Page 61 of The Guardians of Dreamdark (Windwitch #1)

PART I DEVIL’S DOOM

CHAPTER ONE

The play ought to have been scary. At least Magpie thought so. It was called Devil’s Doom , after all, and what was funny about devils, or doom?

Plenty, as it turned out, when the devils were played by crows.

“Folks like to laugh,” Magpie’s father had said. He wrote the play, cast it, directed it and all, so if he wanted it to be funny, it was.

“They like to be scared, too,” Magpie had argued. “Maybe not for-true scared, but for fun.”

She had a part in the play, and the scene where the devils attacked her could have been all shivers and gasps, with delicious chills running down every spine.

Instead, audiences cried with laughter from the moment the crows took the stage.

Out they hopped, heads bobbing, and nothing could have been less fearsome.

They were more like a flock of jesters than a deadly rampaging horde!

Magpie was trying to teach them to be scarier.

It wasn’t going so well.

“Let me see your fierce face,” she coaxed Calypso as he emerged from the dressing room.

“Here’s my fierce butt,” said the bird, presenting his backside. “Fluff up my tentacles, will ye?” His costume was purple velvet with a lot of long spiral tendrils. They were supposed to dangle down but were all knotted up in a jumble.

“Ach, how’d you get em so tangled?” Magpie asked, trying to straighten them out.

Calypso peered over his shoulder at her. “Ye’re a fine one to talk about tangles,” he said. “Ye plannin’ to comb that tumbleweed head of hair before the curtain goes up?”

Magpie’s hands flew to her head, and what they encountered did feel more like tumbleweed than hair.

“Jacksmoke,” she cursed. “I knew I forgot something.” She had put on her own costume, which she hated.

It was a frock, all fancy with flounces.

She never wore frocks, except onstage. It was a compromise.

Her parents let her wear trousers all the rest of the time, so long as she gussied up for performances with nary a gripe or groan.

She was supposed to wash, too, and she had.

Well...there was some dispute in her family as to whether shining her face with the last gulp in her cup counted as a “wash,” but she’d swum in a pond just three days ago. How dirty could she be?

And then there was her hair.

“Comb it now and then, my love,” her mother, Kite, had said last week. “Or I’ll do it for you.”

That was a threat, as any sprout knows who’s been on the receiving end of a disgruntled parent’s comb.

Magpie glanced around, anxious, but didn’t spot her mother.

It was a madhouse backstage. It always was just before a show—especially the first show in a new place, when they’d just arrived from the sky and had to set everything up.

The local faeries were all aflutter, gathering around the caravans and trying to peep through the gaps in the curtains.

In villages like this, all tucked away in the wilderness, travelers were mad rare, and traveling entertainers rarer still.

Often enough, Magpie’s family were the first they’d ever seen—as was indeed the case in this village, which was called Wolftickle, a name Magpie loved extremely.

She smoothed down her hair, but it just sproing ed right back up again, wind-teased to twice its natural size from flying half the night. “How bad is it?” she asked Calypso.

He considered her. “For a tumbleweed, or for a lass?” he asked. He had a chip in the left side of his beak that made him seem perpetually to grin.

“Very funny,” Magpie replied, then spit into her palms and tried smoothing it some more.

Calypso recoiled. “That’s just uncouth.”

To be deemed uncouth by a crow had to be a new low for a faerie, but Magpie Windwitch didn’t care.

She wasn’t fussy about tidiness like most of her kind, who dressed their hair with oils and perfumes and never, ever with spit.

“You’re just jealous,” she told him. “You’d spit all the time if you had lips.

You’d love it. Spitting’s great.” She was emphatic.

“It’s good sport, seein’ who can spit furthest. And it’s the best way to lay down a challenge when some miscreant’s lookin’ at you cockeyed.

And, as any cat can tell you, it’s also.

..a bath.” In demonstration of the last, she licked her own arm from elbow to wrist.

Calypso started to say something, but clicked his beak shut, sudden-like. Magpie, thinking he was being prim, held up her licked arm, where a pale streak shone wetly. “Look, I made a stripe! I guess I am dirty.”

“I guess you are,” came her mother’s voice from behind her.

Magpie spun around and tucked her arm out of sight. “Oh,” she said, her voice going faint. “Hello, Mother. You’re all ready, I see.”

Kite played the leading role in Devil’s Doom : the champion Bellatrix, the greatest faerie of all time.

She looked the part, too: beautiful and stately and not to be trifled with.

She even had luna moth wings just like Bellatrix had, as though she’d been born to play her onstage.

Magpie hadn’t inherited them from her. Her own wings were dragonfly, like her father’s.

“And you’re not ready,” her mother observed.

“I mostly am.”

“Oh, mostly? Are you going to finish your cat bath, then?”

Calypso, Magpie noticed, was slowly edging away. “No time, I reckon,” she said to her mother, slinking backward after the crow. “I’ll just go comb my hair...”

“Nay, darling. You had your chance,” said Kite, producing the comb.

The comb . Magpie wilted at the sight of it.

It was a pretty little thing, carved mahogany with a pattern of bees, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t evil.

She’d convinced the youngest of the crows, Pup and Pigeon, that it was a torture device left over from the devil wars.

“Neh, Mother, please,” she begged. “Take pity on my tender head!”

“Carrying on about combing your hair! What would Bellatrix say?”

It was a low blow. Bellatrix was Magpie’s hero.

Sure, she’d lived twenty-five thousand years ago and was unlikely to offer an opinion, but Kite’s point hit home.

What would Bellatrix say about a lass who whined about hair combing?

Magpie steeled herself. Stoic as a warrior meeting her fate, she turned around and submitted to torture.

The teeth of the comb bit like a devil trying to dine on her brain, but she didn’t make a peep.

She imagined herself in a dungeon, a dread devil general scourging her for information, and herself not giving away a thing.

Do your worst , she’d say with grim defiance. I’ll never tell!

It was too bad, she thought, that she’d never get a chance to be thrown in a real dungeon, or resist a real general. There were no wars now, no more devils, and no more heroes either. All that was long past, deep in the bloody whorls of history.

“That’ll have to do,” said Kite at last. “Though goodness knows, your foxlick is as stubborn as you are.”

Her foxlick. That was the spot on the top of Magpie’s head where no amount of water, oils, or spit would induce her hair to lie flat.

No matter what was tried, it tufted right back up again as though licked by an invisible fox.

Personally, Magpie thought her mother was the stubborn one to keep on trying to tame it, but she refrained from saying so.

It was time for the play to begin. Her father, Robin, whistled the one-minute warning, and everyone hushed up and scooted to their places. Kite gave Magpie a quick kiss on her forehead, then strode onto the stage and stood ready.

With a flick of her wings, Magpie fwish ed out of sight and watched the curtain rise.

A flute trilled, and a voice spoke the opening lines.

It was Granny Sparrow, in a whispery singsong that sounded like rising mist, cascading moonlight, and pure enchantment.

“Long ago and way back when, the whole world was a battlefield,” she said.

“Devils writhed and ravened from sea to earth to sky, devouring everything that lived...”

Twilight had dimmed the glade beyond, and the rapt audience was just visible, hanging on every word.

Sauntering up to Magpie’s side, Calypso inspected her head. “Yer tumbleweed’s gone missing,” he informed her in a hoarse whisper.

“Where’d you melt away to, you craven beastie?” she whispered back, all scornful.

“To safety, lass. I never interfere in faerie grooming disputes.”

“You’re just scared of my mother.”

“That I am,” he agreed, unashamed. “Sure she blames us for yer ways. Ye’re more crow than faerie, most days.”

“If I was, I’d have feathers instead of hair,” Magpie grumped.

She wished she did. Then she could fly and fly, never needing a comb, just like a bird.

But she knew what Calypso meant. The crows had been with them for most of her life—a full ninety out of her hundred and one years.

She’d been only eleven—her baby brother Kingfisher’s age—when they all joined up together.

The birds were her brothers every bit as much as Kingfisher was, and she did behave more like them than a faerie.

Oh, she didn’t smoke cheroots like they did, or snack on dead things, or poop while flying.

But she did curse plenty, her voice nearly as raucous as theirs.

And they’d taught her how to steal trinkets from mannies.

And, while Kite couldn’t exactly blame the crows for her young daughter wearing trousers—they didn’t wear any, after all—she attributed Magpie’s general.

..Magpie-ness to their indelicate influence.

Magpie wasn’t like other faeries, but her family loved her as she was and wouldn’t change a thing about her. Well...at least, not many things.

“I think ye’d look lovely with feathers, Mags,” said Bertram, another of the crows, as they all gathered to jostle around her and eagerly await their cue.

“Thanks, Bert,” she told him fondly. He was a gentle soul and wore spectacles, which he’d taken off for the show, leaving him looking a little squinty.

There were seven crows in all—Calypso, Bertram, Maniac, Mingus, Swig, Pup, and Pigeon—and all were dressed like devils, no two costumes alike.

Bertram’s had batwings, Mingus’s a whip tail.

Swig’s was reptilian green with a matched pair of bear claws for horns.

There had been all kinds of devils back in the day, each more nightmarish than the last. But these costumes were stitched out of silks and brocades, and they looked more like fancy dress for a masque ball than anything out of a nightmare.

Magpie sighed. If she had to flee from them screaming in terror, the least they could do was be terrifying.

That was her part in Devil’s Doom . Her mother was Bellatrix, vanquisher of devils.

Her father played Kipepeo, another legendary faerie warrior, and her uncle Swift donned golden armor in the role of the Magruwen—the great Djinn King himself!

They were all grand and glorious and fearless.

And Magpie? She got to be a helpless village lass snatched from the jaws of death—or from the jaws of Calypso, anyway, whose costume unfolded to present a vast, fanged mouth big enough to devour her whole.

(And if that sounds properly scary: It ought to have been, and was not.)

“Ach,” Magpie gasped as a gaseous smell overcame her. “You nasty things. Who farted?”

Cackling, the crows all denied it even as they all added to it, brewing up a group fart worthy of warthogs in a sulfur spring.

Magpie made a show of gasping like she was dying. “Well, you’re like devils in one way at least,” she said when she could breathe again. All the tales made mention of the devils’ awful stench. “Stinky if not scary.”

Out onstage, Bellatrix was kneeling before the Magruwen, making the vow to become his champion. It was Magpie’s favorite part. Ah, to be the Djinn King’s champion! She could only dream of such things. Like devils and heroes, the Djinn were long gone.

“Rise, my child,” Uncle Swift bid from within his golden helmet. Flames licked out of its eyeholes, which was a nice touch, since the Djinn had been fire elementals. The audience oohed and aahed, even though it was the same magic they used every day to light their hearth fires and lanterns.

Kite rose, and Swift gifted her with the three treasures that Bellatrix always had in all the statues and engravings of her: a circlet of gold, which he set on her head like a crown; a tunic of glittering firedrake scales; and last of all Skandaraj, the legendary smoke axe.

Never mind that this was just an ordinary axe bespelled to give off a waft of smoke, and the tunic was enamel and not real firedrake scales, and the circlet actually a hoop earring Calypso had swiped off a manny.

Now Kite really looked like Bellatrix: a warrior of olden times, ready to deal doom to devils.

The audience clearly thought so, and when the curtain came down on the scene, they went wild with cheers.

Wolftickle was a tiny village. There couldn’t have been more than thirty faeries altogether, but they made enough noise for a hundred.

Kite left the stage. Auntie Pearl handed Kingfisher off to her, and Kite held him up in the air and spun him around like he was flying.

After a quick set change, the stage was transformed from the Magruwen’s throne room to a cozy village scene, and Magpie’s time had come.

One deep breath and out she went, the crows ushering her past with wing pats and whispered well wishes.

She found her mark on the floor and took her place.

Beyond the curtain, the cheers died back to an expectant hush.

It was always at this moment, when the hush fell, that a smidge of stage fright overcame Magpie.

Her breathing hitched. Her mouth went dry.

In the quiet, she could feel the audience out there: all those strangers and their eyeballs, just waiting to stare at her.

It made her feel stiff and awkward. She knew it would pass; it always did.

But...this time it was worse than usual.

The hairs rose on the back of her neck, and the thrill that went through her was not stage fright.

It was dread, pure and cold. It ripped through her, leaving her breathless, and she didn’t have time to make sense of it because the curtain rose, and there they all were: the strangers and their eyeballs, staring straight at her.