Vision swimming. The horrible squall of birds. Magpie struggled to revive, felt blood hot on her face, stinging her eyes. She was stunned, couldn’t feel her arms and legs, and for a moment she had the strangest feeling that she’d fallen outside of her own body. Then, vaguely, she sensed tangled limbs. Poppy! Poppy was in her arms.
But where was the Blackbringer?
“Magpie?” whispered Poppy, her voice weak.
“It’s okay—” Magpie started to say.
Then Poppy screamed and her body lurched in Magpie’s arms. Panicked, Magpie held on and was dragged along with her. The Blackbringer loomed. The long tongue was coiled around Poppy’s ankle and he was reeling her back inside him.
With one arm still wrapped around Poppy, Magpie groped for a handhold with the other. She found one and held tight, straining. Through the haze of blood obscuring her vision, she could see Poppy’s white face, and their eyes met and held. “I’ve got you!” Magpie said. Her feet were braced against a broken statue and one hand clung to a coiled tree root, but she could feel herself begin to tremble. She was weak, but more than that, she felt . . . insubstantial, like she might dissolve into the air.
And the Blackbringer kept coming. A tide of darkness swallowed Poppy’s feet and then her legs. Her eyes pleaded. Magpie tried with all her strength to haul her away but the tongue, withdrawn back into the dark now, held fast. And Magpie could only watch and hold her as Poppy began to dim.
“Poppy!” she screamed.
But Poppy no longer saw her. Though still half in the world, she was already lost in the dark. She faded. The color drained from her flesh and, with horror, Magpie realized she could see through her to the ground beneath. Then she couldn’t hold her anymore. There was nothing to hold. With a final shimmer the faint ghost-image of Poppy opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out and she disappeared, leaving only her shadow behind where she had lain.
Magpie lay bleeding on the stone with her arm curled round Poppy’s shadow. Then even that was wrenched from her as the Blackbringer dragged it too into the darkness.
There would be no diving in this time to pull Poppy out. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere. She had been unmade. She had ceased to be.
The sound inside Magpie’s head was terrible. It was the Blackbringer’s whisper. “Aye, the old wine,” it said. “How wonderful . . .”
And it seemed as if the clot of darkness grew.
TWENTY-ONE
Across the mouth of the Deeps and up the slope of Dream-dark Crag, the Rathersting warriors on the castle walls heard the chaos of birds and took flight. The pale moon glittered on their cool knives and bared teeth as they raced toward Issrin Ev, whooping their bloodcurdling battle cries.
Talon was not with them.
Nor was he back at the castle, cursing his wings and his weakness. If he had been, the sun would have risen the next morning on a doomed world. Because if he hadn’t already been out stalking vultures, his own two blades wicked in his fists and his eyes ferocious in the gloom, Magpie would not have survived.
And without Magpie Windwitch, neither would the world, for long.
In that dreadful instant when Magpie realized she’d been clinging to a shadow and that Poppy was gone, she leapt away from the Blackbringer and flicked open her wings to flee. But as she struggled skyward, the tongue was suddenly on her, cold and clammy. It whipped round her wings and jerked her back, helpless as a bug.
Her fierce crow brother Maniac descended like a fury and seized the stretched tongue with his talons. It released Magpie at once and snapped back into the darkness so quickly . . . so quickly Maniac didn’t have time to release it. His feathers riffled and there was a sound like an intake of breath as he was sucked backward and engulfed in the darkness.
Magpie plummeted fast. It wasn’t one of her sharp landings, but a graceless thudding skid down the slope until a headless statue of Bellatrix finally halted her slide. Woozy, she shook her head and tried to lift her wings. Her wings. They didn’t respond to the flexion of her shoulders but hung limp.
They had been crushed.
It had all happened so quickly Maniac was gone before she even hit the ground. Her arms and legs were scraped but unbroken, but Magpie crouched motionless, as if she had no notion how to move without flying. Her breath came shallow and quick and she had the odd sensation she was just a shadow stretched over the stones. She looked up. The wheeling birds were erratic black shapes against a black sky. And Maniac was gone.
Dizziness overcame her. Time careened off balance, speeding and slowing as the shrieking of birds warbled from deafening to dull. Blood flowed fast from a gash at her temple. Her head felt hollow. Her vision dimmed. She struggled against it, knowing if she closed her eyes now she would never open them again.
“Lass!” a voice rang out. Dazed, Magpie looked around. “Pie!” It came again, and to her surprise she spotted the tattooed Rathersting lad. He was perched atop a freestanding pillar in the old courtyard, poised to spring. The clarity of his eyes seemed to sear a path through her confusion, and the world stopped spinning. She wiped the blood away from her eyes and got shakily to her feet. No sooner had she risen than the lad cried out, “Stay down!”
But it was too late. The Blackbringer had seen her.
Magpie saw the wretched tongue shoot toward her, and the sick certainty of her own doom gathered within her like held breath. She couldn’t move, but only watch, mesmerized, as it came for her.
The lad sprang from his perch.
Magpie saw him leap—powerfully—and dive and stretch and reach. And his knife pierced the shooting tongue at its tip, intercepting it and pulling it along with him in his smooth trajectory. Away from her.
The momentum of his dive carried him along and the tongue, skewered on his blade, went too. When it had swung to the end of its arc, the lad still clinging to the end of it, it began to swerve back in the direction of the Blackbringer. Magpie breathed again to gasp, seeing the lad careening toward the beast. But a tree loomed in the way, and the lad hung on tight to his knife as his momentum whipped him around it, again and again, around and around until the ghoulish tongue was spooled around the tree trunk like twine. Then Talon reared back, paused, gathered all his strength, and drove his second knife into the liver-colored flesh like a nail, pinning it to the wood beneath.
It twitched, and held.
Knifeless now, he looked at Magpie. “Go!” he screamed.
The tongue struggled and the Blackbringer, the deep black core of him, swept toward the tree to free it. The sky remained a battleground of birds and Magpie saw Calypso and Bertram side by side, beating back a giant vulture that was trying to reach its master, perchance to free him.