Page 29 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
“What kind of something?”
Swig shook his head. “Don’t know. Bats said their echo sense went right through it. Justdarkness, 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 Dreamdark 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?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
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.
He came to perch in a pine above Pickle’s Gander, the smallest of the three hamlets on the Sills. Inside his skin he was winded and grinning. No other faerie had to work this hard to fly, sure. They didn’t have to learn to knit, and they didn’t have to operate false wings with their arms. But no faerie had ever done what he’d done. Not ever. Skin-making was the work of elementals and none other. Until now.
It was washing day in Pickle’s Gander. In the creek below his perch the sprouts were splashing their feet while the biddies taught the lasses glyphs for cleaning linens. He knew everyone. These were the Ratherstings’ nearest neighbors, and several of his cousins were courting here. He spotted Shrike’s lass, Lyric, laughing and tossing her long yellow hair, and his grin subsided. She hadn’t yet heard the news. He remembered the sight of the fourteen knives at Issrin Ev, and his joy turned cold. Just becauseEast Mirth and Pickle’s Gander were carrying on as usual didn’t mean the trouble wasn’t real. He would just go check on West Mirth before he flew the skin back to Orchidspike for safekeeping, then he’d return to the castle.
He was prince of the Rathersting. On a day such as this, with the chief missing and a dark presence abroad in the realm, his place was with his folk. He was ashamed of himself, of his grin, his joy, his pride. He lifted his arms, shaking open the wings of his skin, and leapt into a long, tilting glide that would carry him all the way over the Deeps to the Western Sill and West Mirth.
On the way, the joy returned unbidden. There was nothing he could do about it.
While the other crows foraged for cake ingredients, Magpie and Calypso followed the raven Algorab across the vastness of Dreamdark toward the rocky rises in the west. The Dreamdark Deeps were sunk between two ridges, the Crag and the Spine. Where these faced each other across the sunken forest, long horizontal ledges of igneous rock extruded on both sides, looking quite like windowsills. Calypso pointed down with his wing as they passed above the devastation of Issrin Ev, and soon they were circling the cleft boulder into which West Mirth was tucked.
Long ago the boulder had split clean and fallen open, and inside it the hamlet was founded, a row of sweet cottages on either side of a white lane. Their rear gardens backed up to the rock face, billowing with fragrant herbs, and Magpie came in toland on the brink of the cliff above. Looking down, she thought this was the kind of place that belonged in a painting, a place that should never know of devils.
It was far too quiet.
Magpie walked off the cliff as if it were a mere step and fell fast, flicking open her wings just in time to move lightly forward in an animal prowl. The birds dropped down beside her. Cautiously she went in the back door of a cottage. All was neat as a pin within and there was nothing amiss but the beds. She prowled around them, looking, smelling. Of scent there was nothing that didn’t belong. Honeysuckle, rosemary, and soap. But the puzzling way the covers were arranged, as if tucked around sleepers who’d simply melted into the night; it shivered her. It brought to mind the fishermen’s shoes left so suddenly behind in the world when the mannies themselves were whisked, somehow, out of it.
She visioned the glyphs for memory touch, gritted her teeth, and laid her hand upon a pillow, but there was no jolt of darkness. She saw only fragments of dreams. Whatever had happened here, the faeries had slept through it, up until the very last.
All the cottages were the same.
It was only the rocking chair in the sentry tower that gave her what she still hoped not to find. A blast of darkness, hunger, and hatred. Going outside again, Magpie nodded once to Calypso, her eyes hard.
“Jacksmoke!” he croaked.
Passing the stables, Magpie heard sounds within, beetles lowing to be milked and the bleat of hungry dray pigeons. The prowl went out of her step, and her faerie self returned to herwith the recognition of this simple task to be performed, the care and feeding of livestock. Saddened and shaken, she walked into the stable.
She froze in the doorway.
There was never any reason to find a bird of prey in a pigeon stable. Especially when traceries of light shimmied and wove round it, tracing its falcon shape and glinting off its feathers before sliding into the dim outskirts of Magpie’s vision; when it wasn’t a falcon at all, but a disguise. Magpie saw it all in an instant, and that instant slammed into the next instant, in which she found herself hurtling at the imposter with her dagger drawn, knocking the bird to the ground and kneeling over it, the edge of the blade against its false throat.
“Shed it” she growled.
It didn’t speak or move, and she said, “The skin. Shed it now!”
The bird lay silent as a dead thing, without even a rise and fall of ribs to give a hint of the creature hidden inside. But there was a sound. Magpie shifted uneasily in her crouch and glanced around the stable. The pigeons were bleating louder in their agitation, but that wasn’t it. She could hear a sound like the pure ring of crystal against crystal, a fluid and melodious chime that seemed to surround her. It was only when she shifted the knife slightly away from the falcon’s throat that the sound began to ebb and she felt the figure shift beneath her.
