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Dedication

To everyone whose mercy is demanded, and who dreams instead of teeth.

And to my parents: No, you’re not in this one. The cat had first dibs.

Epigraphs

One way or another, we feed the Crows.

—Saborian proverb

On nights you burn sinners, sleep with your sandals on.

—advice for a young Crow chief

Caste Legend

Part One: Sinners and Queens

CHAPTER ONE

THE EMPTY THRONE

Pa was taking too long to cut the boys’ throats.

Near ten minutes had run dry since he’d vanished into the quarantine hut, and Fie had spent the last seven of them glaring at its gilded door and trying not to worry a stray thread on her ragged black robe. Taking one minute meant the Sinner’s Plague had already finished off the boys inside. Taking three meant Pa had a merciful end to deliver.

Taking ten was taking too long. Ten meant something was fouled up. And from the whispers sweeping the pristine tiles of the courtyard, their throngs of onlookers were catching on.

Fie gritted her teeth until the queasy pinch in her gut retreated. Pa knew what he was doing. Twelve hells, just yesterday morning he’d led their band of Crows to answer a plague beacon, collected corpse and coin, and had them all back on the roads before noon.

That town had no shortage of gawkers either: a man slipping looks through his loom threads, a woman steering her goat herd past the sinner’s hut to steal a better view. Children had twisted from their parents’ grasp to stare at the Crows and ask if monsters hid under the beaked masks and black robes.

Fie reckoned the answer changed depending on whether a Crow was in earshot.

But Fie had seen gagglers and worse near every day she could recall. As the only caste untouched by the plague, the Merciful Crows were duty-bound to answer every summons.

And as Pa’s chief-in-training, she hadn’t the luxury of a faint heart. Not even here. Not even now.

The boys they’d been called to take tonight were no different from the hundreds of bodies she’d helped burn in her sixteen years. No matter that few had been this high-caste. No matter that Crows hadn’t been summoned to the royal palace of Sabor for nigh five hundred years.

But the needle-sharp stares of warriors and aristocrats told Fie the plague mattered to the high castes tonight.

Pa knew what he was doing, she told herself again.

And Pa was taking too long.