She yipped and jerked free, stumbling in her haste. A blackened hand scrabbled through the ash toward her, leashed to a steaming mass of burnt flesh.

Tatterhelm somehow lived yet.

But not much longer: his blood turned the cinders about him to dull red paste. If he were fortunate, blood loss would fade him out before the burns could.

“Mercy,” he gasped.

She sucked in a breath that savored of ash and scorched hair.

Mercy.

They always wanted it, in the end. They wanted to hunt Crows, and they wanted to cut them to bits, and when they faced the Covenant’s judgment, they wanted the Crows to grant them a swifter, cleaner way out.

Fie’s hand slipped a little. Her chief’s sword no longer steadied her.

This was her road, wasn’t it? She was a chief. She was a Merciful Crow. Maybe the Covenant had skipped the plague with Tatterhelm and sent her to crop him instead. Maybe she was the Covenant’s judgment now.

She thought of the sinner in Gerbanyar, the smile on his face, the blood on her hands. She saw the Oleanders beneath her tree, screaming for her blood. She saw the Hawks of Cheparok haunting her steps just for being a Crow in the wrong market. Because Crows had to let them. Because Crows would always be merciful.

She saw fire on a bridge. An arrow in an eye. Swain, sharing his scroll with a prince. Tavin, cutting through the rope bridge. Iron slaughter bells hanging about the heads of her own.

She saw a finger on a desk. She saw a trail of fingers on a dusty road.

She saw her own blood-soaked hands.

She was a chief; she looked after her own. Crows, sinners, bastards, kings-to-be; somehow, they had all become her own.

“Damn you, Crow,” he begged. “Mercy.”

Greggur Tatterhelm suffered no plague. He’d chosen his own road, just as Fie had chosen hers.

The Covenant could have sent the plague to deal with him. Instead it had sent a Crow.

Fie dropped Tavin’s slaughter bell in the ash before the skinwitch’s dimming eyes.

“Some of us,” she told him, “are more merciful than others.”

The nails in her sandals ground on cinder and bone as she turned from the Vulture. Her teeth and Tavin’s sword waited in the ashen road ahead.

She took them up again, and did not look back.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

SHORT LIVES

“Figured I ain’t seen the last of you.”

True to Draga’s word, Fie found Viimo alone in her cell. The Hawks at guard eyed Fie but said naught. Perhaps they’d learned her teeth made a better threat than any steel.