Calypso scratched his head with one talon. “Eh? Maybe, sure,” he said vaguely. “Creatures got nursery stories, same as faeries got.”
“Aye,” agreed Bertram. “Like that one about how a rain shower on a sunny day means a fox’s wedding?”
“Ach,” said Snoshti. “That one’s true. Ye never been to a fox’s wedding? They do make a fuss.”
In the Ring, tunes shivered across fiddle strings and Magpie turned to look. Faeries were dancing in air, jewel-bright and shimmering in their gowns and frock coats. She glanced up at the palace. The queen was gone from the window. To the crows she said, “Where to, birds?”
“Come on,” Snoshti said. “There’s a green near my village. My kin would be pleased to host ye.”
Leaving the stage props in disarray inside, the birds slipped into their harnesses and towed the caravans out of the city.
TWELVE
Daylight twinkled into twilight as the last slanting rays of sunset withdrew from the treetops. Darkness came, and the forest’s moontime citizens awoke, glittery-eyed and hungry. Wolves slunk to the edge of the river and dipped their pink tongues in. Foxes jackknifed on scurrying voles. The hag Black Annis crouched na**d on a high branch and shot her tongue at bats who flew too near.
In the southern reaches of the great wood, Magpie and the crows sat around a fire with a clan of hedge imps, trading wind songs for scamper ballads and sipping spiced wine.
Far across Dreamdark in the tiny hamlet of West Mirth, a certain darkness was gliding down the white road out of town. It was a formless thing, unfixed, the edges of it bleeding into the night like watercolors on wet paper. There was no one to feel the desolation it left in its wake. The sentry tower was empty, and in front of its dying fire a rocking chair was slowing to a halt as if someone had stood and stretched and gone to bed. But all the beds in all the cottages were empty. The coverlets were drawn up as if tucked beneath the chins of sleepers, but sleepers there were none. Nothing had been disturbed. The dray pigeons snoozed in their stables and beetles dreamed in their pens, but the faeries were gone. Every one. Even the cradles were empty.
The faerie healer Orchidspike, out foraging in the Deeps for night-blooming flowers, stopped suddenly and straightened up. She was the oldest faerie in Dreamdark, older by an entire lifetime than the next oldest, but her senses were creature-sharp and she knew the currents of the forest like no other. She looked around, feeling an alien chill riding the air, and shivered. Pulling her shawl tight around her, she picked up her basket of flowers and hurried home.
At the ruin of Issrin Ev, Talon Rathersting discovered what the search parties had failed to find: his kinsmen’s knives abandoned in a shadowed cleft in the cliff. He gathered them up and brought them out, laying them carefully on a flat rock. There were fourteen in all. That was all of them: Wick had been wearing only two; the others had worn four each. All were bare of their sheaths. They’d been drawn and thrown at something sunk in that crevice. The point of one blade was nicked off where it had met rock, hard and fast. None of the knives seemed to have hit flesh or drawn blood, and whatever had been in the crevice, it was gone now, as were the vultures and the warriors who’d gone hunting them.
When several hours had passed yesterday with no sign of their return, Talon had summoned the rest of the Rathersting warriors, his uncles, more cousins, and his sister, Nettle, and they’d sent out rotating search parties all through the day. Talon had stayed behind at the castle keeping the watch, his heart clenched like a fist in his chest as their wings flashed away over the treetops. The shame and yearning boiled into a kind of fury as he watched and waited, feeling the relentless tug of the sky as his feet stayed firmly on the rampart.
Days were long this near the summer solstice and there had been light well into the evening, but the search parties had returned with nothing but haggard faces. Talon and Nettle had stayed up in the tower watching owls hunt over the silent forest, and when the moon was high he’d turned to look at her. She was taller than he, being a half century older, but with nearly identical tattoos and the same royal circlet on the same pale hair. Her eyes were copies of his too, and her heart knew his heart, and she met his gaze evenly, understanding. She put a hand on his arm and said, “Be careful.”
And Talon went over the wall and into the woods, alone.
He stood now in the courtyard of Issrin Ev with the Rathersting daggers laid out at his feet and the moon-cast shadows of broken statues swaying around him. Headless, wingless, toppled, split, and shrouded in moss, the statues made the Magruwen’s temple seem like a monument to suffering and battles lost. It wasn’t. It had been a place of the highest glory until the very day the Djinn himself destroyed it. Bards and scribes and kings had hurried along these paths, their hearts and heads full of great magic. Now it was hard to imagine any but ghosts coming up the long, crumbling stair in the rock face or anything arriving on wing but vultures.
Talon had found bones and feathers down the slope. A vulture had been devoured. Not enough remained of it to tell whether his father and cousins had killed it, but he suspected so. As for what had eaten it, it could only have been its five fellows. Cannibals. Talon’s lip curled in disgust.
They were gone now.
Talon couldn’t carry all the bare daggers but he took his father’s favorite and turned west. There was only one faerie he wanted to talk to. He headed for Orchidspike’s cottage, starting down the ruined stair at a loping gait and gathering speed. Soon he was hurtling through the gloom of the Deeps, the long wooded basin gouged between two rocky plateaus. The sun penetrated here only a few hours each day when it was directly overhead, and the rest of the hours were just a slow fade from dark to dusk and dusk to dark again.
He raced along, launching himself off roots and spiraling airborne so fast he blurred. He would run half up a tree trunk and dive for the next one, never even slowing as he came to land between wild leaps and kept on, powerful and thrilling, explosive, acrobatic. But he always touched down between leaps. He’d launch, push off, careen toward the canopy of the forest, and never quite break through to the sky.
His feet touched down and he pushed on.
He found Orchidspike awake when he arrived and she hurried to open the door for him. “Lad,” she said, relieved, taking his head in both her hands and looking straight into him through his eyes. Her relief was short-lived, for she saw the trouble in his heart. “What’s happened?” she asked.