“I can’t!” Magpie screamed back to Talon. “I can’t fly!”
He leapt, somersaulting in the air and landing at her feet. “Neither can I,” he said impatiently.
Magpie noticed his wings and her mouth formed an O of surprise. He’d been wearing the skin when she met him in West Mirth, so she hadn’t seen before . . . his wings, even fully extended, barely reached past his shoulders. They were clearly far too small to support him in flight. Magpie’s eyes darted from Talon’s wings back to his face. A scamperer!
Urgently he growled, “So we run!” Then he grabbed her hand and dragged her after him, across the temple floor in long strides and down the crumbling stair into the Deeps.
TWENTY-TWO
Almost as soon as the Deeps swallowed them, Talon felt the lass struggle, pulling at his hand, slowing him. He looked back and saw her face was ghostly pale beneath the blood that drenched it, and her luminous eyes were growing dim. With tremendous effort she brought her weary eyes into focus and said, “The crows!” and tried to turn back.
“Wait!” Talon said. He caught her under one arm just as she collapsed.
“I won’t leave them!” she gasped. “They’re my clan!”
Uncertain what to do, he carried her into a tree with him to see what was happening back at the temple. He scampered easily up it with one arm, supporting her with the other. They reached the top of the tree just as the Rathersting war party hove into view, whooping, and began to swoop past.
“Nettle!” Talon hollered, seeing his sister. She did a double take and swerved, quickly commanding the others. They swung round and circled Talon and Magpie, hanging in the air like wasps.
“Talon!” Nettle said, staring. “Who is that lass?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “Listen well. The beast that got Papa and the others, it’s in Issrin.”
“Let’s get the creeper, then!” his uncle Orion snarled. “To war!”
The three younger faeries began to answer with shouts but Talon halted them with a sharp, “Neh!” and commanded, “You’ll stay well clear of it!”
His uncle, the chief’s own battle-scarred brother, regarded him with astonishment.
“I’ve just seen what it can do. Stay well above the treetops. It has a wicked long tongue. Don’t get in range of it. Your only plan”—he glanced at the lass, who was struggling valiantly to stay conscious—“is to stay alive and save the crows. Do you hear me? Save the crows. Now! To battle!”
Talon—“Prince Scuttle”—who was usually just the wistful shape growing small on the ramparts behind them as the war parties whooped away, spoke with such kingly command that his cousins and uncle, and even his sister, stared at him for a moment in blank surprise.
Nettle rallied first. “To save the crows!” she cried, raising her knife.
The others echoed her.
“I’m taking her to Orchidspike,” Talon told Nettle quickly. “Bring the crows there.”
Nettle nodded and whirled away. Talon didn’t linger to watch the battle. He glanced at the lass just as her eyes flickered shut and didn’t reopen. He gathered her against him with one arm, scampered down from the tree, and ran.
Orchidspike met him at her cottage door and gasped to see the bloodied lass in his arms. “Bring her in, lad.”
He eased past her into the cottage and carried the lass straight to the little room where Orchidspike kept a cot for patients. He laid her on it and looked at her anxiously. She hadn’t once regained consciousness during the journey through the Deeps. She was white as a bone against the black-dried blood that painted her face.
Orchidspike came with cloths and hot water and started to fuss over her, cleaning the blood from her face and, Talon knew, visioning powerful healing glyphs that would wrap the lass like invisible bandages of magic.
“I think her name is something like Pie . . . ,” ventured Talon after a while.
The old healer looked up at him. “Pie? Not Magpie!” she exclaimed. “Eyes like aquamarines?” she asked him, to which he blushed and nodded gruffly.
“Little Magpie Windwitch!” said the healer. “I’ve been wondering when she’d come home.”
“Home?”
“Aye. Well, she was born in Dreamdark but left as a tiny thing. Her father was a Never Nigh lad.”
“What clan?”
“Robin? None. He was a foundling, raised by Widow Candlenight in the bookshop in Never Nigh. Sure you heard the story. The babe who hatched from a robin’s egg in the widow’s maple?”
“Don’t tell me that story’s true!”
“The widow still has the eggshell. How he came there is a mystery. Such a lovely lad!” She leaned close over Magpie and began to ply a fine needle through the flesh of her brow, closing the wound so artfully it would leave no scar. “Her mother, now,” she went on, “she’s not a mystery so much as a marvel. Daughter of the West Wind himself!”
“An elemental! She said her grandfather wore a skin.”
“Aye. He was even known to come to dances in it from time to time in Never Nigh, looking just like a blustery old codger and playing a fine whisker fiddle when called upon.” She finished her stitching and tied a final knot in the nearly invisible thread at Magpie’s brow.
“Will she be okay?” Talon asked.
“I hope. What happened to her, lad?”
“It was the devil that got my folk.”
Alarmed, Orchidspike asked, “Devil? Is it captured?”
“Neh. We barely escaped it! Never seen such a thing, like it was the dark come to life.”
Orchidspike shivered and laid her hand on Magpie’s brow, conjuring stronger glyphs of healing over her.
“Lady, are we safe here?” Talon asked. “Perhaps we should remove to the castle while this thing roams.”
“Aye, perhaps we should.”
Magpie slept for more than a day without so much as stirring. Even the jostling trip to Rathersting Castle didn’t wake her. Many a curious tattooed face turned to stare as the strange lass was carried unconscious to Princess Nettle’s chamber. As for the half-dozen wounded and battle-scarred crows fussing after her, tracking blood and feathers up the winding stair, they were known to the warriors already. The war party had arrived, whooping, just in time to see the huge stinking vultures fleeing scared while the crows, one-tenth their size at most, even puffed with the fury of battle, chased after.