Blackbringer (19 page)

“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.

The vultures had been routed and the crows’ reputations preceded them to Rathersting Castle. Warriors saluted the bedraggled flock in the corridors and they nodded back, distracted, all their focus on Magpie.

Orchidspike assured them all she would awaken.

Fretting like biddies, they waited. Nettle’s little room was so crowded with crows that every time Talon contrived to pass by the door and check on Magpie, some ragged crow part would be tufting out of it, a tail or a wing, as if all six crows could not quite fit in at once, but couldn’t be persuaded to wait outside. Orchidspike just shrugged, forbade smoking, and made hearty use of her elbows when she needed to reach the bedside.

Talon slouched around the castle, restless and a wee bit peeved his home had been overrun by birds. He wouldn’t consider that he might be jealous of the warrior’s welcome they’d received, or because the lass whom
he
had saved belonged to
them,
and that while
they
cradled her and crooned to her,
he
couldn’t so much as get a glimpse of her through all those feathers.

They’d thanked him, sure, with gusto and smothering wing hugs and jarring brotherly smacks on the back. And Nettle gave him a great proud grin. He was proud of himself too—he’d saved her, and Orchidspike said she’d be okay. But still he was anxious. He lurked in his room next door where he’d be able to hear the crows’ voices and know when she woke, but the hours passed and he ran out of reasons for lurking, and at last he had to go see to his own folk.

 

When she did wake, the first thing Magpie did was count crows. It was the middle of the night and the weary birds had finally fallen asleep, slumped against walls and snoring softly. “Six,” she whispered, and Calypso heard her and opened his eyes.

“Maniac,” he murmured.

“I know. Saving me.”

“I didn’t see, ’Pie.”

“Poppy too.”

“Aye. That I saw.”

Magpie’s quiet sobbing woke the other crows. They touched her lightly with their feathertips, mourning too and shaken to see their lass cry.

“Darlin’,” said Bertram. “Maniac wouldn’t like to see you like this.”

“He’s been so mad at me,” she said, her voice smaller than the crows had ever heard it. “I . . . I made him be Bellatrix . . . and then there was the porcupine . . . and it’s been ever so long since I’ve told him I—” She looked stricken and didn’t finish her thought.

“He knew, Mags,” said Mingus in his low, gruff voice. “He might puff up and act mad but he’d do anything for ye. Even die. We all would.”

“Die?” repeated Magpie. A shadow of anger crossed her face. “That’s not death,” she whispered, thinking of the leeching, sucking darkness.

“Then what . . . ?” ventured Calypso cautiously.

Magpie shook her head. “I don’t know.” She remembered the look on Poppy’s face as she disappeared, her pleading eyes, her final silent scream. “Not death,” she said, “not proper death,” and a look of desolation swept over her features, erasing the spark of anger and leaving her blank. The crows didn’t know what to do. The blankness was worse than the uncertain sleep or the crying, because her eyes were open but she was lost somewhere inside, and they didn’t know what to say to make it right.

“It seems Windwitch lasses only come to me broken,” said Orchidspike in her matter-of-fact way. “You know it’s how I met your parents too?” she asked as she eased open Magpie’s crumpled wings to examine them. “Ach,” she muttered when she saw the extent of the damage. “Wadded up like a bad poem.” She smoothed them carefully, humming.

Slumped at the edge of the bed with her back to the healer, Magpie said nothing.

“Your father wrote poems, you know,” Orchidspike went on. “There was such a litter of them around him while he waited for your mother to wake up. We didn’t even know her name yet, then. She’d just fallen from the sky!”

“Probably scrapping with a witch, knowing Lady Kite,” said Calypso.

“Aye, the witch Stain it was, who was not ever seen again, by the by.” Orchidspike nodded. “These Windwitch lasses are not to be meddled with, well you know.”

The crows squawked their agreement, but Magpie’s eyes were far away. Frowning at her silence, Orchidspike went on, her voice cheery. “Robin saw her fall from the sky and land in the cattails at the edge of Lilyvein Pond. Scratched and bruised and unconscious, a strange lass with her wings torn to ribbons! So he gathered her right into his arms and carried her to me!”

The lass seemed not to be listening, but just outside the door, someone was. Talon leaned against the wall and heard every word.

Orchidspike carefully smoothed open the folds and furls of Magpie’s limp wings, trying not to rip the tender membrane along the creases. She went on talking in a casual voice, though her face was somber. “Their first glimpse of each other’s eyes came as he carried her, so close their breath was on each other’s lips. His eyes were blue as the robin’s egg he hatched from, and when she woke again hours later, it was that blue she looked for. He was sitting right there, waiting, and when they saw each other I swear there was a fizz of magic in the air. Even I felt it.”

Talon recalled the way the air had pulsed when his hands had touched Magpie’s in West Mirth and his face grew hot.

“They’re still like that!” said one of the crows.

“I believe it. I never saw two faeries that much in love, and at first glance! She told us her name was Kite, after the little hawk with the forked tail. . . .” The healer winced as Magpie’s left wing tore along a particularly harsh crease. If Magpie felt it, she didn’t flinch. Calypso’s eyes darted anxiously between her damaged wings and her blank face.

Through a veil of shock, Magpie was dimly aware of a voice. She had a fleeting vision of her father’s eyes, but it faded. Her thoughts sank back into the darkness. Surely she’d left herself there. What sat here in the world looked enough like her to fool the others, she thought, but it was an illusion. A shell echoing with the drone of the endless ocean. She was back in the darkness where she could find Poppy and Maniac and guide them out. She hoped. Because if she wasn’t there with them, they were alone. And if she wasn’t there, where was she? Not here. She knew the feel of her own skin and this wasn’t it, this blurred and fragile shell. It couldn’t be.

Exchanging a worried look with Calypso, Orchidspike went on in her chatty tone, “Robin asked her all about the world he’d only read of in books, and what a picture she wove of beyond! Flocks of macaws that swoop hundreds-strong through the sultry bowers of rain forests, hollow mountains that cough fire, striped cats as big as cattle, and faeries who ride to war on lizardback with fangs pushed through their earlobes. Shooting stars, hooded snakes, spiny trees, islands of ice cutting through the sea like slow ships! And sure you lot have seen all that with your own eyes, but to Robin? It was like a dream.

“I had to shoo him out so she could rest, but not feet nor wings would carry him away, and he slept outside her window and she found him there, and this time it was
he
who woke to the sight of
her
eyes, and after that there was no question of parting! Do you know they found a frog who would marry them that very night?”

“That very night?” repeated Pup.

“Aye! And they drifted off together on a lily pad down Spinney Creek. After a week, when Kite’s wings had healed, Robin brought his bride back to Never Nigh.” Orchidspike’s look of fond remembrance became clouded. “She was not well received.”

“Lady Kite? Why not?” asked Pup.

Orchidspike shrugged. “Half the lasses were in love with Robin themselves. How was Kite to make friends among them? Neh, she was never happy here. It was good you birds came along when you did!”

“And good for us,” added Bertram. “If not for her long-life potions, we’d be dust long since.”

“And how spry you are! ‘Tis a fine bit of sparkle!”

“Aye, she tricked it off a witch doctor. Wicked lot, but they have their uses,” answered Calypso.

In the corridor, Talon’s head was swimming with witches and witch doctors, hooded snakes and love at first glance and long-life potions. Such a world beyond Dreamdark! He could well imagine how Robin must have felt back then—but without the love part, sure. Of course, without that.

 

“ ’Tis a bad crush, indeed,” Orchidspike said in a low voice to Calypso, over by the window. “But I can mend it. Don’t frazzle yourself.”

“But Lady, it en’t just the wings. I don’t like the look in her eyes. It’s like she en’t inside herself.”

“She’s in there, dear. She’s just gone deep. She’s in shock.”

“But what if . . .” Calypso hesitated. “What if it
did
something to her, right? That devil.”

Orchidspike considered this. “Do you know what it was?”

“It’s being called . . . Blackbringer.”

Orchidspike raised her eyebrows. “Blackbringer?”

“Aye, Lady. D’ye know of it?”

Her bright eyes drifted into memories, back and back through the centuries. She said, “He was just a fireside story, something to frighten bad sprouts. A bogeyman, like old Rawhead.”

“Ye’re saying he weren’t real?”

“Neh, I don’t know. If he ever was real, it was long before my time. Understand, bird, no devil has troubled Dream-dark all my long life, and much longer still. Not since the Dawn Days.”

“Ye think anyone could remember that far? Remember the old stories?”

“I can’t think who.” Orchidspike shook her head wistfully.

“We could ask the trees?” suggested Calypso.

“Ah,” Orchidspike answered sadly. “Bless us, we lost that language long ago.”

Calypso cocked his head. “Truly? Flummox me, I had no notion how rare she was.”

“Who, bird?”

“Poppy Manygreen, Lady. Magpie’s friend. She could speak with ’em.”

“What?” the healer asked abruptly, startling Calypso. “A Manygreen? A faerie with that gift? Here, in Dreamdark?”

Calypso nodded.

“A lass?”

Again he nodded.

“But . . . where is she now?”

“Lady?” Calypso scratched his head with his foot. “She’s the one the devil got last night. She’s gone.”

Orchidspike was silent, and Calypso watched, alarmed, as her expression went slack with tragedy. She lifted trembling hands and laid her face in them. A shudder went through her, and Calypso heard her whisper, “I’d stopped looking.”

 

Western Dreamdark lay quiet under a heavy sky. No smoke curled from the chimney of the healer’s cottage, and the hamlets on the Sills were all deserted. In Pickle’s Gander and East Mirth laundry snapped forgotten on the lines as a wind gathered and shutters began to slam. The faeries had flown.

They were tucked safe into the Great Hall of Rathersting Castle where the fireplace alone was bigger than most cottages. The sprouts were whooping round the high eaves like warriors, but the older folk clustered together, tense and whispering. A summer storm was weighing down heavy as an iron lid upon Dreamdark. And out there in the blustering trees, they knew, something lurked. It had swallowed their neighbors in the night and snatched the warrior chief from the sky.

The lady of the castle and the young prince and princess had been to speak with them. Nettle had held Lyric in her arms while the lass wept over the dark fate of her betrothed. Talon had painted blackberry juice tattoos on the sprouts’ faces and given them warrior names like “Spike” and “Slash.” But there was nothing they could say that would ease the faeries’ worries. Indeed, their own faces were pale under their ink and they seemed weary, and troubled, and grim.