Blackbringer (Page 2)

“Nor I.” Magpie was solemn, looking around the small cabin. Aside from the seal, there was no evidence a devil had even been here. The odor was usually overwhelming when a devil had freshly been freed from thousands of years stewing in its own stench, but she smelled nothing. She sat back on her heels.

She’d caught quite a few devils since she got started hunting them eight years ago. The scarab devil had made twenty-three, which was, as far as she knew, twenty-three more than any other living faerie had caught. That was twenty-three ancient bottles fished up by humans and twenty-three broken seals. None of those had borne the sigil of the Magruwen. Magpie knew the legends of the devil wars better than anyone, and in none of them did the great Djinn King himself stoop to wrestling snags into their prisons. That had always been the work of his champion, Bellatrix, the greatest faerie of all legend, and the champions of the other six Djinn.

“What grim beast could need so strong a seal?” Calypso whispered, peering around the cabin. “Think it’s still aboard?”

“Neh,” Magpie said. “It’s gone.” She felt no devilish presence. In fact, but for the missing fishermen there seemed nothing at all wrong. She had seen the aftermath of plenty of devil escapes and they all had two things in common: blood and stench. Here were neither of those and yet a shiver gripped her spine. For here was something she had never expected to see: the Magruwen’s seal upon a snag’s prison. It shivered her to think what could have been inside it.

Something on the floor caught her eye and she leapt down to it. “Flummox me . . . ,” she said. The crows swooped down too.

Four pairs of battered canvas shoes were arranged around the table with their toes pointed inward, as if the fishermen had gathered here to open the bottle they’d pulled up in their nets. Whatever had been inside, it had been there for a long, long time, and it had come out hungry. Calypso whistled low. “Snatched ’em right out of their slippers,” he said.

“Why’d they let it out?” Pup wanted to know. “Why do they always?”

“I reckon they heard the story about the wishes,” replied Swig.

Magpie sighed. One devil, just one in all of devil history, had granted three wishes to the human who freed it. Magpie had caught that troublemaking snag five years ago and put him back, but the damage was already done. The mannies had a mania for it now, and every chance they got they freed some wicked thing back into the world, and they surely didn’t get wishes for their trouble.

What had these fools gotten? Just their shoes left behind, and no one to spread that story. “Poor dumb mannies,” she muttered.

“Curiosity killed the eejit,” Calypso replied with a shrug.

Magpie frowned at him. Usually pity was the last emotion humans inspired in her, but something about those empty shoes tugged at her heart. She reached toward the frayed fabric of the nearest slipper, forming pictures in her mind as she did so. Glyphs—symbols drawn in one’s thoughts—were the basic element of faerie magic. The simplest were mere shapes that every sprout mastered with learning to read. Making light and fire, floating, hiding, protection from trespass, basic healing, and housework; these things were as easy as the alphabet. Real magic came with more complex glyphs and fusing multiple glyphs together in precise ways, being able to conjure them from memory and “vision” them, hold them burning in one’s mind with perfect concentration.

The glyphs Magpie visioned now were for “memory” and “touch,” and no sooner had she laid her fingers on the human’s slipper than a jolt surged up her arm and she was engulfed in darkness. It went as soon as she jerked her hand away, but the shock drove her to her knees and she gasped.

“ ’Pie!” squawked Calypso. “ ’Pie, darlin’, what is it?”

Her fingers were still tingling from the jolt. She said, “Darkness.”

“Eh? That all?”

The mannies’ last memory, seared into the last thing they’d touched, was of darkness. This spell for memory touch, learned from faeries in the high Sayash Mountains, had become a valuable snag-hunting tool, more than once showing Magpie the face of the devil she was seeking as glimpsed in its victims’ last moments. But these mannies had seen only darkness. Or had there been something else?

She hesitated and touched the shoe again. This time, braced for it, she didn’t let it knock her to her knees, but she couldn’t stop the gasp it forced from her lips. She drew her hand hastily away and said, “Hunger.”

“Hunger?”

“Aye. Mad hunger.” She shivered and with one last quick look around said, “Let’s go,” and they flew back up on deck, several crows lugging the devil’s bottle between them. “Rest awhile,” she told them. “It’s a long sky till landfall and I don’t want to feed any crows to the sea.”

Calypso stretched his wings and yawned. “Just a catnap, then. Wake us when it’s time to go, ’Pie.” He tucked his head against his breast and closed his eyes.

Magpie stretched too and looked around. Her grandfather had conjured his faerie skin and was waiting for her in the midst of a clump of napping crows, looking just like a jolly old codger with whiskers, broad-chested and lively. Elementals like the winds or the Djinn could put on skins and enjoy a taste of mortal life, which was how Magpie came to have the West Wind for a grandfather. Six hundred years ago he’d taken one look at a lovely lass named Sparrow, fallen head over heels for her, and gone to craft himself a faerie skin handsome enough to woo her in.

Sparrow had fallen in love back and he’d swept her off to a life in the sky, to travel always cuddled to his chest as he soared above the world. It was a bold, wild life for a faerie—most never even left their forests—but she was a bold, wild lass, and so were her daughter and granddaughter after her, and their place in the world was everywhere and nowhere, like gypsies on wing. No home had they but their caravans and campfires, and no family but the one they’d cobbled together of crows, creatures, and kindred souls they’d met on their endless journey round and round the world.

“Ach, Grandpa, it’s what you thought,” Magpie said, plopping down next to him and resting her glossy head on his shoulder.

“Jacksmoke!” the old fellow cursed, cradling her to his side and absently smoothing down the foxlick that stood up like a tuft from the top of her wind-whipped head. “Another loose devil? Skiving plague of meddlesome mannies, can’t leave a bottle well enough alone!”