Page 44 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
Magpie plummeted fast. It wasn’t one of her sharp landings, but a graceless thudding skid down the slope until a headless statue of Bellatrix finally halted her slide. Woozy, she shook her head and tried to lift her wings. Her wings. They didn’t respond to the flexion of her shoulders but hung limp.
They had been crushed.
It had all happened so quickly. Maniac was gone before she even hit the ground. Her arms and legs were scraped but unbroken, but Magpie crouched motionless, as if she had no notion how to move without flying. Her breath came shallow and quick, and she had the odd sensation she was just a shadow stretched over the stones. She looked up. The wheeling birds were erratic black shapes against a black sky. And Maniac was gone.
Dizziness overcame her. Time careened off-balance, speeding and slowing as the shrieking of birds warbled from deafening to dull. Blood flowed fast from a gash at her temple. Her head felt hollow. Her vision dimmed. She struggled against it, knowing if she closed her eyes now she would never open them again.
“Lass!” a voice rang out. Dazed, Magpie looked around. “’Pie!” it came again, and to her surprise she spotted the tattooed Rathersting lad. He was perched atop a freestanding pillar in the old courtyard, poised to spring. The clarity of his eyes seemed to sear a path through her confusion, and the worldstopped spinning. She wiped the blood away from her eyes and got shakily to her feet. No sooner had she risen than the lad cried out, “Stay down!”
But it was too late. The Blackbringer had seen her.
Magpie saw the wretched tongue shoot toward her, and the sick certainty of her own doom gathered within her like held breath. She couldn’t move, but only watch, mesmerized, as it came for her.
The lad sprang from his perch.
Magpie saw him leap—powerfully—and dive and stretch and reach. And his knife pierced the shooting tongue at its tip, intercepting it and pulling it along with him in his smooth trajectory. Away from her.
The momentum of his dive carried him along, and the tongue—skewered on his blade—went, too. When it had swung to the end of its arc, the lad still clinging to the end of it, it began to swerve back in the direction of the Blackbringer. Magpie breathed again to gasp, seeing the lad careening toward the beast. But a tree loomed in the way, and the lad hung on tight to his knife as his momentum whipped him around it, again and again, around and around until the ghoulish tongue was spooled around the tree trunk like twine. Then Talon reared back, paused, gathered all his strength, and drove his second knife into the liver-colored flesh like a nail, pinning it to the wood beneath.
It twitched, and held.
Knifeless now, he looked at Magpie. “Go!” he screamed.
The tongue struggled, and the Blackbringer, the deep black core of him, swept toward the tree to free it. The sky remaineda battleground of birds, and Magpie saw Calypso and Bertram side by side, beating back a giant vulture that was trying to reach its master, perchance to free him.
“I can’t!” Magpie screamed back to Talon. “I can’t fly!”
He leapt, somersaulting in the air and landing at her feet. “Neither can I,” he said impatiently.
Magpie noticed his wings and her mouth formed anOof surprise. He’d been wearing the skin when she met him in West Mirth, so she hadn’t seen before...his wings. Even fully extended, they barely reached past his shoulders. They were clearly far too small to support him in flight. Magpie’s eyes darted from Talon’s wings back to his face. A scamperer!
Urgently he growled, “So we run!” Then he grabbed her hand and dragged her after him, across the temple floor in long strides and down the crumbling stair into the Deeps.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Almost as soon as the Deeps swallowed them, Talon felt the lass struggle, pulling at his hand, slowing him. He looked back and saw her face was ghostly pale beneath the blood that drenched it, and her luminous eyes were growing dim. With tremendous effort she brought her weary eyes into focus and said “The crows!” and tried to turn back.
“Wait!” Talon said. He caught her under one arm just as she collapsed.
“I won’t leave them!” she gasped. “They’re my clan!”
Uncertain what to do, he carried her into a tree with him to see what was happening back at the temple. He scampered easily up it with one arm, supporting her with the other. They reached the top of the tree just as the Rathersting war party hove into view, whooping, and began to swoop past.
“Nettle!” Talon hollered, seeing his sister. She did a double take and swerved, quickly commanding the others. They swung round and circled Talon and Magpie, hanging in the air like wasps.
“Talon!” Nettle said, staring. “Who is that lass?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “Listen well. The beast that got Papa and the others, it’s in Issrin.”
“Let’s get the creeper, then!” his uncle Orion snarled. “To war!”
The three younger faeries began to answer with shouts but Talon halted them with a sharp, “Nay!” and commanded, “You’ll stay well clear of it!”
His uncle, the chief’s own battle-scarred brother, regarded him with astonishment.
“I’ve just seen what it can do. Stay well above the treetops. It has a wicked long tongue. Don’t get in range of it. Your only plan”—he glanced at the lass, who was struggling valiantly to stay conscious—“is to stay alive and save the crows. Do you hear me? Save the crows. Now! To battle!”
Talon—“Prince Scuttle”—who was usually just the wistful shape growing small on the ramparts behind them as the war parties whooped away, spoke with such kingly command that his cousins and uncle and even his sister stared at him for a moment in blank surprise.
