Free Eyes of Crow by Jeri Smith-Ready

things?”
    Rhia shrugged, in a failing attempt at casualness. “It’s hard to say good or bad.”
    “I’ve heard nothing good about Kalindons, so unless Torynna and Mali have come into some secret knowledge—”
    “Secret knowledge about what?” said a voice behind them.
    Lycas stood at the door. Rhia stepped back, astonished that his burgeoning powers of stealth had allowed him to unlatch the door and slip in without her awareness.
    Nilo, on the other hand, appeared unsurprised. “She says Mali told her about our father,” he said to Lycas. “Today.”
    “Mali?” Lycas tossed a leather bag onto the table with a loud thunk. A rabbit’s stiff brown foot emerged from a tear in the seam. “I trust she spoke well of our kind?”
    “Tell him,” Nilo said to Rhia. “Tell us what she said.”
    “I don’t want to know.” Lycas picked through the flasks near the stove until he found one with contents to his liking. He took a long gulp, then wiped his mouth. “I just came in for a drink, now I need to clean these rabbits. Got three.” He reached for the bundle on the table.
    “You should listen,” Nilo said.
    “You want me to do it in here? This place is too clean for you, needs some fur and guts on the floor?”
    Nilo moved the bag of dead rabbits out of Lycas’s reach. “Rhia, start.”
    She told them everything. The three had always shared a brutal honesty, which was probably why her brothers were so hurt to think she had kept the secret about their father.
    For once, Lycas’s face was impassive. When she was finished, he grabbed the rabbit-bag and left the house.
    Nilo turned back to Rhia. “I always said Mali was no good for him. They’re too alike.” He tried to smile, then gave up, since it was an unnatural contortion for his face. “If they married, they’d kill each other, and then Asermos would lose two warriors before the battles even began.”
    “Battles?” Rhia’s pulse jumped. “What have you heard?”
    “Nothing certain. Always rumors about the Descendants.”
    She tried to hold back a shudder and only succeeded in twinging a neck muscle. “I’ve seen more of them in town lately. Why do they need to come this far north to trade?”
    “They don’t. I don’t think they’re really traders. They’re spies, seeing if our lands and towns are worth their time and weapons and lives.”
    Rhia had trouble believing that the strange men she had seen dawdling around the docks and taverns had been related to her people at one time. From their provocative dress that contained so many useless accents to the way they walked upon the earth, as if they owned the soil under their feet, they were different. Perhaps it was the ease of the southern clime they had migrated to after breaking from her people generations ago, or the great cities they had built to hold their pride. Whatever “it” was about them, the Descendants always made her feel, for a moment, ashamed to be human.
    “You think they want to invade us?” she asked.
    “They want what we have, and they don’t understand our ways. Perfect combination for an invasion.”
    “Something should be done.”
    Nilo scoffed. “The Wolverines, we’ve all been telling Torin we should capture a few of these ‘traders’ and interrogate them.” Torin, the third-phase Bear man to whom Arcas was apprenticed, served as the Asermon military leader. He was also Torynna’s father, but Rhia didn’t hold that against him.
    “What did he say?”
    “He said it wasn’t ‘strategic.’” Nilo half grinned. “Lycas told him that waking up one day to find ourselves dead wasn’t exactly strategic, either.”
    Rhia’s mind wanted to turn away from the thoughts of war, yet her powers would be indispensable in that event. “How could they defeat us? They don’t even have magic.”
    “When their army is ten times the size of ours, they don’t need magic.”
    “But if they had magic, they wouldn’t need those big armies, would they?”
    He