hilt locked in her shaking fist.
“Think her hands got more use than that under those rags?” a Sparrow man jested at the top of the channel.
She heard the scrape of sandal-nails and whipped round. Tavin had half turned toward the Sparrow, one white-knuckled fist drifting to where his own short swords were belted below the Crow cloak.
If he were a Crow, she could tug at her hood to signal, Don’t make trouble. If he were a Crow, he’d know better than to make trouble here to start with.
She cleared her throat. Thunderously. It served well enough: he turned back to her, arms folding tidy and harmless. For the time being.
The sinner spasmed at her feet.
Fie’s gut was a nest of vipers, ready to betray her at one wrong move.
What had Pa done? The memories shied from her like mice in dark corners. He’d taken off his mask. Twelve hells if she’d take hers off and let her face show plain now.
He’d used his Safe voice. He’d had her for a helper. Here, she had neither.
All she had was mercy in her shuddering grasp. And it was time to deal it.
She knelt by the sinner.
“I’m a Crow,” she told him. Her quiet voice shook as much as the rest of her. “I’m here for you.”
The sinner smiled.
She wanted to run from the road that had trapped her so. She wanted to leave the man to die in the scum. She wanted to cast the chief’s blade behind her and never look back.
You have to keep your eyes open.
Fie laid one hand on a salt-rimed forehead and lowered the blade against the sinner’s throat.
And then she did what Pa had done.
The flesh parted all too easy. Fie choked on her own breath, fumbling the sword as the man jerked. Blood splashed over her hands, over the sinner, over the stone steps—had Pa’s sinners all bled so? Had she done it right?
Blood burned in her mouth—no, no, the salt of tears rolling down to her quivering chin, tears she couldn’t fathom, tears she couldn’t hold off—she’d been merciful, she’d done what Pa would, she’d given the sinner what he wanted—she was a chief, she was a chief, she was a chief—