Page 27 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
He nodded and shook out the skin—for that was what he had made—and stepped into it, visioning the glyph that would awaken it. After that, even Orchidspike couldn’t have distinguished him from a real falcon.
The clot of darkness had returned to Issrin Ev. Before sunrise it slipped into a deep fissure in the rubble of the temple, and five vultures hunkered down on branches to wait out the day, restless and hungry. They’d eaten nothing since their brother’s corpse, a whole day past. And though their master had hunted through the night, he had left them no bones to pick over. He never did.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Magpie woke half buried in pillows in a blanket nest on the floor. She stretched like a cat and rolled over, blinking up at the root-ribbed ceiling of Snoshti’s burrow. It smelled sweet in the close space, of tea and earth and spice. “Up and greet the day!” Snoshti called, and Magpie got to her feet and ambled down a low corridor to the kitchen, where hot scented water awaited her in a copper tub.
“Ach,” grumbled Magpie, for whom a bath was a dip in a pond or a quick shine with the last gulp in her cup.
“Sure even crows bathe sometimes,” Snoshti told her, frowning at the feather skirt—for Magpie had slept in her clothes same as she always did. As she stepped out of them she unstrapped her new knife from her leg and laid it aside. It caught Snoshti’s eye, and the imp did a double take behind her back. A little later, when Magpie’s head was underwater, she looked closer, sucking in her breath when she saw the knife’s runes, but when Magpie surfaced, Snoshti didn’t say a word about it.
She lathered Magpie’s chestnut hair with pear-scented soap and watched fondly as the lass used magic to float a scone across the room from the stove to her mouth, leaving it suspended in the air before her face and taking great bites without the use of her hands. Crumbs cascaded into the bathwater. “Little barbarian.” Snoshti chuckled.
A dozen families lived in the hedge imp village, an intricate warren beneath the earth with wide tunnels for avenues, and passages that Snoshti said reached all the way to other villages. Glossy, gem-hued beetles milled about as Magpie made her way topside, and impkins darted up to touch her shyly and giggle, never having had a faerie visit them underground before nor ever having met one so ready to smile at them or carry them into the air on short flights.
The crows were up and smoking in their dressing gowns, and Mingus poured Magpie a cup of sludgy coffee.
“So, ’Pie,” said Calypso. “When are we for the Magruwen, eh? First thing? Or ye going to make that cake?”
Magpie took the recipe out of her pocket and chewed her lip. She’d have been certain the writing belonged to Bellatrix but for the one thing that made it impossible: The paper wasn’t ancient. It could have been written yesterday. “What if it’s a trick?” she asked.
“A trick? Ye mean, like, if it’s not really his favorite cake?” puzzled Pup.
Magpie smiled. It seemed such a silly notion in itself, that the great Djinn had a favorite cake at all. She looked at the ingredients. Oats, honey, the usual things, and what else? Tears, wind, lightning...Magpie cocked her head to one side and took a swig of her coffee, thinking. Tears, wind, and lightning. Water, air, and fire—that was three of the four elements.
She thought of what she and Poppy had talked of, how the Djinn had dreamed a world he couldn’t even touch. He couldn’t wade in a stream and feel the rush of water withoutboiling it, couldn’t sleep beneath a tree without burning it, or ride a bird, or feel the wind, or lay his cheek on a sun-warmed stone. It began to seem like just the kind of cake thatwouldbe his favorite.
And what of the thousand years of undreamed life? What was a life not yet begun? A cocoon, sure. But no butterfly or moth lived a thousand days, let alone years. And Magpie had an idea that this last ingredient would somehow represent the fourth element: earth. Rich earth, steady, solid earth, the element that anchored all the rest, like roots in soil.
Suddenly she had it. She clapped her hands. “An acorn!”
“Eh, ’Pie?” Calypso asked.
“A tree lives a thousand years!” she said, and the idea settled in her mind with thesnickof a puzzle piece fitting into place. What was an acorn if not the perfect expression of life, a millennium of it and more, curled up tight and just waiting for the proper encouragement to begin?
She would make the cake. Wherever it had come from, whoever had written it out, it was made of such things as could have only good in them. “I’m going to meet Poppy,” she told the crows.
She went back down into the imp village to borrow a half walnut shell from Snoshti, then she set out.
Fringed by a circle of willows, Lilyvein Pond was the largest of a string of spring-fed ponds on the outskirts of Never Nigh. Faerie weddings were often held here in the spring when white narcissus bloomed round it thick as snowbanks,and in winter it was the favorite spot for ice-skating. Magpie flew quietly over the glassy water and, hovering just above the surface, began to sing. Poppy watched and listened from the air.
The strange words, sung low in a language not often heard above the waves, rippled over the water, and sleek shapes began to gather beneath.
Magpie was singing the ballad of Psamathe, fiftieth of the fifty daughters of the sea, and it was a tale of despair sure to bring tears to the eyes of fish, eel, and creek maiden, and any other creature who knew their language. Magpie couldn’t speak the fin tongue fluently, but she knew a good number of their ballads by heart as a result of a long winter some twenty years earlier spent trapped in an ice cave with selkies. She’d become quite a good ice sculptor that winter, too, a skill she hadn’t since had to call upon, but who knew but that one day she might? Little had she suspected then, sharing a selkie’s seal pelt for warmth, that the day would come when she’d need to bring a fish to tears. But here that day was.
And all clad in sea foam
she clung to the waves,
singing her love to the sky.
He swept o’er without stopping,
that tempest, by moonlight,
ne’er heeding her heart-rending cry...
The tricky fin verses trilled off her tongue, and as the last notes rippled across the pond, the fish wept like babes. Hanginglike a dragonfly over the green water, Magpie gingerly scooped the walnut shell in and filled it to brimming with their tears.
