The gypsy wagons were a marvel of color in the shady woods. They were carved with sunbursts and stars and painted in jewel tones, with real gems glimmering like mosaic tiles in the designs. The big spoked wheels were radiant red, the roofs were vaulted and the windows round, and each had a bright copper chimney and weather vane, one a dragon, one a whale, a tiger, a phoenix, and a heron with its wings spread wide.
The crows bustled in and out the doors as they set about making camp, and before a half hour had passed they had a fire snapping in a freshly dug pit and were toasting cubes of cheese on the ends of twigs.
Pup caught his cheese on fire at once and took to waving it like a firebrand, while Mingus quietly handed Magpie a chunk that was toasted to perfection. “Thanks, feather,” she said affectionately, and he just nodded and smiled.
“How ye planning to find where the Magruwen’s hid, darlin’?” asked Bertram, dipping his cheese in his brandy and taking a wet bite.
Magpie admitted, “I don’t quite know. It’s just a guess and a hope he’s stayed in Dreamdark, but if he is, he’ll be someplace deep. We’ll ask the burrowers and scamperers. Badgers. Hedge imps.”
“Like that old hedgie who took care of ye when ye were wee?” asked Swig.
“Snoshti?” Magpie’s face lit up. “My bossy old nurse! Aye, I’d like to find her, sure, she’s a dear soul—but not likely to know much of Djinn.”
“But who is, though?” asked Calypso. “Not even faeries. Remember them faerie sprouts in the marshland had never even heard of Djinn?”
“Aye. That was wretched. Papa says the things faeries have forgotten would fill up a library the size of Dreamdark.”
“If yer father ever found a library like that we’d never drag him out of it!”
Magpie laughed. “Aye, for true!”
“All I’m saying, ’Pie,” Calypso went on, “is don’t get yer hopes up.”
“You want me to fly around hopeless?” she asked. “That what you’re saying?”
“Ach,” he sighed. “Neh. Hope away! And may we be blessed with the luck to find creatures in Dreamdark as nosy as ourselves.”
“Cheers to that,” said Bertram, raising his glass. “To nosiness.”
“To nosiness!” they all chimed in.
“When we get there,” asked Pup through a beakful of charred cheese, “we goin’ to do the play?”
Magpie groaned. “Neh, not the play!”
“Course we are,” said Calypso. “Ye know it’s the best way to wriggle into faerie society. They do love a play—next best thing to dancing. And sure ye loved it too, first time ye saw us.”
“Sure I like to watch a play,” she said. “Just don’t put me in one.”
“Someone’s got to be Bellatrix. You want Maniac playing her?”
“Fine by me!”
“Un-skiving-likely,” Maniac snapped.
“I’ll be Bellatrix!” crowed Pup eagerly. “Let me, let me!”
“Pipe down, runtfellow,” said Calypso. “’Pie’ll play Bellatrix.”
“Jacksmoke,” she grumbled under her breath.
Before the crows had been hunters they had been roving actors. That was how Magpie’s family had fallen in with them in Dreamdark and flown away to see the world. It was true there was no better pretext for dropping in on a faeriehold than to pose as players, but that didn’t make Magpie like it any better.
“Fearless Magpie Windwitch,” Swig teased. “Give her devils, give her witches, nary a shiver! But push her out onstage and she shakes like a twig.”
“A twig!” agreed Pup. “Just like a scrawny little twig.”
“Ach, would you stop with the twig?” Magpie muttered. Having the crows for companions was a lot like having seven older brothers, the good parts and the bad. So she was a bit of a twig, still a lass at a hundred years. She supposed them calling her a twig was better than what was bound to come later, when she began to . . . no longer be a twig. How would they act when she started to get curves and that? Ach. Not that she’d ever turn into some priss. There were other ways to grow up. Like her mother. Or like Bellatrix. In statues the champion was always wearing a tunic of shed firedrake scales with daggers strapped to both her thighs and her simple gold circlet on her hair. That was the kind of lady Magpie planned to be when the time came: the kind who sharpened her knives beside the fire in a hunting camp filled with crows.
“Never mind them, darlin’,” said gentle Bertram, wrapping his wing round her and handing her another wedge of the cheese Swig had swiped off a human’s donkey cart. “Here. Say what you will about mannies,” he declared. “They have a genius for cheese.”
“For true, my feather,” she agreed, taking a big bite.
When the crows lit up their stinky cheroots, Magpie hugged them each and took herself to bed. It was full daylight now but she would have no trouble falling asleep. Her muscles were tired and her belly was full. She entered the gilded door of the stage caravan and squeezed past racks of velvety costumes and prop trunks full of swords and crowns, and past the empty devil’s bottle, to her little bunk tucked high in the back. She boosted herself up with her wings and drew closed her patchwork curtain, spelling up a light that would flicker out as soon as her mind relaxed in sleep.
She nestled in under the quilt her grandmother had made for her and pulled a big book into her lap, unspelling the protective magicks she kept on it and hefting it open to a page marked with a green quill. On the page she had written the cryptic words of the devil who had killed the Vritra: The fire that burns its bellows can only fall to ash. What poetry in a traitor’s death! She uncorked her ink and wrote below it:
Tomorrow we’ll arrive in Dreamdark to search
for the Magruwen. The crows are mad shivered
by the thought of him but my shivers are busy
elsewhere, worrying about that snag, wondering
where in the world he is and doing what. And
there’s something else. Like ever, I can’t fumble
up words to describe it, but the pulse—it’s been as