Page 51 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
He made his way through the subterranean passages, his nose and instincts leading him along the least traveled of them. He met no one. He climbed stairs, turned and turned again, and, like a rat in a maze, he found his way.
Batch always found what he was looking for.
And he always found what he wasn’t looking for, too. Those were the charms of a scavenger’s life, the unlooked-for pretties. This time it was a little pedal vehicle with side-by-side seats and a neat red-and-white-striped awning to keep off the rain. It hadn’t been driven since the chief’s old mum had passed to the Moonlit Gardens decades past, and no one even remembered there was a little door hidden in the yew’s roots that let it out into the world.
Humming, Batch pushed open the door and tramped down the weeds that choked and hid it. Then he climbed into the surrey and pedaled out. Once he’d gathered speed, a strange thing happened. Remnants of a floating glyph the biddy had long ago touched to her surrey awakened, and it began to rise gently into the sky.
Jaded or not, Batch’s eyes gleamed with a wild joy as he threw back his head and said, “Wheeeeee!!!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Dead?” repeated Snoshti with a snort. “Ach! As if I’d stand for that! Neh, pet, ye’re not dead. Just visiting.”
“B-but...” stammered Magpie. “It’s a one-way journey. Everyone knows that!”
“Do they, then? Do they know I come and go as I please? And so do all my kind, and so shall you.”
“But how?”
“’Twas my gift to ye at yer blessing ceremony.”
“I never knew I had a blessing ceremony.”
“Neh, for we didn’t tell yer parents. We’d been looking for ye a long time, pet, since before my time, even, waiting for ye to be born. Claws crossed, hoping! We didn’t know if it would work! It’s a lot to trust to stories and dreams, but then along ye came. Even before ye spoke your first word, I was fair sure who ye were.”
Magpie stared at her. The imp’s words were like nonsense tumbling around in her tired mind.
“Ye know what yer first word was?”
“My parents said it wasmama.”
“Nor was it! There was another earlier only I heard, and I never told. It wasdevil.”
“Devil?”
“Aye, just as it was foretold. Then we were sure. We held the blessing after that. Floated ye down Misky Creek on a lindenleaf to where the creatures waited. All the gifts we gave, yer animal senses and languages, and more ye’re like to be discovering all yer life, they’re just tokens and tools to help ye bear yer real gift, ye ken, that which was given even before ye were born.”
Magpie shivered. Foreboding and wonder twined together, and she wanted to know, and was afraid to know, what that gift might be. Before she had decided whether to ask, though, Snoshti said, “But that’s not for me to tell. Come along now. This way.”
She took her hand and guided her gently along the riverbank. Magpie saw a bridge ahead made all of round river rocks, and on the far bank, arrayed like picnickers on blankets, were faeries. “Are they all...?”
“Aye.”
They stepped onto the bridge, and all eyes on the riverbank turned to them. Magpie hesitated. “What are they all waiting for?” she whispered, suddenly shy.
“It’s all right, pet, they’re not waiting for ye. They know no more of ye than living faeries do. They’re waiting for their loved ones to come over. We’re all tied to the world so long as our folk are still in it. It can take lifetimes to let all that go and become.”
“Become? Become what?”
Snoshti pointed into the sky. Magpie looked, but all she could see was a sparkle of some far thing passing before the moon, and she swayed a little on her feet, staring into the fathomless depths of the sky. She looked back down. They were nearing the end of the bridge and Magpie caught a hint in the air of that snow-sharp fragrance she’d detected in her caravan and on therecipe card. She looked sharply at the imp, only now realizing who had slipped it into her book.
She stepped off the last stone of the bridge onto the grass of the Moonlit Gardens, where no other living faerie had ever trod. The clusters of picnickers were all watching her, and she looked from face to face. She’d never really wondered what faeries would look like in the afterworld, and she saw they looked much the same as they did in life, though muted somehow, like reflections in an old mirror. Their edges were blurred, their substance soft and silvered. And in their eyes, mingled with calm, she saw pity. Snoshti nodded to them in greeting and bundled Magpie along.
“Why were they looking at me like that?” Magpie asked.
“Like what?”
“Pitying, like.”
