She’d slipped off while Corporal Lakima settled the Crows in guest barracks. Her kin were safe and whole, mostly; yet Fie had something more to settle before she could face Pa. Her head told her plain what would come of that talk. Her gut said she wasn’t ready to own it, not yet. And her heart …

Her heart had ghosts to cast out.

The skinwitch propped herself up on an elbow, sprawled on a thin straw pallet. “You lookin’ to make speeches, or you lookin’ to whine about your dead traitor lad?”

“Your kin shot Hangdog down,” she reminded Viimo, trying to sound imperious. “That’s two counts of Vulture treachery to one from a Crow, so let’s mind who we’re calling traitors here.”

“It’s to be speeches, then.” Viimo flopped back down on the pallet and closed her eyes. “Go on, get it over with. I got sleep to catch up on.”

“What were you promised?”

No answer came.

Fie gripped the bars hard enough for cold iron to grate against bone. “Why did you turn on Tatterhelm?”

Viimo opened one eye. “And if I don’t say, you’ll use another Crane tooth, aye?”

“Maybe. Maybe I think you want to tell me.”

Viimo opened her other eye.

“Stuck under a mountain, split off from your kin, and you just brought your own leader down,” Fie continued, leaning into the bars. “I wager you want to tell someone, anyone, why, before they hang you for treason.”

Viimo didn’t speak for a moment. Then she sat up and folded her arms, tracing the valor marks there. “I found tots,” she said. For the first time a bleak note sawed in her voice. “When I was younger. Lost ones, stolen ones. Could track them halfway ’cross Sabor if I wanted. And I’d bring ’em back. Got too good at it, and the queen heard what I can do, and next thing I know … Well, you don’t say nay to a queen. But I liked bringin’ the tots back. I liked who I was. Not someone who hunts brats and roughs up grannies.”

Wretch. Fie remembered how the old Crow had spoken to Viimo, even with a knife at her throat.

“It don’t take a master scholar to read the Oleanders’ horseshit for what it is,” Viimo sighed. “So nobody promised me nothin’, chiefling. I didn’t want to be that person no more.”

Fie didn’t know why the notion made her so angry.

No, she did.