“You’re the only one keen to test that,” she snapped, then stopped cold.

Her eyes had adjusted to the little torchlight filtering through the hut’s canvas window screens. The lordlings were already tightly cocooned in linen shrouds on their red-stained pallets, a blot of blood seeping through the fabric at each throat.

Bundling up the dead was their job, not Pa’s.

“Maybe chief didn’t trust us to get it right.” Hangdog didn’t sound like he was grinning anymore.

That was nonsense. The two of them had handled shrouding for five years now, ever since Hangdog had come to her band for chief training.

“If Pa’s got reasons, he’ll tell us,” she lied. “Sooner these scummers are on the cart, sooner we clear the damn patchouli.”

There was a short, muffled laugh as Hangdog picked up one body by the shoulders. Fie took the feet and backed through the door, feeling every gaze in the courtyard alight on her—and then dart to the bloody shroud.

Quiet shrieks ruffled through the Peacock courtiers as Fie swung the body up onto the cart. Hangdog gave it an extra heave. It toppled onto heaps of firewood with an unceremonious thud, knocking over a pile of kindling. A collective gasp swept the galleries.

Fie wanted to kick Hangdog.

Pa cleared his throat, muttering pointedly, “Mercy. Merciful Crows.”

“We’ll be nice,” Hangdog said as they headed back inside. He’d just picked up the remaining body by the feet when he added, “Wager someone faints if we drop this one.”

Fie shook her head. “Pa can sell your hide to a skinwitch, not mine.”

The second body was met with another round of sobs as they loaded it. Yet once the Crows began to haul their cart toward the courtyard’s gateway, the Peacock courtiers miraculously overcame their sorrow enough to jostle at the lattices for a better look.

The spectators’ enraptured angst grated like a broken axle. The dead boys must have been favorites of the royal Phoenix caste if this many Peacocks battled to out-grieve one another.

Fie’s skin crawled. Of all the bodies she had ever dragged off to burn, she decided she hated these two most.

To reach the quarantine court, they’d been all but smuggled down cramped, plain servant passageways; now a stone-faced Hawk hustled them straight through the belly of the palace. The longer the bodies lingered, the greater the odds the plague would pick a new victim.

Fie’s spite grew with every marvel they passed. Their cart clattered over ceramic inlays in mesmerizing whorls, past gardens of amber-pod wafting its perfume through the damp late-spring night, and into arching corridors of alabaster and bronze. Every pillar, every alcove, every tile paid some tribute to the Phoenix royals: a sun, a gold feather, a curl of flame.