Blackbringer (11 page)

“That lady’s one mean twist,” said Pigeon in a low voice. “Sure she’s no match for ye, Mags, but maybe the imp’s right. We en’t come to tangle with faeries. We got any reason to stay in Never Nigh?”

“Neh, none,” Magpie said. “I already found what we’re looking for.”

“What?” croaked Maniac. “When?”

“While
not
on the stage, as a matter of fact!” she said. “So thank you!” She planted a smooch on his beak.

“Ach,” he grunted. “Don’t be thinking that gets ye off the hook!”

The rest of the crows gathered round, tossing their crowns and capes into the caravan. Magpie introduced them all to Poppy and quickly whispered what they’d learned from the ancient tree. They were suitably impressed, with the news and with Poppy both.

“Gorm,” said Pup, still wearing a pair of devil horns. “Ye can talk to trees? How fine!”

“Thank you.” Poppy blushed.

“Poppy Manygreen!” called an imperious voice from overhead, and they all looked up to see a gent hovering above them on smoke-grey wings. It was one of the two who’d earlier been fawning over the queen. Magpie narrowed her eyes.

“My cousin,” Poppy muttered to her and called out, “What is it, Kex?”

“The queen calls for you. Come at once,” he said, looking down his nose at the crowd of crows.

Poppy frowned. “The queen? Tell her I’m busy—”

“At once!” he cut her off.

“Now, there’s no call to be barking at the lass,” Calypso interjected.

“Neh, it’s fine,” said Poppy, turning to them with a twinkle in her eye. She whispered, “This is sure to be about her hair, neh? She’s always demanding potions for this or that. Sure she wants me to undo your spell.”

“Can you?” Magpie asked.

“I’d have to want to, first. And though I haven’t seen it yet I’m fair certain I’ll find it suits her.”

“Cousin!” hollered Kex.

“Calm yer pepper!” squawked Pup.

“Magpie, the cake recipe,” Poppy whispered quickly, unfurling her wings to fly. “Do you think we could make it?”

“I don’t know where it came from! It could be a trick.”

“Meet me in the morning at old Father Linden.”

Magpie nodded. “Sure.”

“Good!” Poppy curtsied to Snoshti and the crows and said, “I’d best go, then. Lady Vesper awaits. I can’t wait to see this!” And with a wink she flew up to meet her cousin.

“She seems a fine lass,” Calypso said, watching her go. “Could be mad handy, talking to trees.”

“Aye,” Magpie agreed. “She hears things. And one thing she heard? That the creatures have this story, right, about a faerie who’s supposed to bring back the Dawn Days.” She chuffed a laugh. “You haven’t heard that, have you?”

Calypso scratched his head with one talon. “Eh? Maybe, sure,” he said vaguely. “Creatures got nursery stories, same as faeries got.”

“Aye,” agreed Bertram. “Like that one about how a rain shower on a sunny day means a fox’s wedding?”

“Ach,” said Snoshti. “That one’s true. Ye never been to a fox’s wedding? They do make a fuss.”

In the Ring, tunes shivered across fiddle strings and Magpie turned to look. Faeries were dancing in air, jewel-bright and shimmering in their gowns and frock coats. She glanced up at the palace. The queen was gone from the window. To the crows she said, “Where to, birds?”

“Come on,” Snoshti said. “There’s a green near my village. My kin would be pleased to host ye.”

Leaving the stage props in disarray inside, the birds slipped into their harnesses and towed the caravans out of the city.

Daylight twinkled into twilight as the last slanting rays of sunset withdrew from the treetops. Darkness came, and the forest’s moontime citizens awoke, glittery-eyed and hungry. Wolves slunk to the edge of the river and dipped their pink tongues in. Foxes jackknifed on scurrying voles. The hag Black Annis crouched naked on a high branch and shot her tongue at bats who flew too near.

In the southern reaches of the great wood, Magpie and the crows sat around a fire with a clan of hedge imps, trading wind songs for scamper ballads and sipping spiced wine.

Far across Dreamdark in the tiny hamlet of West Mirth, a certain darkness was gliding down the white road out of town. It was a formless thing, unfixed, the edges of it bleeding into the night like watercolors on wet paper. There was no one to feel the desolation it left in its wake. The sentry tower was empty, and in front of its dying fire a rocking chair was slowing to a halt as if someone had stood and stretched and gone to bed. But all the beds in all the cottages were empty. The coverlets were drawn up as if tucked beneath the chins of sleepers, but sleepers there were none. Nothing had been disturbed. The dray pigeons snoozed in their stables and beetles dreamed in their pens, but the faeries were gone. Every one. Even the cradles were empty.

The faerie healer Orchidspike, out foraging in the Deeps for night-blooming flowers, stopped suddenly and straightened up. She was the oldest faerie in Dreamdark, older by an entire lifetime than the next oldest, but her senses were creature-sharp and she knew the currents of the forest like no other. She looked around, feeling an alien chill riding the air, and shivered. Pulling her shawl tight around her, she picked up her basket of flowers and hurried home.

 

At the ruin of Issrin Ev, Talon Rathersting discovered what the search parties had failed to find: his kinsmen’s knives abandoned in a shadowed cleft in the cliff. He gathered them up and brought them out, laying them carefully on a flat rock. There were fourteen in all. That was all of them: Wick had been wearing only two; the others had worn four each. All were bare of their sheaths. They’d been drawn and thrown at something sunk in that crevice. The point of one blade was nicked off where it had met rock, hard and fast. None of the knives seemed to have hit flesh or drawn blood, and whatever had been in the crevice, it was gone now, as were the vultures and the warriors who’d gone hunting them.

When several hours had passed yesterday with no sign of their return, Talon had summoned the rest of the Rathersting warriors, his uncles, more cousins, and his sister, Nettle, and they’d sent out rotating search parties all through the day. Talon had stayed behind at the castle keeping the watch, his heart clenched like a fist in his chest as their wings flashed away over the treetops. The shame and yearning boiled into a kind of fury as he watched and waited, feeling the relentless tug of the sky as his feet stayed firmly on the rampart.

Days were long this near the summer solstice and there had been light well into the evening, but the search parties had returned with nothing but haggard faces. Talon and Nettle had stayed up in the tower watching owls hunt over the silent forest, and when the moon was high he’d turned to look at her. She was taller than he, being a half century older, but with nearly identical tattoos and the same royal circlet on the same pale hair. Her eyes were copies of his too, and her heart knew his heart, and she met his gaze evenly, understanding. She put a hand on his arm and said, “Be careful.”

And Talon went over the wall and into the woods, alone.

He stood now in the courtyard of Issrin Ev with the Rathersting daggers laid out at his feet and the moon-cast shadows of broken statues swaying around him. Headless, wingless, toppled, split, and shrouded in moss, the statues made the Magruwen’s temple seem like a monument to suffering and battles lost. It wasn’t. It had been a place of the highest glory until the very day the Djinn himself destroyed it. Bards and scribes and kings had hurried along these paths, their hearts and heads full of great magic. Now it was hard to imagine any but ghosts coming up the long, crumbling stair in the rock face or anything arriving on wing but vultures.

Talon had found bones and feathers down the slope. A vulture had been devoured. Not enough remained of it to tell whether his father and cousins had killed it, but he suspected so. As for what had eaten it, it could only have been its five fellows. Cannibals. Talon’s lip curled in disgust.

They were gone now.

Talon couldn’t carry all the bare daggers but he took his father’s favorite and turned west. There was only one faerie he wanted to talk to. He headed for Orchidspike’s cottage, starting down the ruined stair at a loping gait and gathering speed. Soon he was hurtling through the gloom of the Deeps, the long wooded basin gouged between two rocky plateaus. The sun penetrated here only a few hours each day when it was directly overhead, and the rest of the hours were just a slow fade from dark to dusk and dusk to dark again.

He raced along, launching himself off roots and spiraling airborne so fast he blurred. He would run half up a tree trunk and dive for the next one, never even slowing as he came to land between wild leaps and kept on, powerful and thrilling, explosive, acrobatic. But he always touched down between leaps. He’d launch, push off, careen toward the canopy of the forest, and never quite break through to the sky.

His feet touched down and he pushed on.

He found Orchidspike awake when he arrived and she hurried to open the door for him. “Lad,” she said, relieved, taking his head in both her hands and looking straight into him through his eyes. Her relief was short-lived, for she saw the trouble in his heart. “What’s happened?” she asked.

“My father’s gone. And Shrike, Wick, and Corvus. Gone.” Talon’s young face was somber under the ink of his ferocious tattoos, but Orchidspike knew him well, knew to look past the warrior and into his eyes, which were the eyes of a lad, and frightened.

She took his hands and led him into the cottage. This place had been Talon’s sanctuary since he was wee. His clan had long worked closely with Orchidspike and her foremothers, for she and her kind were the healers of Dreamdark, and the Rathersting were its guardians. Besides protecting the forest from intruders and keeping a close eye on its unfriendlier residents like Black Annis, the Rathersting launched regular raiding parties into the drear Spiderdowns, the nastiest place in all of Dreamdark. There they gathered the silken skeins of web the healer required for her intricate magic of knitting torn faerie wings back together.

Orchidspike had been ancient all Talon’s life, ancient and marvelous. When the shame of his wings had become at last undeniable, when he was still small and his cousins had started calling him “Prince Scuttle,” Orchidspike had been the light in his darkness. He had come here to her cottage every day after his lessons. She had never taken an apprentice, a lass who would become healer in her place when she made her journey to the Moonlit Gardens, so he had done what an apprentice would have done, the garden work, the transcribing, the spinning and winding of the spidersilk onto bobbins. He had even learned how to knit, though never, never had he breathed a word about it to anyone in his clan.

Orchidspike’s knitting needles were ancient, djinncraft, passed down through generations of Dreamdark healers. They sang to the fingers and were capable of mysterious things. And using them, Talon had found himself capable of mysterious things too. In the privacy of the healer’s cottage he had stumbled upon an art form he believed no faerie had ever undertaken before, a secret art, and it had become a fascination for him. No instructions existed in any book, not even the slightest hint. He had to invent it for himself as he went along, stitch by stitch, but he didn’t feel himself alone in it. There was something that guided him, a sense he could not put into words. It was like being swept into a current of magic and carried along, even as he sat still and knitted. His heart pulsed with the pulse of some unseen force, glyphs came together in his mind, and his hands knew just what to do. It was almost like a trance. He had tried explaining it to Orchidspike and her eyes grew bright and sharp but she said little. And because it involved knitting needles he could never mention it to anyone else. Who ever knew a warrior prince to knit?

Orchidspike put on a kettle and gathered leaves from a half-dozen little jars, mixing a tea for Talon. Then she sank back into her rocker and said, “Tell me.”

“Yestermorn on the watch I spotted six vultures,” he told her. “Monstrous big beasts. My father and cousins went out to see to them. They never came back. I found their knives at Issrin Ev.”

“Issrin?” she asked, and nodded to herself. “Aye, near the mouth of the Deeps. Lad, I was in the Deeps this night and I felt a dark presence and it wasn’t vultures, I can tell you.”

“But what was it?”

“It grieves me to say I’ve no idea. Some dark power has come to Dreamdark and we need to learn what it is.”

“I’ll go search the Deeps,” he said, rising to his feet.

“Neh, you will not,” she said, her eyes ablaze. “There’s something out there, lad, and it might only be luck you made it through the Deeps once tonight. Come. You’ve some hours till dawn and work to do. You can finish in that time, I think.”

“Finish? But—”