I don’t know what it is that I’m feeling. I want Mira’s killer brought to justice as much, or more, than anyone. I guess I just can’t shake the guilt of having plucked out his eyes and starting all of this in the first place. I’d thought he was dead—an honest mistake, anybody knowing the circumstances in which I’d found him would say, and after all, cleaning up carrion is what we corbae do.

But I should be the one avenging Mira’s death and all the unhappiness that Odawa had created for me over the years. Instead, as unknowingly as I’d first blinded him, I’d led him to Raven’s justice instead. Odawa’s quick to point the accusing finger at me.

“This is all your doing,” he tells me before Brandon leads him away. His voice is dark with the unhappy promise of what he’ll do to me if he ever gets free and finds me again. “You had this planned from the beginning.”

I shrug, but don’t say anything as he’s taken away because there’s nothing left to say. All things considered, I don’t really owe him an explanation. And he wouldn’t listen if I tried to give him one.

I watch Brandon strong-arm Odawa down the stairs and march him across the lawn toward the back of the house. The oaks are full of black-winged cousins once more, taking in the proceedings with great interest.

Not until he’s gone do I turn back to Chloë.

“I keep telling Odawa,” I say, “that the salmon clan has the gift of knowledge, not wisdom, but he doesn’t seem to have either or why would he have come here with me? Even if I didn’t know Mira’s connection to Raven, he should at least have made the effort to find the names of the kin of the cousin he killed.”

“He obviously didn’t. And why he didn’t doesn’t really matter.”

“I suppose. But you’d think he’d have been able to see that I didn’t know anything about any of this.”

“Maybe he thinks you’re just a good actor.”

“I don’t know how much he actually thinks. You know he’s caught up in this business that has the cerva on the warpath?”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me? He’s as conniving as a cuckoo and easily as dangerous.”

She was referring to the long-standing enmity between corbae and cuckoos that had finally been laid to rest a few years ago by the deaths of most of the local cuckoo elders. I’d first arrived in the area not long after, and the air had been filled with cousin gossip about the events.

“He’s also involved in the abduction of a couple of humans,” I say. “A fiddler named Lizzie and a woman named Jilly that Joe calls his sister.”