Page 26 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
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 furyas 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 Rather-sting 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 Rather-sting 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 stumbledupon 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.
“Nay, 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—”
“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, 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?”
