Crude, flaking murals stained the clay walls with dead gods everywhere she looked, scrawling out the crafting of the world. In one corner, the first gods made their thousand god-children; in another, the thousand gods struck the Covenant, bringing death, judgment, and rebirth into the world. Until that moment, humans had been naught but the gods’ playthings, with no will of their own.

Fie wasn’t sure they’d improved much since.

A few Crow gods loomed in the murals: Loyal Star Hama guarding sleeping Crows, Crossroads-Eyes leading them away from treacherous roads, Dena Wrathful and her hundred-hundred teeth. Pa had left Fie and her ma in Dena Wrathful’s own ruined temple for Fie’s early moons; Ma had told her that they’d known Fie for a witch when, soon as she could crawl, they’d found her giggling among the shrine’s bones night after night.

This shrine’s idol splayed six worn hands, clasping a compass, hammer, staff, blanket, basket, and crow. A cart wheel made her crown.

Maykala. Patroness of weary travelers. Proper to be sure. Fie bowed to her ancestor and pushed through the doorway’s faded crowsilk curtain, scooping up her sandals from the threshold.

Hangdog slept yet in a heap beneath the shrine’s eaves. The other Crows shuffled about the clearing, rolling up sleeping mats and shaking out cloaks. They gave a strange wide berth to the fire, where Pa tended to a smoking griddle and a growing stack of panbread.

A rasp-rasp-rasp drew Fie’s eye to the culprit: the lordlings sat across the fire from Pa. One of them dragged a whetstone along an unsheathed blade; the other stared, grim, into the flames. They’d changed to mismatched crowsilk shirts and trousers from the shrine’s viatik stash. Both wore the castoffs like ill-fitting costumes.

Beside them sat Besom, the shrine’s keeper and maybe the oldest Crow Fie had ever known, with Barf the tabby curled in her lap. Not many Crows lived long enough to feel the ache of old bones. Those who did spent their elder years keeping the teeth-spells of a haven shrine alight, passing rumors and warnings from band to band, and pointing them down different roads so no one region wound up glutted with Crows. Besom’s hair had grayed long before they’d met, her brown hands stained night-purple from picking and weaving the crowsilk lichen that bearded the tree boughs. Though her fingers were gnarled as old vines, they worked a web of thread nimbly enough as she mumbled to Pa.

“Three?”

“Three, aye. We’ll stretch them as long as we can.”

Fie headed over as Besom fished in a bag lying in the sun-yellowed grass. No doubt the old keeper was knotting Phoenix teeth into a chief’s string for Pa. Neither lordling glanced up from fire or sword-whetting. It was a blessing in disguise, for even by daylight Fie couldn’t mark which of the two was the prince.

As soon as Fie sat, Pa plucked the puff of panbread from the griddle, dropped it into a clean rag, drizzled it with honey and a pinch of salt, and handed it to her. “Here.”