Blackbringer (12 page)

“It’s time, lad,” she said. She opened a workbox that sat near the hearth and lifted from it her knitting needles and a long streamer of shimmering threads.

Talon took them from her very gently. Light skittered across the fabric and couldn’t seem to fix a color to it. It looked frail as a cobweb adrift on a breeze, insubstantial as a veil knit of moonbeams. Holding the needles in his hands he felt the familiar pulse catch him up like a current, glyphs filled his mind, and the work began to flow from his fingers.

Just before dawn he looked up from it and his eyes were shadowed with sleeplessness but bright with excitement.

“It’s ready,” he said.

Orchidspike looked it over closely. “It’s more than ready. You’ve done something true here, lad. It’s perfect.”

Talon glowed with pride.

Orchidspike said, “Once the sun’s full up I want you to go to the hamlets on the Sills and see how they fare there. If anything seems awry—anything—shepherd the folk to the castle for safekeeping, you ken?”

He nodded and shook out the skin—for that was what he had made—and stepped into it, visioning the glyph that would awaken it. After that, even Orchidspike couldn’t have distinguished him from a real falcon.

 

The clot of darkness had returned to Issrin Ev. Before sunrise it slipped into a deep fissure in the rubble of the temple, and five vultures hunkered down on branches to wait out the day, restless and hungry. They’d eaten nothing since their brother’s corpse, a whole day past. And though their master had hunted through the night, he had left them no bones to pick over. He never did.

Magpie woke half buried in pillows in a blanket nest on the floor. She stretched like a cat and rolled over, blinking up at the root-ribbed ceiling of Snoshti’s burrow. It smelled sweet in the close space, of tea and earth and spice. “Up and greet the day!” Snoshti called, and Magpie got to her feet and ambled down a low corridor to the kitchen, where hot scented water awaited her in a copper tub.

“Ach,” grumbled Magpie, for whom a bath was a dip in a pond or a quick shine with the last gulp in her cup.

“Sure even crows bathe sometimes,” Snoshti told her, frowning at the feather skirt, for Magpie had slept in her clothes same as she always did. As she stepped out of them she unstrapped her new knife from her leg and laid it aside. It caught Snoshti’s eye and the imp did a double take behind her back. A little later, when Magpie’s head was underwater, she looked closer, sucking in her breath when she saw the knife’s runes, but when Magpie surfaced, Snoshti didn’t say a word about it.

She lathered Magpie’s chestnut hair with pear-scented soap and watched fondly as the lass used magic to float a scone across the room from the stove to her mouth, leaving it suspended in the air before her face and taking great bites without the use of her hands. Crumbs cascaded into the bathwater. “Little barbarian.” Snoshti chuckled.

A dozen families lived in the hedge imp village, an intricate warren beneath the earth with wide tunnels for avenues, and passages that Snoshti said reached all the way to other villages. Glossy gem-hued beetles milled about as Magpie made her way topside, and impkins darted up to touch her shyly and giggle, never having had a faerie visit them underground before nor ever having met one so ready to smile at them or carry them into the air on short flights.

The crows were up and smoking in their dressing gowns, and Mingus poured Magpie a cup of sludgy coffee.

“So, ’Pie,” said Calypso, “when are we for the Magruwen, eh? First thing? Or ye going to make that cake?”

Magpie took the recipe out of her pocket and chewed her lip. She’d have been certain the writing belonged to Bellatrix but for the one thing that made it impossible: the paper wasn’t ancient; it could have been written yesterday. “What if it’s a trick?” she asked.

“A trick? Ye mean, like, if it’s not really his favorite cake?” puzzled Pup.

Magpie smiled. It seemed such a silly notion in itself, that the great Djinn had a favorite cake at all. She looked at the ingredients. Oats, honey, the usual things, and what else? Tears, wind, lightning . . . Magpie cocked her head to one side and took a swig of her coffee, thinking. Tears, wind, and lightning. Water, air, and fire—that was three of the four elements.

She thought of what she and Poppy had talked of, how the Djinn had dreamed a world he couldn’t even touch. He couldn’t wade in a stream and feel the rush of water without boiling it, couldn’t sleep beneath a tree without burning it, or ride a bird, or feel the wind, or lay his cheek on a sun-warmed stone. It began to seem like just the kind of cake that
would
be his favorite.

And what of the thousand years of undreamed life? What was a life not yet begun? A cocoon, sure. But no butterfly or moth lived a thousand days, let alone years. And Magpie had an idea that this last ingredient would somehow represent the fourth element: earth. Rich earth, steady, solid earth, the element that anchored all the rest, like roots in soil.

Suddenly she had it. She clapped her hands. “An acorn!”

“Eh, ’Pie?” Calypso asked.

“A tree lives a thousand years!” she said, and the idea settled in her mind with the snick of a puzzle piece fitting into place. What was an acorn if not the perfect expression of life, a millennium of it and more, curled up tight and just waiting for the proper encouragement to begin?

She would make the cake. Wherever it had come from, whoever had written it out, it was made of such things as could have only good in them. “I’m going to meet Poppy,” she told the crows.

She went back down into the imp village to borrow a half walnut shell from Snoshti, then she set out.

 

Fringed by a circle of willows, Lilyvein Pond was the largest of a string of spring-fed ponds on the outskirts of Never Nigh. Faerie weddings were often held here in the spring when white narcissus bloomed round it thick as snowbanks, and in winter it was the favorite spot for ice-skating. Magpie flew quietly over the glassy water and, hovering just above the surface, began to sing. Poppy watched and listened from the air.

The strange words, sung low in a language not often heard above the waves, rippled over the water, and sleek shapes began to gather beneath.

Magpie was singing the ballad of Psamathe, fiftieth of the fifty daughters of the sea, and it was a tale of despair sure to bring tears to the eyes of fish, eel, and creek maiden, and any other creature who knew their language. Magpie couldn’t speak the fin tongue fluently but she knew a good number of their ballads by heart as a result of a long winter some twenty years earlier spent trapped in an ice cave with selkies. She’d become quite a good ice sculptor that winter too, a skill she hadn’t since had to call upon, but who knew but that one day she might? Little had she suspected then, sharing a selkie’s seal pelt for warmth, that the day would come when she’d need to bring a fish to tears. But here that day was.

 

The tricky fin verses trilled off her tongue, and as the last notes rippled across the pond, the fish wept like babes. Hanging like a dragonfly over the green water, Magpie gingerly scooped the walnut shell in and filled it to brimming with their tears.

“What was that song about?” Poppy asked as they flew slowly away, trying not to slosh the tears. Not understanding a word of it, she’d still felt a tug at her heart, so mournful had been the sound.

“Lost love,” replied Magpie with all the feeling of a child to whom such a thing is mere words. “Woe and heartache. The usual.”

The Manygreen lands sprawled across a varied terrain of speckled meadows and scrubby rises laced with tree cover. As they were growers and plant mages, they lived where the trees were sparse and the sun could dip down and kiss their growing things to life. Poppy guided Magpie to a soft landing atop a tangle of wild plum roots at the edge of a garden in riotous summer bloom. There were checkered heads of drooping fritillary mixed into swaths of bird cherry and cloudberry, kiss-me-quick and creeping jenny, primrose and bee orchid and yellow archangel. Fuchsia and wild peony tumbled over rocks, and fiddleheads unfurled among stalks of honey daphne. From tree to tree rolled carpets of wood anemone, and above it all a fringe of whitebeam and flowering plum waved its plumage in the wind.

“Oh, Poppy . . . ,” Magpie breathed, taking it all in. “It’s wonderful here. . . .”

Poppy beamed. “There’s my workshop,” she said with a flourish of her arm. Emerging from a nook between roots was a many-gabled roof bristling with copper chimneys. Poppy led Magpie through a covered porch into a single large room. Herbs and blossoms hung upside down from the ceiling to dry, and the walls were hidden entirely by shelves and glass-fronted cabinets. A pair of big slab worktables were covered in a tumble of kettles, crucibles, and cauldrons, bubbling vials, interconnected tubes, beakers, shining instruments, and books.

Magpie looked at it all, wide-eyed. “Skive,” she murmured. “I’ve never seen the like!”

Poppy pulled a bowl down from a shelf and emptied the tears into it.

“Songbird tisane.” Magpie read a tiny label on an earthen jar. “Lover’s posy. Cure for hiccups and nightmares. Moonlight mist . . . What’s that do?”

“That helps you remember your dreams.”

“Sharp! Does it work?”

“Aye, sure. Here.” She poured some of the blue cordial into a little metal flask and screwed the cap on tight. “For later. Just a sip before bedtime.” She handed it to Magpie.

“Thanks!” The flask had a ring on its cap that Magpie threaded through her belt. “How’d you make it?”

“You’ve got to collect full-moonlight all night long in a mirror, set out someplace no shadows will fall over it from dusk to dawn, and at first light tip it and pour the moonlight through a sieve of mist into a jug with a sprig of lavender and then distill it for a moon’s time.”

“There’s one for my book!” Magpie said. “How’d you think that up?”

“Sometimes,” Poppy said with a bashful glance at Magpie, “I just sort of
. . . feel
what to do, like the magic’s already there, all around, and I just have to sort of let my mind open—like a flower—and then . . . I don’t know, I . . . find it.”

Magpie stared at her and Poppy blushed, looking back down at the bowl in her hands as she said quickly, “It’s just a fancy, really.”

“Neh,” said Magpie, a push of her wings carrying her half across the room. “Poppy,” she said earnestly, “is it like . . . a pulse?”

Poppy looked up sharply and said, “Aye . . .”

“Like . . . ,” Magpie went on, “like invisible blood pulsing through the veins of the air?”

Poppy nodded eagerly. “Like if you could feel the roots of things alive under the ground, twisting and living and growing, even though you can’t see them, but it’s not just underground, it’s everywhere, all around, and it’s faster than roots growing and bigger, bigger than anything—”

“And it’s warm and alive and—”

They spoke the next words in unison—“and it carries you along with it”—and stood staring at each other.

Tears suddenly sprang to Poppy’s eyes. “Magpie, I’ve never . . . no one else has ever understood. . . .”

“I know,” said Magpie. “Me too!”

“Have you always—?” Poppy started to ask, but just then a crow poked his head through the window.

“Mags,” he croaked. “C’mere a secky, darlin’.” It was Swig. He had a hunched, serious look about him that Magpie knew could mean nothing good. She went to the window at once. Beyond, she could see Maniac and Mingus close in conversation with a raven so large he made the crows look like hatchlings.

“Who’s that feather?” she asked.

“Algorab’s his name,” said Swig. “Dreamdark bird. He’s heard something, Mags.”

“What?”

“Little hamlet called West Mirth? There’s bats who hunt bugs round the pigeon stables there by night. They say last night something came through.”

“What kind of something?”

Swig shook his head. “Don’t know. Bats said their echo sense went right through it. Just
darkness,
they said.”

Magpie’s stomach lurched. “Darkness? Not the hungry one! Not in Dreamdark!”

“No one came out of those houses this morning, Mags, and Algorab says it’s some eerie kinda quiet.”

“Quiet,” Magpie repeated, remembering the terrible hush of the catacombs. ”Neh . . . ,” she said, leaning heavily on the window ledge, her head spinning. It was mad. Dim as devils were, they’d always known to steer clear of Dream-dark in their day. If the beast had come here, then she’d been right about one thing, one awful thing: it had come for the Magruwen. “Where’s Calypso?” she asked Swig.

“Pup went for him.”

She glanced at Poppy, who was watching them, puzzled. “All right,” she told Swig, “I’m coming.” To Poppy she said, “We’ll go gather up the rest of the ingredients. The shadow and wind and that? You got the oats and flour and all?”

“Aye, sure my mum has it at home.”

“Good, then, I’ll meet you back here.”

Poppy watched with a slight frown as Magpie flew out the window to join the birds. After they’d flown away she stepped out into her garden and pondered what she’d overheard. Then she knelt beside a patch of crimson primroses. “Good morning, beauties,” she said. “What gossip in the wood?”

A falcon hung weightless in the updrafts that rose along the rocky Sills. Suddenly it plunged into a harrowing dive, spiraling hard groundward before swooping into a long, smooth upward glide. There was something joyful in the sight of it, a wild, bracing freedom that the flightless could only dream of. After a hundred years of standing on heavy feet watching other wings rise, Talon felt as if a flare had been lit over the world, revealing all new colors. He’d never felt so alive.