The Merciful Crow (The Merciful Crow #1)
by Margaret OwenPublisher: Henry Holt (BYR)
Release Date: July 30th 2019
Genre: Young Adult, Fantasy
Synopsis:
A future chieftain
Fie abides by one rule: look after your own. Her Crow caste of undertakers and mercy-killers takes more abuse than coin, but when they’re called to collect royal dead, she’s hoping they’ll find the payout of a lifetime.
A fugitive prince
When Crown Prince Jasimir turns out to have faked his death, Fie’s ready to cut her losses—and perhaps his throat. But he offers a wager that she can’t refuse: protect him from a ruthless queen, and he’ll protect the Crows when he reigns.
A too-cunning bodyguard
Hawk warrior Tavin has always put Jas’s life before his, magically assuming the prince’s appearance and shadowing his every step. But what happens when Tavin begins to want something to call his own?
It was nigh midnight before they set foot
on the League-High Bridge over the Hem. The great river thundered only a few
hundred paces below, but for murder’s purpose, it worked near good as a league.
Fie minded her step during the ten minutes it took to cross.
The moment her nail-studded soles touched
gravel instead of cobblestone, Fie held her breath. If the royals meant to claw
back their teeth, this was where the Hunting Castes would strike.
All of them strained to catch any hint of
company. The long, terrible silence stretched thin and treacherous as young ice
while Fie scoured every flicker of leaves for an ambush.
None came.
Maybe—just maybe—they’d done it.
Someone inhaled sharp. Then a deafening cry
broke out:
“OH, I ONCE KNEW A LAD FROM ACROSS THE SEA,
WITH A MOST PARTICULAR SPECIALTY—”
Madcap’s voice split the night like an axe,
swinging into the bawdiest walking song Pa’d let them sing in Fie’s presence.
The rest of the band broke into wheezing laughter, near weeping with relief.
“Twelve hells, Fie!” Wretch clung to the
cart for dear life, slapping a knee. She had near as many years as Pa and twice
as quick a temper, one of the few who’d known Pa when he was still called Cur,
not yet Chief. She took the cat from Fie and scratched its brow. “I thought
you’d ask the queen to throw in a crown for all that trouble!”
“What good’s a crown?” Swain drawled from
behind Wretch. A flash of mirth leavened his perpetually dour voice. “She could
have just asked to slap the king. Probably would’ve gone over better with Her
Majesty.”
Madcap, a Crow allergic to dignity,
snatched up Fie’s hands and wheeled her about the road in a giddy whirl,
belting yet another lewd and anatomically improbable verse of “The Lad from
Across the Sea.” Fie couldn’t help but throw back her head and laugh. Aye, they
still had leagues to walk and bodies to burn, but—but she’d done it.
For once, she’d made the palace pay.
“Stop, stop,” Madcap wheezed, laughing as
they clutched their stomach. “I’m like to barf!”
The two of them slowed to a drunken tilt
near Pa. By all rights, he ought to be reeling with glee like the rest of the
band.
He hadn’t even taken off his mask, staring
straight back at Dumosa.
“Come on, chief—” Madcap started, but Pa
cut them off.
“It’s not done yet. Save your dance for
when the bodies burn.” Pa fired off the whistle-order to march.
Wretch passed the cat back to Fie, shaking
her head at Pa’s back. An unease draped over the Crows once more. Madcap still
hummed under their breath, and Swain muttered along after a few steps, but
otherwise silence clung to the cart as they dragged it on.
The scattering of huts and god-grave
shrines by the road eventually yielded to the twist-trunked, lichen-shawled
forest. “The Lad from Across the Sea” wound down, another song rising in its wake,
louder and steadier. Soon the only marks of Dumosa were glimpses of a gilded
crust over dark hills, sometimes sparking through the trees.
“Here.”
Pa’s voice cut through the night, snipping
off the walking song’s last verse. He thrust his torch into the soft dirt by
the roadside. The cart creaked to a halt as Pa shucked his mask and nodded at
Fie and the tabby.
“No strays we can’t eat, girl.”
“Not a stray, she’s mine,” Fie returned.
“My share of the viatik.”
Pa huffed a short chuckle. “Covenant’s crap
she is, Fie, but we’ll talk your share later. What’s her name, then?”
She thought of the steward’s queasy face
and Madcap’s dance and grinned. “Barf.”
“That’s proper.” Pa ran a hand over his
bald crown. All his hair had migrated south to his short salt-and-pepper beard
long years past. “Now let’s see about these boys, eh?”
Fie leaned on the edge of the cart and
studied the two shrouds lying among splits of kindling. “Big,” she said. The
prince had been near a year her elder, and clearly both boys had been better
fed. “Dunno if we have enough firewood for both.”
“Will if we douse ’em in flashburn,”
Hangdog suggested, lounging over the cart’s other side.
Fie’s beak was only in the way now. She set
Barf down in the cart and pushed back her hood to loosen the mask’s straps,
letting it hang about her neck as she ran a hand through her chin-cropped
tangle of black hair. It was a blessing to breathe clean night air and not the
palace’s incense or her mask’s stale mint.
She had naught to fear of contagion. It was
said that every Crow had fouled up something grand in their past lives, bad
enough for the Covenant to strike them down with plague and boot them directly
to a life of atonement in containing the disease. That Crows were born already
in debt to the Covenant’s measures of sin. That it would not take them to their
next life before that debt was paid.
So it was said, at least. Fie didn’t know
how much of that rang true to her ear. But it was truth hard as iron that the
Sinner’s Plague left only Crows untouched.
Death-stink hadn’t settled on the boys yet,
but she still flinched at the crimson stains on their shrouds. Of all a chief’s
duties, cutting throats was the one she dreaded most.
She reached into the cart, prodding what
seemed like the nobler of the bloody heaps. “They really royals, Pa?”
“Just the one. Other was his body double.”
Fie tugged back the linen until torchlight
landed on a boy’s rust-flecked face, looking for all the world like he was
sleeping. Maybe a little afraid. Maybe he’d been awake when Pa’s blade touched
his throat.
She pursed her lips. “So that’s what a
sinner prince looks like.”
The dead boy sat up.
“Well, no,” he said, “but I’ve been told
I’m fairly close.”
Born and raised at the end of the Oregon Trail, Margaret Owen spent her childhood haunting the halls of Powell’s Books. After earning her degree in Japanese, her love of espresso called her north to Seattle, where she worked in everything from thrift stores to presidential campaigns. The common thread between every job can be summed up as: lessons were learned.
She now spends her days wrestling disgruntled characters onto the page, and negotiating a long-term hostage situation with her two monstrous cats. (There is surprisingly little difference between the two.)
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