Fie felt no pain, even though the rag strips wrapped about her palm had begun to char. Fire wouldn’t harm a Phoenix, nor, it seemed, the witch who called royal ghosts. The small flame burned bright, pure gold, as if Fie held sunlight itself. She rolled her shirtsleeve from elbow to shoulder and focused on the spark once more. Fragments came to her: archery practice, a lover waiting in the amber-pod gardens, a ceremony committing the teeth of a dead uncle to the viatik stash … then, at last, what she’d sought. Candle-flame, winding round fingers like a purring kitten.

Fie clung to the way the dead Phoenix had threaded the fire with his will, then sought the answering hum in her own bones. One rattled up her spine. She’d called out the spark, joined it to her own power. Now it was time to make it sing.

With her head and her heart and all of her bones, Fie pulled.

The tooth erupted in her outstretched hand. Heat blasted through the clearing, gasps turning to awed curses as too-bright flames clawed at the stars.

The first time Pa had spoken to Fie of being a witch, he’d started with the gods.

Eons ago, he’d told her, when the thousand gods had founded their castes and chosen their graves, they’d left one final blessing before they died: a Birthright for every caste.

Every caste, that was, save the Crows.

The gods who begat the Crows had a bad sense of humor. Crows came into the world with no blessings, but their witches had a gift all the same. It was why other castes called them bone thieves: their gift was stealing Birthrights.

In the years after, she’d learned the ways of a Crow witch under Pa’s watchful eye. She could call any Birthright from the cast-off bones of the living or the dead, as long as its spark lasted for her.

But why, she’d asked long ago, did the thousand gods have to die?

And Pa had answered: Everything has a price, Fie. Especially change. Even Phoenixes need ash to rise from. Do you know how many witches there are in Sabor?

She’d shaken her head.

One thousand, Pa had told her. We had to rise from something.

She’d never wholly believed it. She’d never once felt like a god.

But with fire, the Birthright of royals, howling in the palm of her hand, Fie felt like one now.

She took a breath and reeled the fire back to a respectable blaze, but a prickle on her neck said eyes still lingered on her. Sure enough, the Hawk’s thin squint was one she knew too well. It belonged to someone adjusting how they’d first sized her up.