“Told you I don’t truck with those,” she said through a yawn. “Can’t even read poetry.”

“I’ll read it to you. I guarantee it will be terrible.” He grinned. “There will be nineteen verses. Your eyes will absolutely be likened to starless skies. So will your hair. I’m not very creative.”

“Stick with flowers.” Fie wrinkled her nose.

“Or knives. Weapons. That’s what Hawks give one another, anyway. Half of Dragovoi’s armory comes from the year the master-general chose her spouses.”

“I’ve already go half a sword.” She traced the shiny lines of his burn scar, curious. “Who gave you this?”

She felt his breath catch, the skin beneath her cheek stilling for a heartbeat or two. Then he said, “Someone who didn’t know what they were doing.”

The old bitterness in his voice reminded her of Hangdog.

She didn’t ask more, only twined her fingers with his until the rise and fall of his chest steadied again.

Then she pushed herself up and reached for her clothes. “I’m getting my laceroot. And then I’m taking watch.”

Tavin opened his mouth to argue and yawned instead. When Fie returned, she settled beside him and shifted his head onto her lap.

“I don’t suppose I can convince you to sleep more,” he sighed, weariness bleeding his words together.

“Maybe when you stop slurring.” She couldn’t scrape the wry smile from her voice. “Now quit fussing and get some rest.”

Fie took his disgruntled grumble as surrender. The rhythm of breath on her knee evened out as she turned her eyes to the dark beyond the cave.

Somewhere, beyond the quiet, beyond the heat of her and her Hawk, somewhere she couldn’t see—the Vultures waited for her.

For a moment, the weight of the unreadable dark crushed in all about Fie. The best trackers in Sabor hunted her. The queen had sold the Crow caste to a prey-beast’s death. And her family lived only as long as their monstrous captor found them useful.

Fie ought to have rolled Pa’s tooth in her fingers. Instead they twisted in the hair at the nape of Tavin’s neck. It shouldn’t have comforted her; it did anyhow.

The peculiar Hawk at her knee believed they could put it all to rights. Believed in her. Believed in a life with her after this.

Perhaps he was a fool after all. Or perhaps he’d gotten something else right.

Fie kept one hand on her Hawk and both eyes on the ebbing dark.

A few hours passed before shuffling echoed from deeper within their cave. The prince had woken. Fie’s gut twinged. Jasimir was bound to ken what her absence meant. The question was how he’d take it.

The hue of the cloud-dusted horizon said she had another hour or two before they had to face him. Maybe less, if the skinwitches had made good time tonight.