“It’s not done yet. Save your dance for when the bodies burn.” Pa fired off the whistle-order to march.
Wretch passed the cat back to Fie, shaking her head at Pa’s back. An unease draped over the Crows once more. Madcap still hummed under their breath, and Swain muttered along after a few steps, but otherwise silence clung to the cart as they dragged it on.
The scattering of huts and god-grave shrines by the road eventually yielded to the twist-trunked, lichen-shawled forest. “The Lad from Across the Sea” wound down, another song rising in its wake, louder and steadier. Soon the only marks of Dumosa were glimpses of a gilded crust over dark hills, sometimes sparking through the trees.
“Here.”
Pa’s voice cut through the night, snipping off the walking song’s last verse. He thrust his torch into the soft dirt by the roadside. The cart creaked to a halt as Pa shucked his mask and nodded at Fie and the tabby. “No strays we can’t eat, girl.”
“Not a stray, she’s mine,” Fie returned. “My share of the viatik.”
Pa huffed a short chuckle. “Covenant’s crap she is, Fie, but we’ll talk your share later. What’s her name, then?”
She thought of the steward’s queasy face and Madcap’s dance and grinned. “Barf.”
“That’s proper.” Pa ran a hand over his bald crown. All his hair had migrated south to his short salt-and-pepper beard long years past. “Now let’s see about these boys, eh?”
Fie leaned on the edge of the cart and studied the two shrouds lying among splits of kindling. “Big,” she said. The prince had been near a year her elder, and clearly both boys had been better fed. “Dunno if we have enough firewood for both.”
“Will if we douse ’em in flashburn,” Hangdog suggested, lounging over the cart’s other side.
Fie’s beak was only in the way now. She set Barf down in the cart and pushed back her hood to loosen the mask’s straps, letting it hang about her neck as she ran a hand through her chin-cropped tangle of black hair. It was a blessing to breathe clean night air and not the palace’s incense or her mask’s stale mint.
She had naught to fear of contagion. It was said that every Crow had fouled up something grand in their past lives, bad enough for the Covenant to strike them down with plague and boot them directly to a life of atonement in containing the disease. That Crows were born already in debt to the Covenant’s measures of sin. That it would not take them to their next life before that debt was paid.
So it was said, at least. Fie didn’t know how much of that rang true to her ear. But it was truth hard as iron that the Sinner’s Plague left only Crows untouched.
Death-stink hadn’t settled on the boys yet, but she still flinched at the crimson stains on their shrouds. Of all a chief’s duties, cutting throats was the one she dreaded most.
She reached into the cart, prodding what seemed like the nobler of the bloody heaps. “They really royals, Pa?”
“Just the one. Other was his body double.”
Fie tugged back the linen until torchlight landed on a boy’s rust-flecked face, looking for all the world like he was sleeping. Maybe a little afraid. Maybe he’d been awake when Pa’s blade touched his throat.
She pursed her lips. “So that’s what a sinner prince looks like.”
The dead boy sat up.
“Well, no,” he said, “but I’ve been told I’m fairly close.”
CHAPTER THREE
A COVENANT OATH
Fie didn’t intend to punch the boy, but she did all the same.
Fie didn’t intend to scream, either, but that happened, too, and with enthusiasm. As did tripping over her feet as she bolted back, landing on her rear in the damp grass. Hangdog’s curses and Pa’s roaring laughter only muddied her panic.
The dead boy yanked his left hand loose from the bindings, wincing as he felt his jaw. Gore on his plain long-sleeved tunic made it impossible to tell if any of the blood was new. Fie scrabbled about to arm herself with a rock as the other shroud also began to stir.
“Here, here,” Pa said, wiping tears from his eyes as he reached into the cart to help free them. “You’ve gone and spooked my girl.”
“There’s an understatement,” the boy said, dry. He glanced down at the wiggling shroud beside him. “Jas, as your personal guard, I feel obligated to warn you”—he pointed at Fie—“that one is easily startled.”
Fie’s mind was a fly in her hollow skull, buzzing in fruitless circles. The dead boys were moving. The dead boys were talking.
The dead boys weren’t dead.
“Yech.” The bodyguard slid out of the cart, wincing at the crackle of his blood-stiff shirt. “Is pig blood always this vile? Next time I fake my death, I’m picking something more glamorous. I hear poisoning’s in vogue.”
“Pa.” Her voice came out strangled. “Did we just kidnap royals?”
Pa grinned ear to ear. He loved a good jest, but Fie wasn’t sure the Phoenix caste would find abducting the heir all that amusing. “Told you, Fie, just the one. And only on account of them asking kind.”
A prince and a guard. A Phoenix and his Hawk, then. Fie didn’t know if she wanted to scream or laugh. Perhaps this was all one garish nightmare. If they were lucky—
“You’re certain we weren’t followed?”
The quiet voice belonged to the boy the bodyguard had called “Jas.”
Jasimir. Everyone knew the crown prince’s name. As the prince untangled himself, neither he nor his guard seemed to note how every mutter had died like birdsong before a storm. The Crows eyed the lordlings as if twin serpents had slipped from the shrouds. By torchlight the two blood-soaked boys were nigh identical in their wide, sharp-jawed faces, sleek black topknots, and loose linen shirts and trousers. Where his Hawk guard was all good-natured ease, though, the prince was as grim as if he were truly at his own funeral.
But it took more than a crown and a frown to faze Pa. “Oh aye, we were followed.” He pried a tooth from his string and tossed it aside. Fie couldn’t believe he’d burned a whole Sparrow tooth without her catching on. “Pair of the queen’s trackers. They tailed us to the bridge and no farther.”
“Cur.”
The prince, the Hawk, and Pa all looked up. Wretch’s mask was off as well. Fie knew when she called Pa “Cur,” they were in for a spectacle.
“I see you’re busy ministering to the needs of the royal louts here,” she cooed, voice rising, “but I don’t suppose if, perchance, when it suits your fancy, you might share with your kin what nonsense, suicidal, scum-brained scheme you’ve just dragged us into?”
The Hawk bodyguard moved first, striding toward Wretch. “Of course, I apologize. We’ve been quite inconsiderate.” He tapped his right fist to his lips and held it out in greeting. Wretch, taken aback, did the same, and they clasped hands briefly. “My name is Tavin. I’m sure you’ve figured out who my friend is.”
“We’ve a notion,” Hangdog drawled, leaning on the cart. There was a nasty edge in his voice, the kind he got when he hungered for a fight. “Got bored of your palace, cousins?”