Blackbringer

A dozen families lived in the hedge imp village, an intricate warren beneath the earth with wide tunnels for avenues, and passages that Snoshti said reached all the way to other villages. Glossy gem-hued beetles milled about as Magpie made her way topside, and impkins darted up to touch her shyly and giggle, never having had a faerie visit them underground before nor ever having met one so ready to smile at them or carry them into the air on short flights.

The crows were up and smoking in their dressing gowns, and Mingus poured Magpie a cup of sludgy coffee.

“So, ’Pie,” said Calypso, “when are we for the Magruwen, eh? First thing? Or ye going to make that cake?”

Magpie took the recipe out of her pocket and chewed her lip. She’d have been certain the writing belonged to Bellatrix but for the one thing that made it impossible: the paper wasn’t ancient; it could have been written yesterday. “What if it’s a trick?” she asked.

“A trick? Ye mean, like, if it’s not really his favorite cake?” puzzled Pup.

Magpie smiled. It seemed such a silly notion in itself, that the great Djinn had a favorite cake at all. She looked at the ingredients. Oats, honey, the usual things, and what else? Tears, wind, lightning . . . Magpie cocked her head to one side and took a swig of her coffee, thinking. Tears, wind, and lightning. Water, air, and fire—that was three of the four elements.

She thought of what she and Poppy had talked of, how the Djinn had dreamed a world he couldn’t even touch. He couldn’t wade in a stream and feel the rush of water without boiling it, couldn’t sleep beneath a tree without burning it, or ride a bird, or feel the wind, or lay his cheek on a sun-warmed stone. It began to seem like just the kind of cake that would be his favorite.

And what of the thousand years of undreamed life? What was a life not yet begun? A cocoon, sure. But no butterfly or moth lived a thousand days, let alone years. And Magpie had an idea that this last ingredient would somehow represent the fourth element: earth. Rich earth, steady, solid earth, the element that anchored all the rest, like roots in soil.

Suddenly she had it. She clapped her hands. “An acorn!”

“Eh, ’Pie?” Calypso asked.

“A tree lives a thousand years!” she said, and the idea settled in her mind with the snick of a puzzle piece fitting into place. What was an acorn if not the perfect expression of life, a millennium of it and more, curled up tight and just waiting for the proper encouragement to begin?

She would make the cake. Wherever it had come from, whoever had written it out, it was made of such things as could have only good in them. “I’m going to meet Poppy,” she told the crows.

She went back down into the imp village to borrow a half walnut shell from Snoshti, then she set out.

Fringed by a circle of willows, Lilyvein Pond was the largest of a string of spring-fed ponds on the outskirts of Never Nigh. Faerie weddings were often held here in the spring when white narcissus bloomed round it thick as snowbanks, and in winter it was the favorite spot for ice-skating. Magpie flew quietly over the glassy water and, hovering just above the surface, began to sing. Poppy watched and listened from the air.

The strange words, sung low in a language not often heard above the waves, rippled over the water, and sleek shapes began to gather beneath.

Magpie was singing the ballad of Psamathe, fiftieth of the fifty daughters of the sea, and it was a tale of despair sure to bring tears to the eyes of fish, eel, and creek maiden, and any other creature who knew their language. Magpie couldn’t speak the fin tongue fluently but she knew a good number of their ballads by heart as a result of a long winter some twenty years earlier spent trapped in an ice cave with selkies. She’d become quite a good ice sculptor that winter too, a skill she hadn’t since had to call upon, but who knew but that one day she might? Little had she suspected then, sharing a selkie’s seal pelt for warmth, that the day would come when she’d need to bring a fish to tears. But here that day was.

           “And all clad in sea foam
           she clung to the waves,
           singing her love to the sky.
           He swept o’er without stopping,
           that tempest, by moonlight,
           ne’er heeding her heart-rending cry. . . .”

The tricky fin verses trilled off her tongue, and as the last notes rippled across the pond, the fish wept like babes. Hanging like a dragonfly over the green water, Magpie gingerly scooped the walnut shell in and filled it to brimming with their tears.

“What was that song about?” Poppy asked as they flew slowly away, trying not to slosh the tears. Not understanding a word of it, she’d still felt a tug at her heart, so mournful had been the sound.

“Lost love,” replied Magpie with all the feeling of a child to whom such a thing is mere words. “Woe and heartache. The usual.”

The Manygreen lands sprawled across a varied terrain of speckled meadows and scrubby rises laced with tree cover. As they were growers and plant mages, they lived where the trees were sparse and the sun could dip down and kiss their growing things to life. Poppy guided Magpie to a soft landing atop a tangle of wild plum roots at the edge of a garden in riotous summer bloom. There were checkered heads of drooping fritillary mixed into swaths of bird cherry and cloudberry, kiss-me-quick and creeping jenny, primrose and bee orchid and yellow archangel. Fuchsia and wild peony tumbled over rocks, and fiddleheads unfurled among stalks of honey daphne. From tree to tree rolled carpets of wood anemone, and above it all a fringe of whitebeam and flowering plum waved its plumage in the wind.

“Oh, Poppy . . . ,” Magpie breathed, taking it all in. “It’s wonderful here. . . .”

Poppy beamed. “There’s my workshop,” she said with a flourish of her arm. Emerging from a nook between roots was a many-gabled roof bristling with copper chimneys. Poppy led Magpie through a covered porch into a single large room. Herbs and blossoms hung upside down from the ceiling to dry, and the walls were hidden entirely by shelves and glass-fronted cabinets. A pair of big slab worktables were covered in a tumble of kettles, crucibles, and cauldrons, bubbling vials, interconnected tubes, beakers, shining instruments, and books.

Magpie looked at it all, wide-eyed. “Skive,” she murmured. “I’ve never seen the like!”