“Stick with flowers.” Fie wrinkled her nose.
“Or knives. Weapons. That’s what Hawks give one another, anyway. Half of Dragovoi’s armory comes from the year the master-general chose her spouses.”
“I’ve already go half a sword.” She traced the shiny lines of his burn scar, curious. “Who gave you this?”
She felt his breath catch, the skin beneath her cheek stilling for a heartbeat or two. Then he said, “Someone who didn’t know what they were doing.”
The old bitterness in his voice reminded her of Hangdog.
She didn’t ask more, only twined her fingers with his until the rise and fall of his chest steadied again.
Then she pushed herself up and reached for her clothes. “I’m getting my laceroot. And then I’m taking watch.”
Tavin opened his mouth to argue and yawned instead. When Fie returned, she settled beside him and shifted his head onto her lap.
“I don’t suppose I can convince you to sleep more,” he sighed, weariness bleeding his words together.
“Maybe when you stop slurring.” She couldn’t scrape the wry smile from her voice. “Now quit fussing and get some rest.”
Fie took his disgruntled grumble as surrender. The rhythm of breath on her knee evened out as she turned her eyes to the dark beyond the cave.
Somewhere, beyond the quiet, beyond the heat of her and her Hawk, somewhere she couldn’t see—the Vultures waited for her.
For a moment, the weight of the unreadable dark crushed in all about Fie. The best trackers in Sabor hunted her. The queen had sold the Crow caste to a prey-beast’s death. And her family lived only as long as their monstrous captor found them useful.
Fie ought to have rolled Pa’s tooth in her fingers. Instead they twisted in the hair at the nape of Tavin’s neck. It shouldn’t have comforted her; it did anyhow.
The peculiar Hawk at her knee believed they could put it all to rights. Believed in her. Believed in a life with her after this.
Perhaps he was a fool after all. Or perhaps he’d gotten something else right.
Fie kept one hand on her Hawk and both eyes on the ebbing dark.
A few hours passed before shuffling echoed from deeper within their cave. The prince had woken. Fie’s gut twinged. Jasimir was bound to ken what her absence meant. The question was how he’d take it.
The hue of the cloud-dusted horizon said she had another hour or two before they had to face him. Maybe less, if the skinwitches had made good time tonight.
She called a Vulture tooth to life and gripped a stolen fur. The trail lit up—
And stopped a bare league off, in the valley below.
Fie sucked in a breath and shook Tavin’s shoulder, trying to keep her head steady. “Tavin—Tavin—”
He jerked awake. “What’s wrong?”
“The Vultures.” She staggered to her feet, swaying as blood rushed down her numb legs. “I just looked—they’re—they’re too close—”
“How far?”
“A league, maybe.”
Tavin swore and shouted for the prince. He and Fie scrambled about for clothing and blades, stumbling into each other in the dim. Cold guilt thudded about Fie’s belly. If she’d held out longer with her three teeth; if she’d taken first watch; if she’d checked sooner—
Calloused hands cupped her cheeks, stilling her. “This isn’t your fault.”
“Twelve hells it isn’t,” Fie spat. “I’m the—”
“The only reason we’ve made it this far. We’re all in over our heads.” Brute honesty chewed a ragged edge in his voice. “You’re the only one treading water. We can vanish once we clear the cave, and they’ll lose us again, all right?” She didn’t answer. He pulled her close, leaning his brow on hers. “Fie. They’ve been closer than this twice now, and we’ve still outrun them thanks to you.”
“But we have to keep doing it, keep outrunning them, all the way to the Marovar,” she whispered. “And they only have to catch up once.”
At the grate of a throat clearing, Fie and Tavin jolted apart. Jasimir stood a few paces away, face ironed blank. “What’s wrong?”
“The Vultures are a league off,” Fie blurted.
Jasimir’s eyes widened, then landed on her. “How did they get so close?” he asked, frosty.
“We all needed to rest.” Tavin strode past the prince. “And now we need to get out.”
Fie followed him, furs and cloaks bundled under an arm. Behind her, she could have sworn she heard the prince mutter, “‘Rest.’”
A flush ran up her neck. She did not look back.
They left minutes later, Fie dragging three Sparrow teeth into harmony as sunrise ripped the dark seam of the horizon. Spindly fingers of Vulture tracking spells pried all about the cave behind them, fumbling over rock and tree like a drunkard who’d dropped his purse in the dark.
All through the morning they hurried on, through beech and spruce and bristling pine, as the trees thinned and yielded to snow-patched black stone. A hushed murmur through the leaves swelled to a full-throated roar once they reached the gnashing river.
“It’s the Fan,” Tavin said as they paused at the top of the banks. He hadn’t spoken since they’d left the cave. None of them had. Instead they’d glanced over their shoulders again and again and rushed ahead. “This is where it starts, from the glaciers.”
It looked nothing like the sedate ribbon Fie recalled from Cheparok. But the river was far, far from the southern deltas now, and so were they.
Tavin sat and unrolled one of the stolen pelts from his pack, then cut two wide strips and handed them to Fie. “Wrap your sandals. We’ll be crossing snow and ice soon.”
“Where are the Vultures?” Jasimir asked over the water’s rush.
Fie reached through her triad of teeth and grimaced. “League and a half? We’ve gone northeast. They’re going due north.”
“They must think we’re trying the Sangrapa Pass.” Tavin waved at a dip between two gray peaks leagues north, then handed two more hide strips to the prince. “It’s the fastest route to Draga. But Trikovoi is beyond the Misgova Pass.” He pointed to a toothsome, winding slope to the east. “We can clear it tonight. And if we make it through Misgova without them catching on…”
It could give them the lead they needed. Fie still heard the question behind the question. She dug a fistful of Sparrow teeth from her bag. “But if they catch on, they’ll know we aim for Trikovoi, and then we’re rutted.” Tavin nodded, grim. She fed the teeth into gloves she’d stripped off a dead Vulture days ago, trapping them against her palms. “So I’ll make sure they don’t.”
“You fainted yesterday,” the prince said. “Are you certain—”
“Aye,” Fie snapped, and pushed on the hide binding her sandals until the nails poked through. “We done dawdling?”
They were done dawdling. Tavin led them along the river, following a game track drawn with a toddler’s shine for nonsense curves. Trees shrank to thorny scrub, and scrub to grass and wiry lichens. Shaggy goats paid them no heed, nibbling daintily at any sprouts of green.