Page 27 of The Guardians of Dreamdark (Windwitch #1)

Almost as soon as the Deeps swallowed them, Talon felt the lass struggle, pulling at his hand, slowing him.

He looked back and saw her face was ghostly pale beneath the blood that drenched it, and her luminous eyes were growing dim.

With tremendous effort she brought her weary eyes into focus and said “The crows!” and tried to turn back.

“Wait!” Talon said. He caught her under one arm just as she collapsed.

“I won’t leave them!” she gasped. “They’re my clan!”

Uncertain what to do, he carried her into a tree with him to see what was happening back at the temple. He scampered easily up it with one arm, supporting her with the other. They reached the top of the tree just as the Rathersting war party hove into view, whooping, and began to swoop past.

“Nettle!” Talon hollered, seeing his sister. She did a double take and swerved, quickly commanding the others. They swung round and circled Talon and Magpie, hanging in the air like wasps.

“Talon!” Nettle said, staring. “Who is that lass?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Listen well. The beast that got Papa and the others, it’s in Issrin.”

“Let’s get the creeper, then!” his uncle Orion snarled. “To war!”

The three younger faeries began to answer with shouts but Talon halted them with a sharp, “Nay!” and commanded, “You’ll stay well clear of it!”

His uncle, the chief’s own battle-scarred brother, regarded him with astonishment.

“I’ve just seen what it can do. Stay well above the treetops. It has a wicked long tongue. Don’t get in range of it. Your only plan”—he glanced at the lass, who was struggling valiantly to stay conscious—“is to stay alive and save the crows. Do you hear me? Save the crows. Now! To battle!”

Talon—“Prince Scuttle”—who was usually just the wistful shape growing small on the ramparts behind them as the war parties whooped away, spoke with such kingly command that his cousins and uncle and even his sister stared at him for a moment in blank surprise.

Nettle rallied first. “To save the crows!” she cried, raising her knife.

The others echoed her.

“I’m taking her to Orchidspike,” Talon told Nettle quickly. “Bring the crows there.”

Nettle nodded and whirled away. Talon didn’t linger to watch the battle. He glanced at the lass just as her eyes flickered shut and didn’t reopen. He gathered her against him with one arm, scampered down from the tree, and ran.

Orchidspike met him at her cottage door and gasped to see the bloodied lass in his arms. “Bring her in, lad.”

He eased past her into the cottage and carried the lass straight to the little room where Orchidspike kept a cot for patients.

He laid her on it and looked at her anxiously.

She hadn’t once regained consciousness during the journey through the Deeps.

She was white as a bone against the black-dried blood that painted her face.

Orchidspike came with cloths and hot water and started to fuss over her, cleaning the blood from her face and, Talon knew, visioning powerful healing glyphs that would wrap the lass like invisible bandages of magic.

“I think her name is something like Pie...” ventured Talon after a while.

The old healer looked up at him. “ Pie ? Not Magpie!” she exclaimed. “Eyes like aquamarines?” she asked him, to which he blushed and nodded gruffly.

“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 Candle-night 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?”

“Nay. 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.