“You absolute ass,” she said, choking up. “I already know.” Tears rolled hot down her cheeks as she pulled him to her and kissed him, finally without reservation, without glamours, without secrets. His arms wound around her, deliciously tight, and he was kissing her back so fierce and sweet she thought she might drown happy in it. “I’m still mad at you,” she told him before kissing him again. “You didn’t apologize in advance, so I get to be mad at you as long as I want.”
“If this is how you get mad at me, I can live with that,” he murmured.
Fie shook her head and made herself sit up straight, scrubbing at her leaking eyes. “I mean it. I don’t care what happens to us after this, I never, ever want you to die for me, aye? I want you to live for me, Tavin, I want you to keep fighting, I want you to be happy with or without me, because that’s what love is.” She clasped his face in her hands. “Someone told you love means giving up on yourself, and they were lying. I know you never gave up on me. But I never want you to give up on us again.”
Tavin let his forehead rest on hers, so close she could see the firelight caught in his glistening eyes. “To be fair, one half of this equation just got himself poisoned and locked in a crypt.” His voice cracked. “Could … could you say that part about being happy again?”
“I don’t want you to have to sacrifice for me. I want you to be happy. I want you to live.” She kissed him. “Because I love you.”
“That,” he said raggedly. “That’s … what I wanted to hear.”
“And I’m still mad at you,” she added, and kissed him anyway as he laughed, and for a few beautiful moments, all they did was laugh and kiss and dry each other’s tears and hold each other close until they had both steadied out.
“We have to stop doing this here,” Tavin said as she helped him get to his feet. “I feel like Ambra’s watching us, the pervert.”
Fie choked. “I, uh. About that.”
But before she could figure out how to tell him that, in a roundabout way, Ambra had been watching them the whole time, a strange, unholy sound lowed through the catacombs.
It sounded like crying. Like a moan.
Like a soul in torment.
Both she and Tavin froze. “That’s the noise,” she said. “The one the Sparrow man heard. It’s something to do with the queen, we have to find it—”
Tavin laced his fingers through hers and headed for the door. “Yes, chief.”
The cry faded as they entered the main chamber but swelled up again a moment later, almost gurgling. Fie turned toward one of the gaping doorways. “There.”
“That’s the crypt for cousins,” Tavin said, brow furrowing. The fire-lines did not continue beyond the entrance, so he raised one burning hand, his other still tight in hers. Golden firelight caught on dark, wet smears on the ground, and he recoiled. “Eugh.”
“Oh. Right.” Fie stepped well over one of the smears. “There are skin-ghasts. Reckon that’s what Rhusana did with the plague victims.”
Tavin shuddered. “A new and horrifying way for her to be creative. Why am I not surprised?”
They made their way into the hall, then into the crypt proper. Coffin-filled hollows lined the walls like larvae in a hive, and more dark slicks polished the floor, spreading from rows upon rows of wet, red heaps of corded muscle and tripe.
A sad kind of wrath coiled in Fie’s throat. Whatever the Covenant had meant when it had marked so many with the Sinner’s Brand, it couldn’t have been this.
Another groan made Fie grip Tavin’s hand tighter. It sounded closer, bestial.
He touched his hand to a brazier in the middle of the room. It did not send lines of fire to light the crypt, but as the coals caught, they cast a sullen orange glow over the stone.
At the far end, something stirred.
Fie sucked in a breath. She’d thought it one more body, splayed on a tall stone slab in its final moments. But as she and Tavin watched, its chest racked with coughs like sobs.
“Fie?”
Jasimir’s voice made both her and Tavin jump. Footfalls fell across the stone, and a moment later, he appeared in the tunnel behind them. His eyes widened as they took in the gore—then landed on Tavin.
The prince marched across the crypt and pulled him into an embrace. “You absolute ass,” he said into Tavin’s shoulder. “How dare you.”
“Funny, that’s what Fie said,” Tavin wheezed.
“There’s still a decent chance I throw both you and Khoda in jail.” Jasimir let his brother go. “Assuming there’s still a jail. It’s a mess up there. People are breaking out with the Sinner’s Brand left and right. Rhusana’s soldiers have taken the gates, and they won’t let anyone in or out. She’s holed up in the royal residence with a small army of skin-ghasts. Aunt Draga…” He gulped. “She lost an eye. She may lose an arm, too. The prison’s rioting, and I only found you because Viimo snuck out. The loyal Hawks are still trying to keep the peace, but they can only do so much.”
The figure at the end of the crypt let out a rattling cough.
Jasimir’s eyes near bugged out of his head. “Twelve hells, is it still alive?”
“Aye.” Fie drew the chief’s sword from her belt. “I’ll handle it.”
Tavin and Jasimir followed her as she walked to the sinner. The closer she got, though, the clearer it became: this was not one of the people Rhusana had crammed into the catacombs, their arms barely mottled with the Sinner’s Brand.
This man’s skin was so ruined with sores, with the Brand, that everywhere she looked was dried black blood and weeping red along ridges of ribs. His fingernails had withered to half moons of gray, the flesh of his hands gnarled and black; his feet were the same. From the smell, he’d fouled himself, and crusts of long-dry sick streaked down the sides of the stone slab he lay on.
There was something sickeningly familiar about the cut of the man’s face, despite his sunken cheeks and bloodstained mouth.
Tavin stiffened at Fie’s side, but Jasimir was the one to put a name to the wreckage before them:
“Father?”
Rhusana’s lie hadn’t been that King Surimir had been claimed by the Sinner’s Plague.
Her lie had been that it killed him.
Surimir’s eyes opened, wandered, closed again, little left but gray cataracts and burst veins. Fie didn’t think he knew they were there. If the Covenant had any mercy at all, he would be too lost in delirium to feel the plague’s ravages.
Then again, if the Covenant had any mercy for the king, he would have died in Crow Moon.
“How long has it…” Fie trailed off, counting the days. “Three weeks since they lit the beacons for his death. He’s been down here at least that long.” The chief’s broken sword shook in her grasp. “This is all wrong. The Covenant doesn’t…”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
“Why wouldn’t it kill him? Why drag it out like this?” Tavin stared at the king’s shivering, fevered form.
“Because,” Jasimir said, in awe, in despair, in revelation, “it wanted people to see.” He didn’t look away. “That’s what the plague really is, isn’t it? A reminder that no one can … can be like him, treat people the way he treated them, and get away with it forever. Not even a king.”
Fie found Tavin’s hand again, belly-sick. “Rhusana knew that if he died, it would spread. So she tried to hide him where it couldn’t reach her, but the Covenant spread it anyway.”
She watched Surimir’s chest rise and fall in shudders.
Near a whole moon he’d been down here in the dark, slowly burning. Only the Covenant could keep him alive this long.
It was speaking to them now, as clear as the crows flocking to the palace, as clear as the Sinner’s Brand creeping through even the highest castes.
It was in the way the Peacocks had watched the queen beat a man bloody without so much as a cross word, then let her savage the one who spoke up. It was in the way the Hawks, sworn to serve the nation first, bowed to a queen wh
o served no one.
It was in the monument to a slow and terrifying death that sat above their heads even now, with centuries of bones at its heart. It was in every inch of the palace, its golden feathers, its cruel-cut iron, the games it played, the ashes from which it rose. It was in the way Khoda and his Black Swans seemed to think they could trade one Phoenix for another like changing sandals, and that alone would be enough to put the country right.
It was a palace built to remind people that only Phoenixes were fireproof. It was built to demand tribute from the rest of Sabor. It was built to make every other caste hunger for scraps of that gold, that power, that fire; to make them swear their lives for just a taste.
Fie was Ambra reborn, by rights the Queen of Day and Night, by rights the heir to the throne, by rights the owner of the crown on Rhusana’s head.
But if the Covenant had meant for her to save all this, to set things to rights as a queen, it could have sent her as a Phoenix.
Instead, it sent a Crow.
This is a gift, Little Witness had said, something to remember. You are not what you were.
Fie knew what she had to do.
“All those people with the Sinner’s Brand now…” She shivered into the silence. “Once the king dies, it’s going to get bad. I don’t know how long they’ll have.” She squared her shoulders. “I asked Pa to send as many Crows as he could two days ago. If they’ve made it, we’ll have help.”
Tavin squeezed her hand. “What a coincidence. Three days ago I got Mother to sign an order for the Hawks to offer rides and escorts to any Crows headed to the palace.”
Fie had a number of thoughts then, and most of them involved lowering her standards for where she’d roll a lad.
“So we can stop this.” Jasimir ran a hand through his hair. “We can let the Crows in, and isolate the infected, and once the bodies burn…”
Fie looked at the chief’s blade in her free hand.
Dealing mercy had never gotten easier, in the end.
“Jas,” she said. “It’s not just the bodies. All of it has to burn.”
Jasimir shook his head. “But we can contain the plague. We’ll make pyres for the bodies, and then it won’t spread.”
“It already has. The Covenant’s been trying to bring Surimir to light for weeks. We can get the uninfected out, but the plague wouldn’t spread the way it has if that rot wasn’t clean through the palace grounds by now.”
Jasimir’s throat worked. “I can’t—we can’t just burn all of it, can’t we try to save anything?”
“I think we’ve been trying, Jas.” Tavin sounded tired. “Haven’t we? You and I have tried our best to survive here without becoming”—he gestured helplessly to Surimir—“this. But if we just burn the dead, clean the palace, and go back to the same damn games … Who is that good for? You? Me? Any of us? We told ourselves that if we played by the rules we knew, it’d protect us from people like Rhusana. We told ourselves that people born into castes like ours couldn’t be touched by the Sinner’s Plague. And it’s all been—nothing. None of it did a damn thing to stop it, because the sickness started with the king.” He put his free hand on Jasimir’s shoulder. “What good is any of this?”
Jasimir stared at their father, lying bloody and squirming on the stone, an exile from his own tomb. Fie could only imagine what it was like: being raised to believe your father was good as a walking god, one of the Covenant’s beloved Phoenixes, chosen to rule the way you were chosen.
She could only imagine what it was, to see the rotten heart of it all now.
“It’s already gone,” she said softly. “The Covenant sent you a Crow, not a queen.”
He locked eyes with her.
After a heartbeat, he nodded and whispered, “All of it has to burn.”
Tavin and Jasimir were the ones to carry their father from the catacombs, Fie leading the way, a Phoenix tooth alight in her hand, the lament of the Well of Grace in her bones.
When they reached the surface, the sun had just touched the cliffs behind them, beginning its final descent on the royal palace of Sabor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE FLOODGATES
Skin-ghasts wreathed the royal quarters above, peering out over the gardens as Rhusana’s thousand-eyed sentinel.
Before, they’d not even tilted toward Fie. But now, as she, her lordlings, and the king climbed from the catacombs, one by one, every hollow face turned toward them.
“Don’t look now,” Tavin said slowly, “but I think we have an audience.”
Jasimir shifted his father’s arm over his shoulders with a grunt. “They didn’t bother me at all on my way here. I think they’re protecting Rhusana.”
“The queen who hid her damnedest to make sure this scummer never saw the light of day again?” Fie jerked her thumb at the king as they passed under the stone arch. “That Rhusana?”
Tavin glanced up. “That Rhusana,” he confirmed tightly. “We may want to pick up the pace.”
Fie dug in her satchel of Phoenix teeth. “You two go first, and I’ll cover our backs. We’re going for the main gate.”
“Yes, chief,” the lordlings said in unison. Fie looped back behind the king’s dragging feet—and not a moment too soon, as a skin-ghast leapt toward them from the stairs leading to the Well of Grace above.
It landed in an arc of golden Phoenix fire. “Go,” Fie shouted, teeth blazing in her fists.
Through the gardens they half ran, half stumbled, wheels of fire driving off the ghasts, great sweeps of crackling gold from Fie, from Tavin, from Jasimir, leaving trails of lingering flame and scorch marks. They carried the king past the pavilions he’d once ruled, the halls he’d feasted in, the servants’ quarters where his name had been little better than a curse.
The sky began to blush bloody. By the time they reached the main gates, it had rusted vivid orange. A mob had gathered in the courtyard where Fie had once bargained viatik from the queen; now the gates were barred shut, penning them in like cattle. She caught shouts of “Let us out!” and “Whatever you want, I’ll pay!” and “For the gods’ sake!”
Then she heard cries of alarm, of horror. The skin-ghasts on their trail went still as someone gasped, “Is that the king?”
“It’s over, Rhusana,” Fie told the ghasts. “They see him.”
The ghasts lingered a moment, then retreated like oil slicks.
Fie returned to the front of their gruesome procession. The crowd drew back as Tavin and Jasimir hauled Surimir onward toward the gates proper. Fie saw Peacocks, Owls, Sparrows, Pigeons, Cranes, a few Swans, all crushed together. She almost let out a bitter laugh. Rhusana had united them after all.
“Is that the king?” someone called more forcefully.
In answer, Tavin let golden fire unfurl from his fingers, then lifted Surimir’s limp hand into the air by the wrist. The flames rolled around them both, harmless.
A hush fell over the crowd.
Finally Fie stood before the gates. They were solid lacquered oak, and she saw no bar across the double doors, which meant they’d been sealed from the outside.
“Open the gates,” she called to the Hawks standing behind the stone parapets, a score or so in a line, bristling with spears.
They didn’t answer.
“Open the gates!” Jasimir’s voice soared over her shoulder. In the edges of her sight, she saw him lift a burning hand. “As crown prince, I command you to open them!”
The Hawks only shifted their spears, the sunset flickering along steel.
“There are Crows outside,” someone shouted.
A nearby Sparrow nodded. “We heard you shut them out! Let us go!”
“Let the Crows in, you damned fools!” Fie shouted.
“Fie?” A voice rose from beyond the gates. “Fie, is that you?”
The Hawks did not move.
Fie knew what this was. She’d seen it in more villages than she could number, she’d seen it in the faces of Peacocks and Pigeons alike, she’d se
en it in everyone who thought they could yank the Crows about as they pleased because the Crows always, always had to let them. Even on the edge of the plague, they feared the queen more than the Crows beyond the gates.
They should have feared the one within.
Fie lifted her chin, drew the chief’s sword, stared them down. “You have a count of one hundred,” she said, loud enough to carry out across the courtyard. “Then I cut your sinner king’s throat, and you’d best hope you’ve let in the Crows and gotten far enough from here that the plague won’t catch you, because it all goes guts-up from there.”
Then she planted her feet on the tiles of the courtyard and let out a piercing, unmistakable scream.
A silent heartbeat passed.
Then the answer roared back like a hurricane, shrieking from beyond the palace walls, carving from hundreds, maybe a thousand throats.
Fie tried not to let her shock show. When she’d asked Pa to send help, she’d expected her band, maybe Ruffian and Jade’s.
Khoda had said a conqueror without an army was just a thief. But she had no use for armies, and that Pa had known.
Instead, the Messenger had sent her a flood.
She trilled an order: Pass it on. Outside, another chief picked up the commands, wailing sharp as steel. Every stamp shook the ground. Every sweep rolled like thunder.
“One,” Fie said.
Finally, one of the Hawks spoke, only to say, “We—we have orders from the queen—”
Tavin and Jasimir let the king fall to the ground.
“Two,” Fie said.
One of the Hawks broke, then another. They lunged for something behind them, only for their fellow soldiers to swing spears their way. A scuffle broke out as the rumble and howl of the Money Dance swelled to bursting.
“Three,” Fie said. Then she turned to the lordlings and added: “If you’ve aught to say to the king, say it now.”
She did not listen, for the words were not for her. She watched the gates and kept her count.
By thirty, the lacquered oak shuddered like the dying king at Fie’s back.
The Faithless Hawk Page 31
