Blackbringer (Page 15)

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.

EIGHT

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!”

Magpie grimaced and listened to the commotion of faeries and creatures in the Ring. “Come on, then,” she said to the brothers. “Let’s do this skiving thing so we can get on with what we came for.”

“Ye’ll be great, Mags,” said Pup, tossing a tentacle over her shoulders as he hopped along by her side. They came round the corner of a caravan and nearly collided with a small group of faeries coming the other way. “Hoy!” cried Pup, swerving to avoid putting out a gent’s eye with his beak.

There was a mild commotion as they stumbled over one another, but Magpie had stopped dead in her tracks and was standing before a tall young lady, her head tilted up to stare at her. It was the lady from the tower window, the one with the golden circlet. Magpie stared at her and at her crown. Unlike her own circlet, this was no human’s earring. It looked exactly like the one Bellatrix wore in all the statues. Then Magpie noticed the lady’s tunic and knew from its shimmer it could be naught but real firedrake scales—impossible to come by since the creatures went extinct. Her eyes moved to the lady’s face. Exquisite features, a sweet smile with a twist of amusement at each corner.

“Blessings!” said the lady in a rich, musical voice. “What a small warrior!”

The gents at her sides laughed. “Aye, Lady,” said one. “I fear this must be our Bellatrix! A far cry from the huntress.”

“Indeed, it should be you upon the stage,” fawned the other gent. “Then we would all have an excuse to gaze at your loveliness for hours together!”

But the lady smiled at Magpie and said, “You wrong the pretty child, sirs. She does my ancestress great credit.”

“Ancestress?” repeated Magpie.

The lady said, “Aye, my great foremother, Bellatrix.”

The gents looked at Magpie as if they expected her to collapse into a curtsy at the revelation, but she only squinted and said flatly, “Blither. Bellatrix left no heirs.”

Again the lady laughed her lovely tinkling laugh. “Oh, but she did, as you see.”

One of the gents cut in, “Hasn’t word spread to the world? You can carry the news, gypsy, when you go away. Tell them Lady Vesper, many-greats-granddaughter of the warrior princess, is come to Dreamdark.”

Magpie snorted. “Come from where?” she asked. “And with what for proof?”

The gents, both frocked in frippery to rival the lady’s, their hair fragrant with pomade, gaped at Magpie. One managed to say in a voice choked with shock, “Lady Vesper needn’t defend her claim to a ragamuffin!”

Maniac, who’d come to fetch them to the stage, puffed up at once. “Ragamuffin!” he cried. “Ye don’t call Mags names!”

“Nay, gents, nay, birds,” said the lady with a look of imperturbable sweetness. “Don’t scuffle on my account. I know how it sounds.” She knelt before Magpie and took her hands in her own. “It was a shock to me as well when my grand-dame told me, just before she crossed to the Moonlit Gardens. She showed me where the ladies of our lineage had long hidden Bellatrix’s crown.” She inclined her head, and as the sunlight rippled over the circlet’s surface it had the look of molten gold, and there was something else. A pattern like living glyphs sparkled around it then faded again, like a secret. Magpie blinked. There could be no doubt the crown was forged in a Djinn’s fire. “And her tunic,” continued Vesper, brushing her fingertips over the scales. “These are my greatest treasures, and they belong in Dreamdark, as do I.”

Magpie felt a surprising rush of longing to believe her. She looked at her, so beautiful, so like the warrior princess, and it seemed right that such a lady should exist in this place. She might have stepped from a legend.

There had been a time when the Djinn strode the world in splendor, winking new creatures into being and reaching up to arrange the stars into patterns in the heavens. Faeries had been different then, not only beautiful, but powerful. Magpie’s longing for such times was a deep and wrenching ache, and looking into Lady Vesper’s eyes she felt the ache begin to give way to a bloom of possibility.

One of the gents was speaking. “And besides the crown,” he said, “m’lady has records discovered in the crypts of Chijal Ev showing Bellatrix’s descendants back twenty-five thousand years, and the elders of Dreamdark have studied it—”