Page 48 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
“But...where is she now?”
“Lady?” Calypso scratched his head with his foot. “She’s the one the devil got last night. She’s gone.”
Orchidspike was silent, and Calypso watched, alarmed, as her expression went slack with tragedy. She lifted tremblinghands and laid her face in them. A shudder went through her, and Calypso heard her whisper, “I’d stopped looking.”
Western Dreamdark lay quiet under a heavy sky. No smoke curled from the chimney of the healer’s cottage, and the hamlets on the Sills were all deserted. In Pickle’s Gander and East Mirth, laundry snapped forgotten on the lines as a wind gathered and shutters began to slam. The faeries had flown.
They were tucked safe into the great hall of Rathersting Castle, where the fireplace alone was bigger than most cottages. The sprouts were whooping round the high eaves like warriors, but the older folk clustered together, tense and whispering. A summer storm was weighing down heavy as an iron lid upon Dreamdark. And out there in the blustering trees, they knew, something lurked. It had swallowed their neighbors in the night and snatched the warrior chief from the sky.
The lady of the castle and the young prince and princess had been to speak with them. Nettle had held Lyric in her arms while the lass wept over the dark fate of her betrothed. Talon had painted blackberry juice tattoos on the sprouts’ faces and given them warrior names like “Spike” and “Slash.” But there was nothing they could say that would ease the faeries’ worries. Indeed, their own faces were pale under their ink, and they seemed weary, and troubled, and grim.
In Nettle’s bed, Magpie hugged her feather skirt, which contained the last remnant of Maniac, and stared at the ceiling. Whether or not she had truly left herself behind in the dark, her thoughts, at least, were trapped there and wandering blind.
In the adjacent parlor, Orchidspike was slumped in a rocking chair, but she wasn’t rocking. One of her precious djinncraft knitting needles had rolled off her lap, and she hadn’t noticed, so lost was she in her regret. She was dreaming of an apprentice, bright with curiosity and power, to whom she could at last pass her secrets. Her remorse was like an ache that rode her heartbeat out through her entire body. She’d given up too soon. She’d stopped looking, and missed her.
Messages had been dispatched to all corners of Dreamdark and Never Nigh, too, but with Magpie still silent no one had thought to tell of poor Poppy Manygreen’s sad end. Out in the gathering wind, a search party of her kin was combing the woods and calling out for her, anxiety turning to anguish in their voices as the day bore on.
The worst-injured of the crows—Bertram, Pigeon, and Swig—were seeing the others off from the ramparts. Calypso looked up at the iron-gray sky just as the first raindrops fell, heavy as berries. “Fine flying weather,” he said, his grim voice at odds with his cracked grin.
“Hurry back, blackguards, ye hear?” said Swig, who sported a new eye patch as a result of a vulture’s talon gouge. “No stopping at the tavern without me.”
“Aye, Cyclops, sure,” piped Pup. “Calm yer pepper.”
“Cyclops?”
“Hush and no bickering,” said Calypso sharply. “Keep ’Pie company, ye ken?” His voice softened. “Try to get her to talk about it, if ye can.”
“Shivers me to see her like this,” said Bertram, his voice weak since being throttled by a stinking vulture foot.
“And me.”
“Ye going to bring that bossy little beetleherd back here?” asked Pigeon, whose left wing was crisscrossed with neat stitches.
“Bring her? Neh. She won’t fly, that one. She has her own ways of getting place to place,” said Calypso. “But I’ll get her to come.”
“Hurry,” said Swig again.
“We’ll try.”
The three tired birds heaved into the driving rain. After an hour’s wet slog across the vastness of the forest, rain sheeting from their feathers with every wing beat, Calypso, Pup, and Mingus landed at last on the little green above Snoshti’s underground village. One glance at their caravans had them squawking and cursing. “We been ransacked! We been looted!” hollered Pup.
Mingus went to gather up the costumes that spilled out the open doors into the rain and hung them up carefully inside to dry. As an afterthought, he fetched Magpie’s book from her bunk and tucked it under his wing to keep it dry. Then they all hopped to the door of the hedge imps’ warren, rapping fast at it with their beaks.
“Get ye gone!” a snarly voice cried from inside. “She en’t here, I tell ye! And if she was, I’d have yer eyes out before I let ye to her!”
“Open up!” Calypso squawked.
“Crow?”
“Aye!”
The door swung open, and Snoshti stood there, small and fearsome with her paws on her hips. “It’s about time, birds,” she said. “What’s happened?”
“I might ask ye! What happened to our caravans? And who were ye flappin’ at? Someone looking for ’Pie?”
“Anyonenotlooking for her, I’d like to know?”
“Eh?”
