Tavin held a hand up, brow furrowed, searching the dark. “Do you hear that?”

Fie sifted through the noises one by one: the creak of smoldering firewood. Leaves murmuring in a weak wind. The soft trill of faraway cicada song.

Just beyond it all, a thin, uneven whistle.

Not the sort Fie issued for marching orders or the steps of the Money Dance, nor even the sort Swain half hummed under his breath while he tallied inventory. The nearest thing Fie could recall was a hunched-up poppy-sniffer she’d passed in an alley years ago, a forgotten reed pipe resting on his slack bottom lip. Every wheeze had skimmed off a faltering note.

And somewhere beyond their campfire, it sounded as if scores of those poppy-sniffer whistles were closing in.

“Trees. Now. Grab what you can.” Fie had started keeping a few bowlfuls of earth near their campfires for moments like this. She threw the dirt over the flames, smothering them in an instant. Then she blinked away the deeper dark and shoved as much as she could into her pack.

The whistles whined louder.

Mercifully, the prince was not barefoot this time. He and Tavin had scaled a sturdy oak, and Fie followed them up, calling two Sparrow teeth. She settled on a thick bough, teeth alight, and tried not to think on all the supplies still left below.

The whistling rose to a soft shriek, mere paces from camp.

Fie had seen her fair ration of terrible things in her sixteen years: scummed sinners, long-dead Oleander victims, the aftermath of a plague beacon gone unanswered. She’d heard campfire tales of monsters, devils, ghosts of wretched souls even the Covenant refused. All stories, she’d told herself. The only monsters she’d seen were humans with something to hide behind.

But by every dead god, she was starting to believe now.

Fie heard the dull clang of a pot overturned, a flap of a sleeping mat, strange wet leathery sighs, and above all, the whistles. But the dark hid the camp below too well. She could see shifting ripples of piecemeal moonlight and no more.

Worse, the twin Sparrow teeth ought to have shown her gazes peering about camp, so she might turn them away as needed. The teeth burned steady as they always did, and yet—

Fie saw naught below.

No searching looks, no scouring beacons, no Vulture gazes prying about the dirt. Only shifting, slippery night.

A brief sizzle drifted up, chased by a whiff of something rancid and burnt. Then the whistles shifted, flowing out of the camp, away to the north.

Fie didn’t let out her breath until long after the final quiet shrill seeped away.

“Anyone see what that was?” she whispered.

“No.” Tavin’s voice shook. “Jas?”

“I’ve no idea.”

Fie rolled Pa’s tooth about, half to think, half to comfort herself with the familiar spark. What would he do, hunted by the night itself?