That sword had come from Pa, who she soon would have to leave behind as well.įie didn’t care to dwell on that. A Crow chief’s sword, good for mercy alone. The other sword could barely be called such: an old, battered blade, broken half through, its end no more than uneven jags. One was from Tavin, the Hawk boy she’d left behind: a beautiful short sword wrought of finest steel, gleaming demurely in the diluted sunlight. “Not how it works,” Fie said, tying it to her belt, “but we’ll call it a tip.”įie shrugged, brushing her cloak aside in the same movement, and drew the swords buckled at each hip. The governor’s dying daughter meant it as a bribe. Others in the bag kept quiet, but Fie picked out the song of Peacock witches among them. The tooth had been Niem- the sinner girl’s, and it’d stay noisy until she died. Niemi Navali szo Sakar, it declared, daughter of-įie yanked her hand out.
The bag was full of milk teeth, and when Fie fished one out, its spark sang loud and harsh in her bones. You can’t read anyway.” She tossed a small, clicking bag at Fie. The Peacock girl leaned back, gaze narrowing. Instead, she jerked her chin at the scroll and asked, “What’re you reading?” She ought to have told the Peacock girl to close her eyes. She ought to have drawn the broken sword. Never before had a sinner watched Fie so, like she was a wolf strolling too near a pasture.įie ought to have left her mask on. Most of the time Fie found her sinners delirious, dazed, even dead the Sinner’s Plague never let any soul slip through its grasp, and it wrung even the simplest dignities from its victims along the way. But delicate rings of dark-veined rash had begun blooming at her temples, slight enough to be only hours old, damning enough to say the girl had only hours left. Just enough near-noon sunlight soaked the canvas-screened windows for her to read by.įie reckoned the Peacock girl was near her own age, somewhere closer to seventeen years than to sixteen. A scroll had sat half unfurled across her lap. Her short-sleeved linen shift was well made but plain for the Peacock governor’s only daughter, her black hair in a clean, glossy braid that hadn’t yet frayed and dulled with fever sweat. The girl had been sitting up on her pallet when Fie walked into the quarantine hut, dark eyes imperious, mouth set in a stiff bar like the one sealing the door from the outside. No, the sticking point now was the sinner girl. Too many lives had ended on the edge of her steel since then to pretend that didn’t hold a speck of truth. Tavin had told her last moon that killing never ought to get easier, but that it did anyway. It wasn’t the act itself in the three weeks since taking charge of her band of Crows, Fie had dealt mercy more than a handful of times. Fie was taking too long to cut the girl’s throat.
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