Magpie shook her head and spread her wings, stepping back into the air to follow the crows down the avenue. When she saw the city, thoughts of the lights faded from her mind.
The trees grew wild and strange here, of any shape the Djinn had had a mind to try as they honed their treecraft. The trees were the city. Their roots wove across the ground like interlacing fingers and spiraled up into walkways and bridges. Everywhere paths meandered in hidden ways and from every nook and fissure in the bark sprouted fanciful spires. The massive arms of the yews were festooned with palaces and hanging gardens. Each generation of faeries had added its own flourishes and the grove was a marvel of towers and domes, balconies and catwalks, chimneys and carved gates and porticos and stained-glass windows. For all the exotic places Magpie had been, no city could hold a candle to Never Nigh for sheer audacious beauty.
The crows and their caravans rocketed beneath soaring bridges and over domes tiled with gold, down the main thoroughfare toward the Ring, the gathering place where they would set up stage. Magpie glimpsed tiny stairways and lamp-lit courtyards among the branches as she flew. She swooped past a nectar parlor, a haberdasher, a teahouse, and Candlenight’s Bookshop, her father’s childhood home. As the way widened and branches opened to the Ring, she caught sight of Alabaster Palace gleaming white in the branches above, and her breath caught in her throat.
The crows spiraled in to land and Magpie eased the floating spells off the caravans and set them gently down on the moss. Then, as the crows shrugged off their harnesses, she turned her gaze up to the treetop palace.
It was white as sugar, its many graceful spires flowing seamlessly into one another as if the whole palace was shaped from one immense block of marble, but with a look of lightness, like it could float into the sky. It stood as a monument to greater times. No one had lived in it, Magpie knew, since that day twenty-five thousand years ago when Bellatrix had announced to the cheering folk that the devil wars at last were at an end.
“Dance and rejoice, my friends, my faeries, and my kin,
No longer fear to fly at dusk, no longer hide within.
Come out and feel the pulse of night,
clawless, fangless, free.
The devils are all gone and shall no longer
trouble thee.”
Looking up at the palace now, Magpie couldn’t help wondering, for a thousandth time—a millionth?—what had become of Bellatrix after that. How many libraries and crypts had Magpie searched, how many books and scrolls had she scoured for some word on what became of the Magruwen’s champion after that day? The greatest faerie of all legend had simply dropped from history, leaving an empty throne in Dreamdark and no heirs to fill it ever again, and so it had stood empty all these long years since.
Just as her gaze moved on, Magpie caught sight of a figure in the corner of her vision and she turned. Framed in an arched window of the tallest tower, a lady was peering down at her. She was far away, but Magpie’s sharp eyes had no trouble perceiving that her dark hair was crowned by a shining circlet of gold. Crowned? Magpie’s eyes widened in surprise, and she thought for an instant that she was seeing a vision of Bellatrix. But that was absurd. The lady in the window was no ghost. But who was she? Alabaster Palace had no tenant, just as Dreamdark had no queen.
“Hoy, Mags!” cried Swig. “Ye going to brush yer tumbleweed head of hair sometime before the town wakes up?”
Magpie turned to stick her tongue out at him, and when she glanced back up at the tower, the lady was gone.
Down the avenue, Never Nigh was stirring to life. Soon the whole city would be awake, the air vivid with wings as faeries promenaded from their palaces, bejeweled, lacquer-haired, and lovely. Magpie tried to remember when last she’d combed her hair with something other than her fingers and thought it was likely near a week ago. Tumbleweed, indeed. She went zinging back to her caravan to do it.
SEVEN
Batch awakened with a gasp to find himself slung over a tree branch. “Neh, neh, neh!” he said frantically. “Not sleep, neh!” That was how master had found him in the first place. He clung tight to the branch and shoved the tip of his tail into his mouth, sucking at it furiously until his terror had subsided to mere panic. When he let it drop from his mouth it was a spot of shining pink on a lump of filth-caked imp.
Batch moaned. He was bruised and scorched and hungry and he missed his treasures but at least he’d done as he was ordered so he could go his own way. He patted his satchel to make sure the pomegranate was still there. It was.
“Stupid fruit,” he muttered, recalling the silver bat wings with a trembling lip. He should have chosen them as his treasure and flown far, far away. Let the master fetch his own fruits. Let the vultures fetch them for him!
The vultures. Batch pulled himself up to a sitting position. They’d have been waiting for him at the hedge all night. Let them wait! Slowly he climbed down the tree and dragged himself back to the well. He peered over the edge. “Down in the dark, the mudmunching dark . . .” His words twisted into a sob. He knew he couldn’t go back down the well. It would be madness. Death. And yet his thoughts steered back to the wings from second to second. There was a warp in his mind that pulled all thoughts to treasure. Such was a scavenger imp’s peculiar genius. Until he had them he’d be able to concentrate on nothing else.
He tried to think what to do. He could find a bird to carry him down the well! But he scarcely spoke their language. He had no reason to talk to birds! Imps generally spoke a pidgin form of Old Tongue in addition to the scamper language favored by those that scurry and slink: beetles, lizards, squirrels, and the like. Rats, of course. Batch had a strong rapport with rats, but that wouldn’t serve him now. He needed wings.
As if in answer to his thoughts he heard wings in the sky above him. In the instant before he looked up, a hopeful smile started to shape his snout, but then the shadows fell over him and the smile died unborn. “Aieee!” he shrieked as the vultures bore down on him. “Neeehhh!”
Throughout Dreamdark playbills were being carried in all sorts of hands, furry fox paws and globed frog toes, hooked hawk talons and slippery webbed fingers. All across the forest’s many miles paws and hooves and fins were changing course and heading toward Never Nigh. Faeries weren’t the only ones who loved a play.