Blackbringer (7 page)

Just as her gaze moved on, Magpie caught sight of a figure in the corner of her vision and she turned. Framed in an arched window of the tallest tower, a lady was peering down at her. She was far away, but Magpie’s sharp eyes had no trouble perceiving that her dark hair was crowned by a shining circlet of gold. Crowned? Magpie’s eyes widened in surprise, and she thought for an instant that she was seeing a vision of Bellatrix. But that was absurd. The lady in the window was no ghost. But who was she? Alabaster Palace had no tenant, just as Dreamdark had no queen.

“Hoy, Mags!” cried Swig. “Ye going to brush yer tumbleweed head of hair sometime before the town wakes up?”

Magpie turned to stick her tongue out at him, and when she glanced back up at the tower, the lady was gone.

Down the avenue, Never Nigh was stirring to life. Soon the whole city would be awake, the air vivid with wings as faeries promenaded from their palaces, bejeweled, lacquer-haired, and lovely. Magpie tried to remember when last she’d combed her hair with something other than her fingers and thought it was likely near a week ago. Tumbleweed, indeed. She went zinging back to her caravan to do it.

Batch awakened with a gasp to find himself slung over a tree branch. “Neh, neh, neh!” he said frantically. “Not sleep, neh!” That was how master had found him in the first place. He clung tight to the branch and shoved the tip of his tail into his mouth, sucking at it furiously until his terror had subsided to mere panic. When he let it drop from his mouth it was a spot of shining pink on a lump of filth-caked imp.

Batch moaned. He was bruised and scorched and hungry and he missed his treasures but at least he’d done as he was ordered so he could go his own way. He patted his satchel to make sure the pomegranate was still there. It was.

“Stupid fruit,” he muttered, recalling the silver bat wings with a trembling lip. He should have chosen them as his treasure and flown far, far away. Let the master fetch his own fruits. Let the vultures fetch them for him!

The vultures. Batch pulled himself up to a sitting position. They’d have been waiting for him at the hedge all night. Let them wait! Slowly he climbed down the tree and dragged himself back to the well. He peered over the edge. “Down in the dark, the mudmunching dark . . .” His words twisted into a sob. He knew he couldn’t go back down the well. It would be madness. Death. And yet his thoughts steered back to the wings from second to second. There was a warp in his mind that pulled all thoughts to treasure. Such was a scavenger imp’s peculiar genius. Until he had them he’d be able to concentrate on nothing else.

He tried to think what to do. He could find a bird to carry him down the well! But he scarcely spoke their language. He had no reason to talk to birds! Imps generally spoke a pidgin form of Old Tongue in addition to the scamper language favored by those that scurry and slink: beetles, lizards, squirrels, and the like. Rats, of course. Batch had a strong rapport with rats, but that wouldn’t serve him now. He needed
wings.

As if in answer to his thoughts he heard wings in the sky above him. In the instant before he looked up, a hopeful smile started to shape his snout, but then the shadows fell over him and the smile died unborn. “Aieee!” he shrieked as the vultures bore down on him. “Neeehhh!”

 

Throughout Dreamdark playbills were being carried in all sorts of hands, furry fox paws and globed frog toes, hooked hawk talons and slippery webbed fingers. All across the forest’s many miles paws and hooves and fins were changing course and heading toward Never Nigh. Faeries weren’t the only ones who loved a play.

Kneeling in her garden, Poppy Manygreen knew the crows had come even before the playbill fluttered down to her. The flowers had whispered it to her. She sat on her knees with her head bowed toward the honeysuckle and its voice was as soft as a feather falling on moss, but she heard it. The forest was a wonderland of voices if only you could hear them, but no one else could, even in her own clan, though plants had always been their lifeblood.

“The crows,” she heard the soft voice say, “from years ago.” Faeries thought news traveled fast by wind and bird and butterfly, but it was nothing compared with the root-to-root gossip of the green and growing things. “The noisy crows,” the honeysuckle whispered, and Poppy smiled. She remembered the noisy crows. She remembered them clowning on the stage they set up in the Ring, and she remembered how the lead crow had a cracked beak that made him seem to grin. Most of all she remembered the day they left, because her best friend had flown away with them and had never returned.

She whispered a question to the vine and the answer came at once. “Aye,” the voice whispered, “the trees have seen her. She has come home.”

Poppy leapt to her feet. She didn’t spread her wings so much as she unfurled them, the vast red wings of a swallow-tail butterfly, iridescent and veined with gold. Fully spread they were twice as large as she was herself. It was a mystery where they’d come from. No one in the whole history of her clan had ever had such wings. She surged into the air, fast as a spark off a firecracker, and sped toward Never Nigh.

 

It was not uncommon for faeries dawdling in a garden or gossiping under a streetlamp to suddenly notice a hedge imp, where the moment before no hedge imp had been. Sneaks and spies, faeries called them, having a general mistrust of imps, even of hedge imps who were known as fine craftsfolk and cleanly neighbors. That their stealth might be of a magical nature never occurred to faeries. Few creatures looked less magical than hedge imps, and kin though they might be to faeries, faeries were few who would claim them as such.

Snoshti appeared on a small avenue leading into Never Nigh with a twinkle in her eye and a beetle in her arms. It was blue as lapis and mild as a milk cow. She set it down and looked around. Seeing no faeries, she went away again directly. That is, she faded from sight and no sooner had her afterimage glimmered out than she was glimmering in again, this time with a garnet-red beetle in her arms. She set this one down too and repeated the process.

The third time she appeared, she carried an emerald-green beetle under one arm and a shepherd’s crook in her paw and she was whistling. She set off down the avenue, driving her small herd before her. About waist-high to a grown faerie, she was a stout bandy-legged creature with a shiny black nose and whiskers set in a broad, furred face. Her coarse fur was mottled grey and honey, with a touch of white the only hint of her age, and it tufted from the neck and cuffs of her flowered frock. She was sturdy and wide, with a pleasant gentleness in her face and a sparkle of intelligence in her pure black eyes that could turn fierce in an instant.

She whistled her way into the throng of creatures headed toward the Ring. A steady stream of faeries, butterflies, and birds flitted overhead, and the avenue was bustling with toads and crickets, ladybugs and newts, hedgehogs and snakes and badgers and imps, all heading to see the show. Turtles had even come out of the river, some of them with creek maidens riding on their shells, and progress toward the Ring slowed behind their lurching gait.

But Snoshti went on whistling, and why not? Her lass was back. She’d been saving this song for over eighty years.

 

Talon Rathersting spotted the vultures from the north tower of the castle where he was daydreaming his way through guard duty. Rathersting Castle, peering out from a great hollow yew on the stony east slope of Dreamdark Crag, commanded a view of nearly the entire forest. Every winged thing that swept its way across could be seen from here by those with the eyes for it, and today there were more wings on the wind than usual. The crows had drawn Talon’s notice only an hour ago, but they’d made right up the Wendling for distant Never Nigh. Talon had been there only twice in his life; his folk seldom mingled with those Never Nigh flibbertigibbets with their fancy hair and ribbons and baubles, but well he knew that no unwelcome creatures could slip through the spells that twined round the city. It was the safest place in the world. So after the crows disappeared into the trees, he’d returned to his daydreams, unconcerned.

The vultures were different. Talon leapt atop the tower’s crenellations and trained his eyes on them. There were a half dozen, moving with grim purpose just above the treetops, their wings vast, too vast. There were no vultures in Dreamdark. These birds were a long way from home. His daydreams forgotten, he visioned the glyph for the deep chime that would summon his cousins and he watched to see where the vultures’ path would lead.

His cousins arrived on wing almost at once from their own guard posts around the ancient tree. They were a fearsome sight, these Rathersting warriors, lean lads just across the threshold of manhood, their shoulders and sharp cheekbones patterned with coal-black tattoos, no two alike. Talon wore the tattoos too, though he was yet a lad. And he wore something they didn’t, a circlet of woven reeds on his wild pale hair.

“Prince,” said his cousin Shrike, alighting beside him on the tower’s high wall. “What is it?”

“There.” Talon pointed. “Vultures, from beyond. Monsters. Six of ’em.”

They looked. Wick whistled low. “Nasty meat.”

“Aye. Fetch the chief,” ordered Shrike, and Wick dove over the edge of the tower, dropping nearly to the rampart before snapping open his wings and whirring away into the deep courtyard of the hollow yew.

By the time the chief came the vultures had sunk into the forest near the upsweep of the great spine of rock where the Magruwen’s temple lay in ruin. “At Issrin Ev, sir,” Talon told him, pointing. “They circled and went down less than a minute ago.”

The chief of the Rathersting clan was a formidable faerie. Coming on seven hundred years old, his beard had gone silver but his hair was still white-gold and gleaming, like Talon’s. He was thick in the chest and narrow in the hips and he moved like a peregrine on the hunt, a few fast flicks of his wings launching him into a long deadly glide. He wore a dagger on each arm and each thigh and had slung his crossbow over his back. He looked at his son. “Good eyes, lad,” he said, and gripped Talon’s shoulder hard.

Talon couldn’t feel proud, though, because he was already tasting the shame of what would necessarily come next. “Shrike, Wick, Corvus, come with me. We’ll see what we see, neh?” said the chief, his eyes flicking to his son and away. Talon pretended not to notice. He knew the look too well, the look where his father still, after a hundred years, seemed puzzled to have found himself with such a son. “Keep on the watch, son,” said he, heaving skyward. “We hunt!” he bellowed, and Wick and Corvus and Shrike launched after him, eager and blooded for danger.

Talon watched them all the way and saw them breach the forest canopy just where the vultures had. At his shoulders his own stunted wings twitched with the yearning to follow them but he bit his lip. He would keep the watch. He might be a prince of the Rathersting, but with wings too small to lift him in flight, guard duty was about all he was good for.

He watched and watched the distant treetops, waiting for their return. His daydreams had slipped away completely and he forgot to send word to Orchidspike to tell her he wouldn’t be coming today. She would watch the gate all afternoon and frown while she worked, wondering. And Talon would be frowning and wondering too, and pacing and scanning the treetops with his hawk-keen eyes, watching for the small distant shapes of his father and cousins returning. But the relief and jealousy that usually flooded him when a triumphant war party returned to the castle would elude him today.

His father wasn’t coming back, and neither were his cousins. Talon would find their knives that night, abandoned deep in a fissure in the ruined face of Issrin Ev.

In their caravans behind the stage the crows were getting into their costumes. Pup looked on as Magpie helped Pigeon with his gown. The crows each played multiple parts in
Devils’ Doom,
the epic of Bellatrix. Pigeon would start out as Queen Fidrildi and later change into armor. Pup played assorted devils throughout.

Magpie, as Bellatrix, wore her own battered hunting tunic over breeches, with a circlet on her head that had been an opera singer’s earring until Swig swiped it in a daring dive. Strapped to her thigh was the skeleton’s knife, partially concealed by the crow-feather skirt she had not yet removed.

She gave Pigeon’s flounces a final fluff and slapped his tail feathers. “There you are, m’lady, pretty as a flower! Do try not to outshine me, if you please.”

Pup squawked, “Ach! Him? I’m much outshinier than him!” He twirled in his devil costume, got tangled in his tentacles, and sat down hard.

“Careful, meat,” said his brother. “Ye’ll ruin yer costume!”

Magpie laughed and helped Pup stand.

“Come along, ye lot,” called Bertram. “Curtain’s in ten!”