She blinked up at him as her head began to clear. Then she laughed.
It was not a happy laugh.
A raid from monsters. A scummed sinner. The first throat she’d ever cut. A war-witch boiling a man in his own blood before her eyes. An ambush from the queen’s pet Vultures. That same war-witch near snapping his own neck on her account. Tatterhelm walking away in one piece. Falling out of a stupid tree.
And a traitor heart that refused to listen to sense.
She hated it. Hated all of it. Hated him. Hated herself.
“Anything else?” she croaked, waving a shaky, blood-flecked hand at the sky. “Covenant? Got any more disasters you’re keen to spit my way? Day’s still young.”
Tavin let out a breath, then brushed her hair aside to rest calloused fingertips on her brow. “Let’s not go giving the Covenant any ideas. Can you move your—”
“Let’s not go telling me what to do.” Fie swatted his hand off and made herself sit up, a peculiar wrath aching in her bones. He had no right to her, to any part of her, least of all her heart. “You damned fool. We could have been in and out of Gerbanyar before Tatterhelm caught up, but you just had to lose your head, didn’t you?”
Tavin jerked back, shamefaced. Part of her curled with guilt. He’d felled that man on her account.
But she hadn’t asked for it. Wanted it, perhaps, in the ugly way she’d wanted Tatterhelm to burn before her. But wanting and asking were beasts of two wholly different names.
“We’re lucky the Gerbanyar Hawks didn’t stuff us all full of arrows on the spot,” she spat. “The queen would’ve liked that, aye? You’d have done her work for her.”
Tavin stared at the ground. Maybe if she pushed him far enough, this nonsense of theirs would be over. He’d stop pretending a Crow and a Hawk could share a road as aught but strangers, and she’d keep pretending it didn’t matter to her.
The razor edge of anger glittered in his eyes again. The set of his mouth said it wouldn’t be turned on her.
Somehow that only infuriated her more. “What, Vulture got your tongue? You couldn’t keep quiet when all our hides were on the line, but now it suits you? You’ve mummed as my kin for nigh a fortnight now. When are you going to understand that being a Crow means you can’t just do what you want?”
“Don’t try to tell me I do what I want,” Tavin snapped.
He rocked back on his heels. One hand ran over his mouth, fingertips pushing down into the sides of his jaw. Then he stood and looked away.
In the startled silence, Fie wondered if she’d meant her words for Tavin or for herself.
The prince’s voice cut through the air. “Enough. It’s not his fault.”
“If by ‘not his fault’ you mean ‘square his fault,’ then aye.”
“He saved your life not ten minutes ago.” Jasimir’s tone soured on your. “Haven’t you been berating us since day one for not standing up for the Crows? Make up your mind whether you want our help or not.”
“You call that help? Your Peacocks and Hawks listen to crowns, not Crows. Deal with them when you’re not hiding behind our masks, and I’ll call that help.”
“I already swore an oath to do just that, and if you think that won’t cost me dearly—”
“Oh aye, such a trial,” Fie sneered. “Poor little princeling has to treat us like people.”
Tavin spoke before the prince could fire back. “We need to get moving.”
“To where?” Fie lurched to her feet, wearing a scowl. “The Vultures know we’re headed northeast. They’ll block the flatway to the Marovar.”
“We don’t have anywhere else,” Tavin said shortly. “They can’t go too far from their supply caravan, which slows them down in bad terrain. We can keep ahead of them if we stay off the roads.”
Fie sucked in a breath. “I won’t be able to see plague beacons.”
“No,” Tavin agreed, “you won’t.”
He didn’t know what he was asking. Lordlings got to look away when they wanted to. Fie’d never had a choice in keeping her eyes open.
“You won’t be able to walk us into another trap,” the prince muttered.
“Jas.” Tavin shook his head.
Fie waited for the rest of what he ought to say: I know we’re asking more of you. But your Crows need you. We need you. I need you.
She knew it all already. Believed some of it. The rest—the rest she wanted from him.
But he didn’t offer another word. And she would not ask.
Perhaps she’d pushed him far enough after all.
Perhaps she’d pushed too far.
But going off the roads … She’d already turned her back on her kin. What would the Covenant think of her turning her back on sinners?
Didn’t want to be a Crow no more.
Fie’s hands curled into dust-lined fists. The Covenant knew the oath she carried now. And Pa wanted her to keep it. It was plain as that.
She shifted her pack and squinted for where afternoon sunlight needled through the cedar boughs. “We go northeast,” she said finally, and set off through the trees, back to the sun.
* * *
Fie’s hands burned with salt in a hundred tiny scrapes, and yet she kept scrubbing.
The sun had long slunk below the horizon before they’d stopped for the night. They’d pushed up in thick silence through the bristling hills, up into rockier ground, onto thinner game trails, always searching the growing dark for skinwitches closing in. When they’d staggered to a halt by a pond in the crook of a steep hillside, she’d waited for the boys to refill the water skins, then burned the remains of her arm-rags on the campfire and took the salt and soap-shells to the pond.
She couldn’t wash up proper here, not a few paces from the campfire. Even though Tavin had been badgered into sleeping while dinner cooked and the prince didn’t shine to girls at all, stripping down in front of lordlings didn’t sit right.
But scrub as she might, she couldn’t shake the memory of Pa’s sword sliding through flesh. By firelight, the salt and suds on her arms might as well have been blood. Even a string of bubbles on the pond’s surface reminded her of the gash across the sinner’s throat.
“Was that your first time killing someone?”
Fie started. The prince had perched by the campfire, stirring a mash of maize and salt pork, one eye on Tavin’s sleeping back.
“Aye,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
Jasimir frowned at the mash. “You … your family should have been here to help.”
Near a week had passed since she’d left them in Cheparok, yet a hot lump still rose in Fie’s throat. She splashed cold water on her arms. “Have you ever killed someone?”
He shook his head. “Tavin has. Before today, I mean. One of Rhusana’s assassins went down fighting, and another fell on her own poisoned dagger, so Tavin put her out of her misery.”
“That’s … nice of him?”
“It’s how we were raised. The Hawk code requires you to treat an enemy with dignity, even in death.” Jasimir let the campfire roll around his fingers.