The world went dark, shouts fading from her ears—then the weight at her back abruptly slackened. She staggered forward, the skin-ghast’s arm still locked about her throat. Someone grabbed her, and then with a jerk, the arm fell away. She gasped and coughed, eyes watering.

The prince knelt beside her, pinning the skin-ghast’s arm to the ground with Tavin’s sword. Scraps of gray skin littered the ground around them, wriggling and unfurling still. The skin-ghast’s head flattened out like raw dough, then swelled again. Just beyond it lay the dead Oleander.

He still had a few strands of Fie’s hair clenched in a fist. Enough to make a new puppet for Rhusana, once they’d finished with her.

“Now can you spare a Phoenix tooth?”

Trust Jasimir to get petty at a moment like this. Fie shot him a glare and scrabbled for her string.

The Oleanders had drawn their steel, the other skin-ghasts lurching toward them with a faint whistle. Still too many to fight.

Not too many to outrun.

The Phoenix tooth answered Fie’s call.

A dead witch-king roared in her bones, and golden fire bloomed in a shrieking arc. The Oleanders’ horses crashed into one another as their riders swore. Yet they didn’t flee, as if they doubted her.

As if they doubted the wrath of a Crow.

Fie fed the fire her fear and her fury; the ghost of the Phoenix led the charge. Flames turned into a wall, into a wave, into the jaws of a terrible beast crashing down around them.

The Oleanders fled then.

“Grab what you can,” she wheezed. Jasimir pulled her to her feet and lunged for their packs.

Fie tossed the Phoenix tooth at the dead Oleander, burning every last strand of her hair in his hand. A golden wall stretched along the road, keeping the Oleanders at bay. The tooth wouldn’t last but a few heartbeats more, but Fie prayed that’d give them enough of a start.

She and Jasimir fled into the trees.

She didn’t know how long they ran, only that golden fire waned to more mundane orange that shrank behind them. Hoofbeats drummed through the forest, chased by shouts, taunts, torchlight. More than once she and Jasimir huddled in the brush until a pale rider or a slithering skin-ghast passed and the quiet dark returned.

Eventually they cleared the woods. A sickle midnight moon gleamed above, its weak light catching on the mellow slopes of a pasture studded with goats and cattle.

Fie pointed. A few dozen paces away, a crude wooden structure sheltered great heaps of hay. “There.”

Jasimir nodded. They hopped the pasture fence, then the one around the hay, and crawled into a discreet hollow.