“Neh, for we didn’t tell yer parents. We’d been looking for ye a long time, pet, since before my time, even, waiting for ye to be born. Claws crossed, hoping! We didn’t know if it would work! It’s a lot to trust to stories and dreams, but then along ye came. Even before ye spoke your first word I was fair sure who ye were.”
Magpie stared at her. The imp’s words were like nonsense tumbling around in her tired mind.
“Ye know what yer first word was?”
“My parents said it was mama.”
“Nor was it! There was another earlier only I heard, and I never told. It was devil. ”
“Devil?”
“Aye, just as it was foretold. Then we were sure. We held the blessing after that. Floated ye down Misky Creek on a linden leaf to where the creatures waited. All the gifts we gave, yer animal senses and languages, and more ye’re like to be discovering all yer life, they’re just tokens and tools to help ye bear yer real gift, ye ken, that which was given even before ye were born.”
Magpie shivered. Foreboding and wonder twined together and she wanted to know, and was afraid to know, what that gift might be. Before she had decided whether to ask, though, Snoshti said, “But that’s not for me to tell. Come along now. This way.”
She took her hand and guided her gently along the riverbank. Magpie saw a bridge ahead made all of round river rocks, and on the far bank, arrayed like picnickers on blankets, were faeries. “Are they all . . . ?”
“Aye.”
They stepped onto the bridge and all eyes on the riverbank turned to them. Magpie hesitated. “What are they all waiting for?” she whispered, suddenly shy.
“It’s all right, pet, they’re not waiting for ye. They know no more of ye than living faeries do. They’re waiting for their loved ones to come over. We’re all tied to the world so long as our folk are still in it. It can take lifetimes to let all that go and become.”
“Become? Become what?”
Snoshti pointed into the sky. Magpie looked, but all she could see was a sparkle of some far thing passing before the moon, and she swayed a little on her feet, staring into the fathomless depths of the sky. She looked back down. They were nearing the end of the bridge and Magpie caught a hint in the air of that snow-sharp fragrance she’d detected in her caravan and on the recipe card. She looked sharply at the imp, only now realizing who had slipped it into her book.
She stepped off the last stone of the bridge onto the grass of the Moonlit Gardens, where no other living faerie had ever trod. The clusters of picnickers were all watching her and she looked from face to face. She’d never really wondered what faeries would look like in the afterworld, and she saw they looked much the same as they did in life, though muted somehow, like reflections in an old mirror. Their edges were blurred, their substance soft and silvered. And in their eyes, mingled with calm, she saw pity. Snoshti nodded to them in greeting and bundled Magpie along.
“Why were they looking at me like that?” Magpie asked.
“Like what?”
“Pitying, like.”
“Ach, well, it en’t often a sprout comes across that bridge. Biddies and codgers, that’s who comes. They think ye’re here unnatural early, and that can’t mean any good for ye. They’ll be thinking ye were killed.”
Magpie stopped walking and looked back over her shoulder at them, struck by a thought. “They’ll have seen Poppy and Maniac then, neh? Can’t I ask them?”
“Pet . . . ,” Snoshti said, clasping Magpie’s wrist with her paw and keeping her from turning back. “I’ve already asked. They’re not here.”
Magpie’s insides lurched. “They’re not here?” she demanded. “But . . . they must be! I saw them die!”
“I’m sorry, I am, but it’s sure . . . and it’s an older mystery than ye know.”
Magpie stared at the imp, horrified. Not death, she had said of the darkness. Unmaking? They couldn’t have been . . . extinguished . . . but wasn’t that what she felt her own self at the brink of? In a raw voice she whispered, “Then where are they?”
Still clutching her wrist, Snoshti tugged her along. “I don’t know, pet, but ye’re not the only one who wonders. My mistress has long been wanting to know that same thing. Come now. She’s waiting.”
Magpie didn’t ask who Snoshti’s mistress was. A wild hope had leapt into her heart and she didn’t want to dash it.
She followed Snoshti, and it seemed they walked a long way beside the river. She didn’t see another bridge. Above them meadows sloped up to a forest and the forest rolled on from there, on and on in the moonlight until in the distance it met a line of white mountains.
Faeries waved from gardens as they passed and Magpie waved back, seeing glints of light from cottage windows tucked among the trees. All the flowers in all the gardens were pale and the foliage was silver, and the faeries too were the color of moonlight, and luminous, as if lit from within. Some were paler than others and more ghostly. When Magpie asked Snoshti why this was, she answered, “They’ve been here longer. They’re closer to their spark,” which really didn’t make things any clearer.
At length a rumbling sound resolved itself out of the placid shushing of the river and grew steadily louder. A waterfall, Magpie thought, and was glad the river didn’t go on and on forever in sameness. It broadened as it approached the plunge, and mica-glittering rocks began to loom out of the landscape. With Snoshti, Magpie left the meadows behind and approached the edge of a cliff. She felt the vastness of space opening before her as she stepped to the brink to peer over. But as she did, her senses suddenly screamed at her—onslaught!—and she caught Snoshti around the shoulders and yanked her back.
They tumbled to the ground just as a shape came hurtling up right in front of them, preceded by a snort of fire and spiraling straight up into the sky. The most massive creature Magpie had ever beheld, it shone like crushed gems and left a reek of brimstone in its wake as it coursed toward the moon. Magpie pushed herself to her knees and stared after it. She heard, over the rush of the falls, great bellowing calls sounding and looked down into an immense canyon. Near and far, huge shapes hove into the sky.
“Dragons!” Magpie gasped, staring up at them. Hundreds there were, gliding and spinning, the coppery fumes of their breath seeming to inscribe fiery glyphs on the night. Magpie had dreamed of dragons. She had dreamed of a time when the heavens had glistened with them as the sea glints with sharks, but she had always woken to a world of empty skies. Seeing them now, awe bloomed within her.