In losing his foot, Bertram had also lost his edge at thieving and had since had to let the other crows handle all necessary thief work. But to make himself useful he’d taken up sewing with his good foot, stitching the crow-stolen kerchiefs and bits of parasol lace together into costumes and curtains for their theater. Farsighted as he was, he had a time threading needles, though, so Magpie sneaked into his workbox whenever he was away and did it for him. She always denied it. “Must be pixies,” she’d say, and lately she’d noticed him sneaking up on his box like he might catch the tiny creatures in the act!
Out the door she went to where the birds were gathering groggily around the ashes of the morning’s fire, still in their dressing gowns. “Bertram!” she cried, hitting him with a flying hug. “I love it!”
“How fine ye look, lass,” he said, pushing his specs up his beak and looking her over. “Fine indeed!”
“Aye,” added Pigeon. “En’t ye lovely! Bit o’ the crow in ye, sure.”
“That one’s mine,” said Pup proudly, pointing at a feather. “Neh, wait . . . that one! Neh . . .”
“Ach, blitherhead,” grunted Maniac. “What’s it matter?”
Magpie dropped an exaggerated curtsy and drawled,
“Thennnk you sooo much! What a lot of chaaarming birds you are!” in a dead-on impersonation of an Ismoroth clan queen for whom they had recently recovered an amulet from a monkey.
“And ye claim ye’re no actress!” said Calypso.
“Actress, piff! Queeens do not act!”
“Ach, drop it, Queen ’Pie, and toss me some brecky.”
“Brecky” this evening was cheese. Again. Rubbery-edged from being left out all day and without the benefit of toasting. Maniac griped for coffee but they’d haul out soon—no time for a fire. Mingus brought clear water from a stream and Magpie perched on a stone between Pup and Pigeon, tipped up her tin cup, and drank so the water splashed down her chin. She saved the last gulp to wash her face with, and dried it on her sleeve.
They flew all night in the arms of the wind and reached Dreamdark with the dawn. By the light of earliest morning Magpie had her first glimpse in more than eighty years of the forest of her birth. A world of oak and yew, pine and thorn, it seemed to go on forever. Long fog-blurred lakes twisted past knuckles of rock, and creeks meandered out of the dense woods and back in again. There were meadows hither and thither, and rising crags, and an island-dotted river, but mostly Dreamdark from the sky was a tapestry of treetops, as inscrutable as an ocean. Some white owls broke its surface like fish leaping in a sea. All else was still.
No longer fearing human eyes, the crows dipped down from their cloud-high path and skimmed above the crests of the trees. Calypso flew ahead to find the way to the city of Never Nigh, while Magpie zigzagged behind and dropped playbills into the shadowed world below. Thoughts and memories were whirling in her mind. The crows had called Dreamdark home and she had piffed at the notion. In truth, she barely remembered it. She’d been such a wee babe when they’d left that she hadn’t even been flying with her own wings yet. She did have vague fond memories of the house where she was born, a cozy maze of rooms tucked high inside an ancient linden tree by the river. It was the last home she’d had with roots.
And she remembered Snoshti, of course, the bright-eyed imp marm with tickling whiskers who’d rocked her and sung to her in that growly little voice. The only other face that came easily to mind from her time here was Poppy Manygreen’s. Her first friend. Magpie had made many friends since. Mountain faeries, jungle faeries, selkies, hobgoblins, owls. The world was scattered with friendships she’d begun and left behind when the time came to move on, and the time always came.
Once, it seemed, her family’s gypsying life had been filled with golden seasons. They would find a ruined temple or a remote faerie clan and they’d set down their caravans and stay awhile, collecting glyphs, digging for relics, settling into the rhythm of the native ways. But nowadays Magpie lived a different kind of life, a hunter’s life, and there was little time for lingering. The devils gave her no rest. It seemed an age since she’d seen her family or made a new friend. In all of it, the crows were her one constant, her kindred. She’d said they were her home, and she’d meant it. This might be Dreamdark, the navel of the world and her own birthplace, but what of that? Magpie pushed all thoughts of friends and treehouses from her mind. She was looking for a devil and Djinn, not a home.
She and the crows followed the river like a road of poured silver. Each curve they rounded on tilting wings brought them nearer to the hidden city of Never Nigh, until finally Calypso led them toward the trees. The branches reached out to gather them in, and just like that, they passed into another world, one as ancient as the Djinns’ first dreams of trees.
Dreamdark.
Here on this very spot in the unimaginably distant past the Djinn had gathered to dream the world. Here the Magruwen’s dragon, Fade, had curled round them while they worked, his serpent shape crushing a great arc in the forest that remained to this day, Fade Hollow, a crescent clearing where nothing grew but blood-red moss. Here, down an avenue of arching branches, lay the fabled city of Never Nigh, where the great faeries of the Dawn Days once had lived. There King Valerian and the ice princess Fidrildi had joined hands on the balcony of Alabaster Palace and said their vows. And there their daughter Bellatrix, the greatest of all, had been born and rocked in a cradle of willow.
Spells were woven tight as a basket around Never Nigh, and as the forest closed around her, Magpie gasped and faltered. It was as if she had swum into a current of light. A pattern of radiance flared all around her, weaving and moving, then flickered away into the far reaches of her vision. She alighted upon a branch to clear her head.
“Mags!” cried Bertram, whisking past with a caravan in tow. “All right there?”
“Fine, feather!” she called back. She blinked and looked around, seeing no more spinning lights but only the dense bower of the forest. It was the spells, she thought. Those luminous patterns she’d glimpsed in the air must be the ancient spells of protection the Djinn had spun round Never Nigh so long ago. Somehow she had seen them. Ever since she’d felt the Vritra’s death with her memory touch, these strange traceries of light had been seeping into her sight, and they seemed to be growing brighter. What new oddity was this, to see what was invisible to other eyes, to see magic?