Page 45 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
Nettle rallied first. “To save the crows!” she cried, raising her knife.
The others echoed her.
“I’m taking her to Orchidspike,” Talon told Nettle quickly. “Bring the crows there.”
Nettle nodded and whirled away. Talon didn’t linger to watch the battle. He glanced at the lass just as her eyes flickered shut and didn’t reopen. He gathered her against him with one arm, scampered down from the tree, and ran.
Orchidspike met him at her cottage door and gasped to see the bloodied lass in his arms. “Bring her in, lad.”
He eased past her into the cottage and carried the lass straight to the little room where Orchidspike kept a cot for patients. He laid her on it and looked at her anxiously. She hadn’t once regained consciousness during the journey through the Deeps. She was white as a bone against the black-dried blood that painted her face.
Orchidspike came with cloths and hot water and started to fuss over her, cleaning the blood from her face and, Talon knew, visioning powerful healing glyphs that would wrap the lass like invisible bandages of magic.
“I think her name is something like Pie...” ventured Talon after a while.
The old healer looked up at him. “Pie? Not Magpie!” she exclaimed. “Eyes like aquamarines?” she asked him, to which he blushed and nodded gruffly.
“Little Magpie Windwitch!” said the healer. “I’ve been wondering when she’d come home.”
“Home?”
“Aye. Well, she was born in Dreamdark, but left as a tiny thing. Her father was a Never Nigh lad.”
“What clan?”
“Robin? None. He was a foundling, raised by Widow Candle-night in the bookshop in Never Nigh. Sure you heard the story. The babe who hatched from a robin’s egg in the widow’s maple?”
“Don’t tell me that story’s true!”
“The widow still has the eggshell. How he came there is a mystery. Such a lovely lad!” She leaned close over Magpie andbegan to ply a fine needle through the flesh of her brow, closing the wound so artfully it would leave no scar. “Her mother, now,” she went on, “she’s not a mystery so much as a marvel. Daughter of the West Wind himself!”
“An elemental! She said her grandfather wore a skin.”
“Aye. He was even known to come to dances in it from time to time in Never Nigh, looking just like a blustery old codger and playing a fine whisker fiddle when called upon.” She finished her stitching and tied a final knot in the nearly invisible thread at Magpie’s brow.
“Will she be okay?” Talon asked.
“I hope. What happened to her, lad?”
“It was the devil that got my folk.”
Alarmed, Orchidspike asked, “Devil? Is it captured?”
“Nay. We barely escaped it! Never seen such a thing, like it was the dark come to life.”
Orchidspike shivered and laid her hand on Magpie’s brow, conjuring stronger glyphs of healing over her.
“Lady, are we safe here?” Talon asked. “Perhaps we should remove to the castle while this thing roams.”
“Aye, perhaps we should.”
Magpie slept for more than a day without so much as stirring. Even the jostling trip to Rathersting Castle didn’t wake her. Many a curious tattooed face turned to stare as the strange lass was carried unconscious to Princess Nettle’s chamber. As for the half dozen wounded and battle-scarredcrows fussing after her, tracking blood and feathers up the winding stair, they were known to the warriors already. The war party had arrived, whooping, just in time to see the huge stinking vultures fleeing scared while the crows, one-tenth their size at most, even puffed with the fury of battle, chased after.
The vultures had been routed, and the crows’ reputations preceded them to Rathersting Castle. Warriors saluted the bedraggled flock in the corridors, and they nodded back, distracted, all their focus on Magpie.
Orchidspike assured them all she would awaken.
Fretting like biddies, they waited. Nettle’s little room was so crowded with crows that every time Talon contrived to pass by the door and check on Magpie, some ragged crow part would be tufting out of it, a tail or a wing, as if all six crows could not quite fit in at once, but couldn’t be persuaded to wait outside. Orchidspike just shrugged, forbade smoking, and made hearty use of her elbows when she needed to reach the bedside.
