Kneeling in her garden, Poppy Manygreen knew the crows had come even before the playbill fluttered down to her. The flowers had whispered it to her. She sat on her knees with her head bowed toward the honeysuckle and its voice was as soft as a feather falling on moss, but she heard it. The forest was a wonderland of voices if only you could hear them, but no one else could, even in her own clan, though plants had always been their lifeblood.
“The crows,” she heard the soft voice say, “from years ago.” Faeries thought news traveled fast by wind and bird and butterfly, but it was nothing compared with the root-to-root gossip of the green and growing things. “The noisy crows,” the honeysuckle whispered, and Poppy smiled. She remembered the noisy crows. She remembered them clowning on the stage they set up in the Ring, and she remembered how the lead crow had a cracked beak that made him seem to grin. Most of all she remembered the day they left, because her best friend had flown away with them and had never returned.
She whispered a question to the vine and the answer came at once. “Aye,” the voice whispered, “the trees have seen her. She has come home.”
Poppy leapt to her feet. She didn’t spread her wings so much as she unfurled them, the vast red wings of a swallow-tail butterfly, iridescent and veined with gold. Fully spread they were twice as large as she was herself. It was a mystery where they’d come from. No one in the whole history of her clan had ever had such wings. She surged into the air, fast as a spark off a firecracker, and sped toward Never Nigh.
It was not uncommon for faeries dawdling in a garden or gossiping under a streetlamp to suddenly notice a hedge imp, where the moment before no hedge imp had been. Sneaks and spies, faeries called them, having a general mistrust of imps, even of hedge imps who were known as fine craftsfolk and cleanly neighbors. That their stealth might be of a magical nature never occurred to faeries. Few creatures looked less magical than hedge imps, and kin though they might be to faeries, faeries were few who would claim them as such.
Snoshti appeared on a small avenue leading into Never Nigh with a twinkle in her eye and a beetle in her arms. It was blue as lapis and mild as a milk cow. She set it down and looked around. Seeing no faeries, she went away again directly. That is, she faded from sight and no sooner had her afterimage glimmered out than she was glimmering in again, this time with a garnet-red beetle in her arms. She set this one down too and repeated the process.
The third time she appeared, she carried an emerald-green beetle under one arm and a shepherd’s crook in her paw and she was whistling. She set off down the avenue, driving her small herd before her. About waist-high to a grown faerie, she was a stout bandy-legged creature with a shiny black nose and whiskers set in a broad, furred face. Her coarse fur was mottled grey and honey, with a touch of white the only hint of her age, and it tufted from the neck and cuffs of her flowered frock. She was sturdy and wide, with a pleasant gentleness in her face and a sparkle of intelligence in her pure black eyes that could turn fierce in an instant.
Poppy
She whistled her way into the throng of creatures headed toward the Ring. A steady stream of faeries, butterflies, and birds flitted overhead, and the avenue was bustling with toads and crickets, ladybugs and newts, hedgehogs and snakes and badgers and imps, all heading to see the show. Turtles had even come out of the river, some of them with creek maidens riding on their shells, and progress toward the Ring slowed behind their lurching gait.
But Snoshti went on whistling, and why not? Her lass was back. She’d been saving this song for over eighty years.
Talon Rathersting spotted the vultures from the north tower of the castle where he was daydreaming his way through guard duty. Rathersting Castle, peering out from a great hollow yew on the stony east slope of Dreamdark Crag, commanded a view of nearly the entire forest. Every winged thing that swept its way across could be seen from here by those with the eyes for it, and today there were more wings on the wind than usual. The crows had drawn Talon’s notice only an hour ago, but they’d made right up the Wendling for distant Never Nigh. Talon had been there only twice in his life; his folk seldom mingled with those Never Nigh flibbertigibbets with their fancy hair and ribbons and baubles, but well he knew that no unwelcome creatures could slip through the spells that twined round the city. It was the safest place in the world. So after the crows disappeared into the trees, he’d returned to his daydreams, unconcerned.
The vultures were different. Talon leapt atop the tower’s crenellations and trained his eyes on them. There were a half dozen, moving with grim purpose just above the treetops, their wings vast, too vast. There were no vultures in Dreamdark. These birds were a long way from home. His daydreams forgotten, he visioned the glyph for the deep chime that would summon his cousins and he watched to see where the vultures’ path would lead.
His cousins arrived on wing almost at once from their own guard posts around the ancient tree. They were a fearsome sight, these Rathersting warriors, lean lads just across the threshold of manhood, their shoulders and sharp cheekbones patterned with coal-black tattoos, no two alike. Talon wore the tattoos too, though he was yet a lad. And he wore something they didn’t, a circlet of woven reeds on his wild pale hair.
“Prince,” said his cousin Shrike, alighting beside him on the tower’s high wall. “What is it?”
“There.” Talon pointed. “Vultures, from beyond. Monsters. Six of ’em.”
They looked. Wick whistled low. “Nasty meat.”
“Aye. Fetch the chief,” ordered Shrike, and Wick dove over the edge of the tower, dropping nearly to the rampart before snapping open his wings and whirring away into the deep courtyard of the hollow yew.
By the time the chief came the vultures had sunk into the forest near the upsweep of the great spine of rock where the Magruwen’s temple lay in ruin. “At Issrin Ev, sir,” Talon told him, pointing. “They circled and went down less than a minute ago.”
The chief of the Rathersting clan was a formidable faerie. Coming on seven hundred years old, his beard had gone silver but his hair was still white-gold and gleaming, like Talon’s. He was thick in the chest and narrow in the h*ps and he moved like a peregrine on the hunt, a few fast flicks of his wings launching him into a long deadly glide. He wore a dagger on each arm and each thigh and had slung his crossbow over his back. He looked at his son. “Good eyes, lad,” he said, and gripped Talon’s shoulder hard.
Talon couldn’t feel proud, though, because he was already tasting the shame of what would necessarily come next. “Shrike, Wick, Corvus, come with me. We’ll see what we see, neh?” said the chief, his eyes flicking to his son and away. Talon pretended not to notice. He knew the look too well, the look where his father still, after a hundred years, seemed puzzled to have found himself with such a son. “Keep on the watch, son,” said he, heaving skyward. “We hunt!” he bellowed, and Wick and Corvus and Shrike launched after him, eager and blooded for danger.