On the way, the joy returned unbidden. There was nothing he could do about it.
While the other crows foraged for cake ingredients, Magpie and Calypso followed the raven Algorab across the vastness of Dreamdark toward the rocky rises in the west. The Dream-dark Deeps were sunk between two ridges, the Crag and the Spine. Where these faced each other across the sunken forest, long horizontal ledges of igneous rock extruded on both sides, looking quite like windowsills. Calypso pointed down with his wing as they passed above the devastation of Issrin Ev, and soon they were circling the cleft boulder into which West Mirth was tucked.
Long ago the boulder had split clean and fallen open, and inside it the hamlet was founded, a row of sweet cottages on either side of a white lane. Their rear gardens backed up to the rock face, billowing with fragrant herbs, and Magpie came in to land on the brink of the cliff above. Looking down, she thought this was the kind of place that belonged in a painting, a place that should never know of devils.
It was far too quiet.
Magpie walked off the cliff as if it were a mere step and fell fast, flicking open her wings just in time to move lightly forward in an animal prowl. The birds dropped down beside her. Cautiously she went in the back door of a cottage. All was neat as a pin within and there was nothing amiss but the beds. She prowled around them, looking, smelling. Of scent there was nothing that didn’t belong. Honeysuckle, rosemary, and soap. But the puzzling way the covers were arranged, as if tucked around sleepers who’d simply melted into the night; it shivered her. It brought to mind the fishermen’s shoes left so suddenly behind in the world when the mannies themselves were whisked, somehow, out of it.
She visioned the glyphs for memory touch, gritted her teeth, and laid her hand upon a pillow, but there was no jolt of darkness. She saw only fragments of dreams. Whatever had happened here, the faeries had slept through it, up until the very last.
All the cottages were the same.
It was only the rocking chair in the sentry tower that gave her what she still hoped not to find. A blast of darkness, hunger, and hatred. Going outside again, Magpie nodded once to Calypso, her eyes hard.
“Jacksmoke!” he croaked.
Passing the stables, Magpie heard sounds within, beetles lowing to be milked and the bleat of hungry dray pigeons. The prowl went out of her step and her faerie self returned to her with the recognition of this simple task to be performed, the care and feeding of livestock. Saddened and shaken, she walked into the stable.
She froze in the doorway.
There was never any reason to find a bird of prey in a pigeon stable. Especially when traceries of light shimmied and wove round it, tracing its falcon shape and glinting off its feathers before sliding into the dim outskirts of Magpie’s vision; when it wasn’t a falcon at all, but a disguise. Magpie saw it all in an instant, and that instant slammed into the next instant, in which she found herself hurtling at the imposter with her dagger drawn, knocking the bird to the ground and kneeling over it, the edge of the blade against its false throat.
“Shed it,” she growled.
It didn’t speak or move, and she said, “The skin. Shed it now!”
The bird lay silent as a dead thing, without even a rise and fall of ribs to give a hint of the creature hidden inside. But there was a sound. Magpie shifted uneasily in her crouch and glanced around the stable. The pigeons were bleating louder in their agitation, but that wasn’t it. She could hear a sound like the pure ring of crystal against crystal, a fluid and melodious chime that seemed to surround her. It was only when she shifted the knife slightly away from the falcon’s throat that the sound began to ebb and she felt the figure shift beneath her.
“Wait,” it said in no birdlike voice.
She thrust the knife edge again to its throat, and again the falcon fell still and the strange chime grew louder. Magpie looked at the blade and saw runes agleam on it. She realized with a jolt that it was the knife that was singing. Her eyes widened and her gaze shifted rapidly back and forth between the blade and the falcon. A magic blade! There was many a story in legend of strange weapons that mastered their masters, having wickedness and will forged into them by their makers.
In a fluid movement she drew it off the falcon’s throat and backed quickly away, staying crouched and ready to spring. The blade fell silent, and the falcon moved.
A ripple went through it, a rift appeared in its belly, and it sort of split apart and fell away, its feathers transforming as it did into a strange membranous sheath that looked like little more than a stocking. Inside it was a faerie like no faerie Magpie had ever seen. She’d seen tattoos on witch doctors, savage jungle faeries, but not like these. The black patterns on his face had grace and reminded her of only one thing: the mysterious whirls of light that had of late been spinning across her vision. She stared at him. Looking closer, she saw the features of a lad and eyes like crystals with the sky dancing through them.
“What did you do to me?” Talon gasped, falling on his side and clutching his throat.
Magpie looked at the blade in her hand, confused. It was silent. “Are you okay?” she asked, her voice wary.
“Okay?” Still clutching his throat he rose to his knees and said, “Now that I’m not paralyzed and suffocating, aye, I’m right as rain.”
“Paralyzed and suffocating? How—?”
With narrowed eyes he looked at her and at the knife. “Djinncraft,” he said. “That explains things. Who’d you steal it from?”
“Steal it? I found it in a skeleton’s spine!”
“Ah, so you stole it from the dead. How fine.”
“Call me a thief?” Magpie blazed. “Sure you didn’t find that skin in your granny’s attic!”
“Right, I didn’t. I—” He bit off his words and glared at her, then asked with a tinge of bitterness, “How did you know?”
“I know a skin when I see one,” Magpie said. “My grandfather wears one.”
“Faeries don’t wear skins!”
“Neh, they don’t indeed,” she replied, looking pointedly at the shimmering sheath gathered around his shoulders. “I never said he was a faerie.”
Talon looked at her hard. A lass, just a lass she was, wind-mussed and wearing feathers and gripping a blade such as that. For a moment there he’d thought he might suffocate and wake to find himself in the Moonlit Gardens! When she’d held that knife to his throat he’d been unable to move a muscle, even to breathe. “Who are you?” he asked her in an acid voice.