Madcap, a Crow allergic to dignity, snatched up Fie’s hands and wheeled her about the road in a giddy whirl, belting yet another lewd and anatomically improbable verse of “The Lad from Across the Sea.” Fie couldn’t help but throw back her head and laugh. Aye, they still had leagues to walk and bodies to burn, but—but she’d done it.

For once, she’d made the palace pay.

“Stop, stop,” Madcap wheezed, laughing as they clutched their stomach. “I’m like to barf!”

The two of them slowed to a drunken tilt near Pa. By all rights, he ought to be reeling with glee like the rest of the band.

He hadn’t even taken off his mask, staring straight back at Dumosa.

“Come on, chief—” Madcap started, but Pa cut them off.

“It’s not done yet. Save your dance for when the bodies burn.” Pa fired off the whistle-order to march.

Wretch passed the cat back to Fie, shaking her head at Pa’s back. An unease draped over the Crows once more. Madcap still hummed under their breath, and Swain muttered along after a few steps, but otherwise silence clung to the cart as they dragged it on.

The scattering of huts and god-grave shrines by the road eventually yielded to the twist-trunked, lichen-shawled forest. “The Lad from Across the Sea” wound down, another song rising in its wake, louder and steadier. Soon the only marks of Dumosa were glimpses of a gilded crust over dark hills, sometimes sparking through the trees.

“Here.”

Pa’s voice cut through the night, snipping off the walking song’s last verse. He thrust his torch into the soft dirt by the roadside. The cart creaked to a halt as Pa shucked his mask and nodded at Fie and the tabby. “No strays we can’t eat, girl.”

“Not a stray, she’s mine,” Fie returned. “My share of the viatik.”

Pa huffed a short chuckle. “Covenant’s crap she is, Fie, but we’ll talk your share later. What’s her name, then?”

She thought of the steward’s queasy face and Madcap’s dance and grinned. “Barf.”

“That’s proper.” Pa ran a hand over his bald crown. All his hair had migrated south to his short salt-and-pepper beard long years past. “Now let’s see about these boys, eh?”

Fie leaned on the edge of the cart and studied the two shrouds lying among splits of kindling. “Big,” she said. The prince had been near a year her elder, and clearly both boys had been better fed. “Dunno if we have enough firewood for both.”

“Will if we douse ’em in flashburn,” Hangdog suggested, lounging over the cart’s other side.