Blackbringer (Page 41)

The worst-injured of the crows, Bertram, Pigeon, and Swig, were seeing the others off from the ramparts. Calypso looked up at the iron-grey sky just as the first raindrops fell, heavy as berries. “Fine flying weather,” he said, his grim voice at odds with his cracked grin.

“Hurry back, blackguards, ye hear?” said Swig, who sported a new eye patch as a result of a vulture’s talon gouge. “No stopping at the tavern without me.”

“Aye, Cyclops, sure,” piped Pup. “Calm yer pepper.”

“Cyclops?”

“Hush and no bickering,” said Calypso sharply. “Keep ’Pie company, ye ken?” His voice softened. “Try to get her to talk about it, if ye can.”

“Shivers me to see her like this,” said Bertram, his voice weak since being throttled by a stinking vulture foot.

“And me.”

“Ye going to bring that bossy little beetleherd back here?” asked Pigeon, whose left wing was crisscrossed with neat stitches.

“Bring her? Neh. She won’t fly, that one. She has her own ways of getting place to place,” said Calypso. “But I’ll get her to come.”

“Hurry,” said Swig again.

“We’ll try.”

The three tired birds heaved into the driving rain. After an hour’s wet slog across the vastness of the forest, rain sheeting from their feathers with every wing beat, Calypso, Pup, and Mingus landed at last on the little green above Snoshti’s underground village. One glance at their caravans had them squawking and cursing. “We been ransacked! We been looted!” hollered Pup.

Mingus went to gather up the costumes that spilled out the open doors into the rain and hung them up carefully inside to dry. As an afterthought, he fetched Magpie’s book from her bunk and tucked it under his wing to keep it dry. Then they all hopped to the door of the hedge imps’ warren, rapping fast at it with their beaks.

“Get ye gone!” a snarly voice cried from inside. “She en’t here, I tell ye! And if she was, I’d have yer eyes out before I let ye to her!”

“Open up!” Calypso squawked.

“Crow?”

“Aye!”

The door swung open and Snoshti stood there, small and fearsome with her paws on her hips. “It’s about time, birds,” she said. “What’s happened?”

“I might ask ye! What happened to our caravans? And who were ye flappin at? Someone looking for ’Pie?”

“Anyone not looking for her, I’d like to know?”

“Eh?”

“Birds, haven’t ye heard? The Windwitch daughter is back, they say, sneaking about with imps and crows and perhaps a pet devil with a taste for faeries?”

“What? They think ’Pie—? They think we—?” Calypso stuttered, stunned.

“It must be so, neh? Ye lot show up and—spit spot!—faeries start to vanish? That queen’s behind it, telling the whole city how Magpie was with Poppy Manygreen last anyone saw of her and how they were talking devils with some crusty scavenger imp.”

“Er,” said Calypso. “Mistress, so far that’s so.”

“And where are the lasses now?”

“Well, ’Pie, she’s at Rathersting Castle, with the old healer.”

“Healer?” Snoshti growled. “Is she—?”

“Her wings . . . they’ll take some mending. Lady Orchidspike says she can do it. But that’s not the worst. She’s . . . lost, like. Been a bad blow to her, losing Poppy . . .”

“Losing Poppy?”

“Aye,” Calypso said. “ ’Twas terrible. We . . . we lost a crow, too. There’s a bad devil come, we never seen its like. It got the better of us, and good. Mistress . . .” He looked hard at Snoshti. “It’s time. We got nothing left but our secrets, neh? It’s time ye told ’Pie the truth and let her be who she’s going to be. Ready or not.”

Snoshti returned his hard look and, at length, she nodded. “Perhaps ye’re right, old feather. Time can rush up to meet ye before ye’re ready. But what are ye to do? Ask it to wait?” She shook her head. “Neh. I’ll come to the castle, and we’ll see.”

Calypso nodded solemnly. “After all these years,” he said, “it shivers me a little to think what’s next. It’s like turning a page, neh? And starting up at the top of a new one?”

“That’s thinking small, crow. It could be a whole new book.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Magpie was lying on the bed with her eyes closed when Talon peered in. The room had cleared out considerably. One bespectacled crow sat reading at her bedside, a bandage wrapped round his neck, and he looked up when Talon hesitated in the doorway. “Come in then, laddie,” he croaked.

Talon entered. “Is she . . . ?”

“Asleep, I reckon, or pretending. She don’t much feel like talking.”

“Ah, well, then I’ll just . . . ” He backed away.

“Neh, lad, stay. Here, sit with her. I’m starved for a smoke.”

The bird got up and Talon saw he was the one with the peg leg. He thunked heavily out of the room and down the corridor. Talon sat on the edge of the chair and looked at Magpie. Even though her eyes were closed he felt awkward staring, so he looked away.

Magpie wasn’t asleep. Her weariness kept trying to pull her down into darkness, but each time she felt herself slipping away she struggled against it. The oblivion and numbness of sleep felt too much like that sea of nothing. The terrible scenes of Issrin Ev were playing over and over in her mind, and there was no safe escape in sleep.

When Talon looked back over at her, her eyes were open and gave him a start. “Hello,” he said.

She didn’t respond.

“I thought you’d want to know, the vultures are gone,” he told her. “After the crows ran ’em off they seemed keen to get out of Dreamdark, back to wherever they came from. It seems the devil’s cleared out of Issrin too. We don’t know where he’s gone. And that scavenger imp? The crows told us about him. We found him looting East Mirth. He’s in the dungeon now.”

Magpie’s face seemed vacant and Talon didn’t know what else to say, so he pulled out something he’d tucked into his belt. “I found this at Issrin Ev. I recognized it from the other day in West Mirth, when you near killed me with it.” He laid Skuldraig on the bed beside her.

She stared at it for a long moment, then blinked. She looked up at him. Some expression flickered in her dulled eyes. “You . . . you touched it?” she asked.