PART ONE
KINGS AND OUTCASTS
CHAPTER ONE
THE THOUSAND CONQUESTS
Fie was taking too long to cut the girl’s throat.
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. Tavin had told her last moon that killing never ought to get easier, but that it did anyway. Too many lives had ended on the edge of her steel since then to pretend that didn’t hold a speck of truth.
No, the sticking point now was the sinner girl.
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. 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. A scroll had sat half unfurled across her lap. Just enough near-noon sunlight soaked the canvas-screened windows for her to read by.
Fie reckoned the Peacock girl was near her own age, somewhere closer to seventeen years than to sixteen. 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.
Minutes, now that Fie had come for her.
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. Never before had a sinner watched Fie so, like she was a wolf strolling too near a pasture.
Fie ought to have left her mask on. Instead she took it off.
She ought to have drawn the broken sword. Instead it stayed at her side.
She ought to have told the Peacock girl to close her eyes. Instead, she jerked her chin at the scroll and asked, “What’re you reading?”
The Peacock girl leaned back, gaze narrowing. Her lip curled. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t read anyway.” She tossed a small, clicking bag at Fie. “There. Do it fast and clean.”
The bag was full of milk teeth, and when Fie fished one out, its spark sang loud and harsh in her bones. Niemi Navali szo Sakar, it declared, daughter of—
Fie yanked her hand out. The tooth had been Niem—the sinner girl’s, and it’d stay noisy until she died. Others in the bag kept quiet, but Fie picked out the song of Peacock witches among them. The governor’s dying daughter meant it as a bribe.
“Not how it works,” Fie said, tying it to her belt, “but we’ll call it a tip.”
“Just do what you’re here for already.”
Fie shrugged, brushing her cloak aside in the same movement, and drew the swords buckled at each hip. 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. The other sword could barely be called such: an old, battered blade, broken half through, its end no more than uneven jags. A Crow chief’s sword, good for mercy alone. That sword had come from Pa, who she soon would have to leave behind as well.
Fie didn’t care to dwell on that. Instead she held out both blades and asked, “Which do you want?” As the Peacock girl’s face turned gray, Fie shuffled closer to give her a better view … and to give herself one as well. The letters on the scroll ordered themselves into words for her, faster now thanks to regular reading practice. “Oh. The Thousand Conquests. That’s a load of trash.”
The Peacock girl snapped the scroll up, scowling. “Of course you’d think that. I don’t expect a Crow to have taste.”
“I’m around conquest … two hundred?” Fie drawled. “Out of a thousand? So far the only Crows have been dirty, thieving half-wits. Or monsters. Scholar Sharivi seems to think the Peacocks piss ambrosia, though, so I see the appeal for you.”
“It’s the truth,” the sinner girl hissed. “Peacocks are born to rule. The Covenant made you as a punishment.”
Fie had heard it before; she supposed that to most of Sabor, it seemed clear-cut. Every other caste was born with a Birthright, an innate gift passed down from the dead gods, like a Crane’s way of spotting lies or a Sparrow’s way of slipping from unwanted attention. Some were even believed to be dead gods reborn into the castes they’d founded, like the Crane witches, who could pull the truth out of a liar, or a Sparrow witch, who could utterly vanish from sight.
The dead gods, though, had denied the Crows a Birthright of their own. Their witches could only steal the Birthrights from bones of the other castes, and only as long as a lingering trace of its former life lasted in that bone. And as the only caste immune to the Sinner’s Plague, their trade was cutting throats and collecting bodies.
With all that, Fie didn’t doubt the life of a Crow sounded like a punishment to a highborn Peacock. Most of Sabor believed dead sinners were reborn into the Crow caste so as to atone for whatever crimes had brought the plague down on them to begin with.
And yet …
She crouched on the dirt floor, setting her swords between her and the Peacock. “Funny thing is, were I to think on which of us two the Covenant favors right now—” Fie tapped her cheek. “Reckon that’s where the scholar Sharivi and I would disagree.”
Fie expected the Peacock girl to sneer at her, to lash back.
Instead, Niemi closed her eyes and raised a hand to the Sinner’s Brand rash on her face. Her voice cracked. “I … I suppose you’re right.”
A tiny, cold scrap of guilt knotted in Fie’s gut. Aye, she despised this soft, clean girl, and not merely because the girl despised her. Yet only one of them would leave this room alive.
Pa would tell her to stop dragging it out.
Wretch would tell her not to play with her food.
Instead, Fie asked, “Do you know why the Covenant picked you?”
The Peacock’s lips pressed together. Her finger shook as she pointed to the Hawk sword. “I want that one.”
“Rich ones always go for the fancy sword,” Fie mused. “You didn’t answer me.”
“Just get it over with,” the girl spat.
Fie lifted The Thousand Conquests and began rolling it up. “Been about five years since Crows passed through the lands of Governor Sakar, aye?” The parchment let out a particularly belligerent crackle. “Heard the last band didn’t make it out of here. Most of them, anyway.”
The Peacock girl said naught.
“A boy got away. Another chief found him, brought him to my pa. His name was Hangdog.”
Was. Two moons since he’d tried to run from being a Crow. Two moons since he’d died on the steps of a Peacock mansion.
When Fie had been old enough, Pa had told her what had happened to Hangdog’s first band. Hangdog himself had spoken of it to her only once.
“He told me there was a rich girl who came to their camp. They let her look at the pyre, they let her wear a mask, they let her see the chief’s sword, because you don’t say nay to a Peacock, even a little one … and then that night, the girl led the Oleander Gentry straight to their camp.”
The Peacock girl’s hands fisted in her pristine linen shift. Another bloom of Sinner’s Brand had begun to tattoo her forearm.