Page 60 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
“Maybe longer, lass. This is quite severe.”
Magpie frowned and grumbled. Then Orchidspike’s knitting needles caught her eye. “Those must be djinncraft,” she said.
“Aye, my foremother Grayling chose them long ago from among the Magruwen’s treasures.”
“Did your apprentice use them to make that skin of his?”
“My what?” asked Orchidspike, startled, for the wordapprenticehad been much on her mind. “Ah, Talon? Nay, lass, the prince isn’t my apprentice.”
“Prince?” Magpie repeated.
“Aye, Talon will be chief one day, after his father...” Her voice wavered. “Indeed, that day may be at hand.”
“Would the Rathersting have a clan chief who’s a scamperer?” she asked, and at that moment Talon came back into the room. He stiffened. Magpie had simply been curious—she’d scarcely ever known a scamperer: they were exceedingly rare—but she saw his face color with shame, and she cursed herself.He avoided meeting her eyes, and she could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t make it worse, so she just frowned and resolved to speak no more.
When Orchidspike was ready to begin, Calypso tried to talk Magpie into lying down to sleep through the healing. “Ye can’t just go and go, ’Pie, after what ye been through. Ye’re pale as biscuit flour, and yer folks would have my feathers for it. Ye need sleep.”
But she resisted, seating herself on a low stool in front of Orchidspike’s rocker. “My mind’s buzzing too much. I wish I had my book to write in.”
“Here, Mags,” said Mingus, holding it out to her. “I got it from the caravan for ye.”
“Ach, Mingus, thank you,” Magpie said, taking it and giving him a kiss on his beak while he shuffled his feet and examined the floor.
She held her book in her lap and unspelled it so it fell open to the page she’d last written. She’d been en route to Dreamdark then, and knew the devil only as “the hungry one.” So much had happened since! She had found the Djinn King in the bottom of a well. She had fallen through the darkness of the Blackbringer and lost two dear friends in it. She had journeyed to the afterworld and had her hair braided by Bellatrix! She had fallen off a cliff and been caught in a dragon’s fist. And she had learned of a gaping hole in the legends she had always cherished. An eighth ancient!
She wished she could talk to her parents. They were so far away, probably shape-shifting themselves into fish with the elders of Anang Paranga right this moment. She would tell herbook instead, and maybe in the writing, things would come clear. She tapped her quill against her lip and began to write.
Behind her, holding Magpie’s right wing taut while Orchidspike worked on it, Talon could just see the page over her shoulder. The crows were all around, though, so he couldn’t stare, and he caught only a word or two now and then when the birds nodded off for little naps. Magpie didn’t nap. Head bent over her book, she wrote. Orchidspike’s needles clicked steadily, and the spidersilk reeled off the bobbin. Rows of spells danced off the knitting needles, rows of words filled Magpie’s page, and time passed.
She had been writing, pausing, frowning, remembering, and writing again for several hours when she finally gave voice to what was frustrating her. “Is he a snag, or isn’t he?” she blurted suddenly.
“Eh?” muttered Calypso sleepily.
“It’s just not right somehow. I can’t get past it. He leaves no rooster tracks, he’s got no smell, he’s not stupid like a snag...That snag the so-called queen set on me, now that was a devil, horrid and sure. To compare them—”
“What snag, ’Pie?” asked the crow.
“Ach! I never told you!” she cried. “Aye, it was why Poppy came to Issrin Ev, to warn me that Vesper had a snag slave she’d set after us, and it came, sure, and it was some nasty meat, I tell you.”
Talon cut in incredulously, “Lady Vesper set a devil after you?”
Magpie glanced over her shoulder at him. “Aye,” she said defensively. “Your fine queen’s got some dark dabblings.”
“She’s notourqueen!” he returned hotly. “Lady Orchidspike and my father were the only elders in Dreamdark who wouldn’t recognize her claim, and the others ignored them. The only time those Never Nigh fops care what a Rathersting thinks is when they nick their wings dancing or spot Black Annis too near their hamlets!”
“Ach, well...Lady Orchidspike, you were right. Vesper’s a fake and worse. That snag was grim, and it’s because of him Poppy’s...” She choked on the worddeadand finished instead with a bleak “...gone.”
“Is it still out there?” asked Mingus, puffing himself up.
“Neh. The Blackbringer got it, just like that. Like it just vanished or melted. That’s the thing, feathers, I can’t get past it. That was a devil, and we seen plenty and that’s what they’re like, stringing drool and snaggle teeth and suckers and stink? But the Blackbringer, he’s not like them at all...” She paused. “The Magruwen called him a contagion of darkness—”
At the mention of the Magruwen, Orchidspike’s fingers fumbled but she caught her stitch and kept knitting, eyes alert, and Talon’s jaw dropped open. “The Magruwen?” He gaped. “You’ve seen the Magruwen?”
“Aye.”
Talon stammered, “B-but how...? Where? What...what was he like?”
“Mean! Sure he couldn’t care a twitch what happens to faeries or anything else. Calypso was right: He’s through with the world.”
