Page 8 of The Guardians of Dreamdark (Windwitch #1)

Magpie and the crows flew by night, high enough above the human lands that the jumble of painted caravans they towed wouldn’t attract attention.

They didn’t worry about meeting anyone up here.

The pathways of the skies were traveled by winds and white geese, wheeling bats and butterflies, but they never encountered other faeries here, and it had been decades since they had seen a witch silhouetted against the moon.

“Take ’em down, my lovelies!” Calypso croaked, sweeping along the line of airborne caravans. “The sun, she stirs! Time to fill our bellies and shut our eyes!”

There was a bloom of light on the horizon.

Day was coming on. They bade the wind goodbye and dropped down toward the forest far below.

This stretch of Iskeri was the last place of safety before the channel they would cross the next night on the way to Dreamdark.

They eased through the treetops and set their five caravans down gently in a nook between roots.

The gypsy wagons were a marvel of color in the shady woods.

They were carved with sunbursts and stars and painted in jewel tones, with real gems glimmering like mosaic tiles in the designs.

The big spoked wheels were radiant red, the roofs were vaulted and the windows round, and each had a bright copper chimney and weather vane, one a dragon, one a whale, a tiger, a phoenix, and a heron with its wings spread wide.

The crows bustled in and out the doors as they set about making camp, and before a half hour had passed they had a fire snapping in a freshly dug pit and were toasting cubes of cheese on the ends of twigs.

Pup caught his cheese on fire at once and took to waving it like a firebrand, while Mingus quietly handed Magpie a chunk that was toasted to perfection. “Thanks, feather,” she said affectionately, and he just nodded and smiled.

“How ye planning to find where the Magruwen’s hid, darlin’?” asked Bertram, dipping his cheese in his brandy and taking a wet bite.

Magpie admitted, “I don’t quite know. It’s just a guess and a hope he’s stayed in Dreamdark, but if he is, he’ll be someplace deep. We’ll ask the burrowers and scamperers. Badgers. Hedge imps.”

“Like that old hedgie who took care of ye when ye were wee?” asked Swig.

“Snoshti?” Magpie’s face lit up. “My bossy old nurse! Aye, I’d like to find her, sure, she’s a dear soul—but not likely to know much of Djinn.”

“But who is, though?” asked Calypso. “Not even faeries. Remember them faerie sprouts in the marshland had never even heard of Djinn?”

“Aye. That was wretched. Papa says the things faeries have forgotten would fill up a library the size of Dreamdark.”

“If yer father ever found a library like that, we’d never drag him out of it!”

Magpie laughed. “Aye, for true!

“All I’m saying, ’Pie,” Calypso went on, “is don’t get yer hopes up.”

“You want me to fly around hopeless?” she asked. “That what you’re saying?”

“Ach,” he sighed. “Neh. Hope away! And may we be blessed with the luck to find creatures in Dreamdark as nosy as ourselves.”

“Cheers to that,” said Bertram, raising his glass. “To nosiness.”

“To nosinessi!” they all chimed in.

“When we get there,” asked Pup through a beakful of charred cheese, “we goin’ to do the play?”

Magpie groaned. “Neh, not the play!”

“Course we are,” said Calypso. “Ye know it’s the best way to wriggle into faerie society. They do love a play—next best thing to dancing. And sure ye loved it, too, first time ye saw us.”

“Sure I like to watch a play,” she said. “Just don’t put me in one.”

“Someone’s got to be Bellatrix. You want Maniac playing her?”

“Fine by me!”

“Un-skiving-likely,” Maniac snapped.

“I’ll be Bellatrix!” crowed Pup eagerly. “Let me, let me!”

“Pipe down, runtfellow,” said Calypso. “’Pie’ll play Bellatrix.”

“Jacksmoke,” she grumbled under her breath.

Before the crows had been hunters, they had been roving actors.

That was how Magpie’s family had fallen in with them in Dreamdark and flown away to see the world.

It was true there was no better pretext for dropping in on a faeriehold than to pose as players, but that didn’t make Magpie like it any better.

“Fearless Magpie Windwitch,” Swig teased. “Give her devils, give her witches, nary a shiver! But push her out onstage, and she shakes like a twig.”

“A twig!” agreed Pup. “Just like a scrawny little twig.”

“Ach, would you stop with the twig?” Magpie muttered.

Having the crows for companions was a lot like having seven older brothers, the good parts and the bad.

So she was a bit of a twig, still a lass at a hundred years.

She supposed them calling her a twig was better than what was bound to come later, when she began to.

..no longer be a twig. How would they act when she started to get curves and that?

Ach. Not that she’d ever turn into some priss.

There were other ways to grow up. Like her mother.

Or like Bellatrix. In statues, the champion was always wearing a tunic of shed firedrake scales with daggers strapped to both her thighs and her simple gold circlet on her hair.

That was the kind of lady Magpie planned to be when the time came: the kind who sharpened her knives beside the fire in a hunting camp filled with crows.

“Never mind them, darlin’,” said gentle Bertram, wrapping his wing round her and handing her another wedge of the cheese Swig had swiped off a human’s donkey cart. “Here. Say what you will about mannies,” he declared. “They have a genius for cheese.”

“For true, my feather,” she agreed, taking a big bite.

Once the crows lit up their stinky cheroots, Magpie hugged them each and took herself to bed.

It was full daylight now, but she would have no trouble falling asleep.

Her muscles were tired and her belly was full.

She entered the gilded door of the stage caravan and squeezed past racks of velvety costumes and prop trunks full of swords and crowns, and past the empty devil’s bottle, to her little bunk tucked high in the back.

She boosted herself up with her wings and drew closed her patchwork curtain, spelling up a light that would flicker out as soon as her mind relaxed in sleep.

She nestled in under the quilt her grandmother had made for her and pulled a big book into her lap, unspelling the protective magicks she kept on it and hefting it open to a page marked with a green quill.

On the page she had written the cryptic words of the devil who had killed the Vritra: The fire that burns its bellows can only fall to ash.

What poetry in a traitor’s death! She uncorked her ink and wrote below it:

Tomorrow we’ll arrive in Dreamdark to search for the Magruwen.

The crows are mad shivered by the thought of him but my shivers are busy elsewhere, worrying about that snag, wondering where in the world he is and doing what.

And there’s something else. Like ever, I can’t fumble up words to describe it, but the pulse—it’s been as strong as I ever felt it, all around me like I could reach my hands into it, and I’ve even fancied I could see it.

Sure, it’s just when I’m waking so anyone would say it was the tail of a dream, but I could swear.

It’s like curls of light at the edges of my vision that fade away when I try to see them, like fireworks into ghosts of smoke.

How I wish there was someone I could talk to about it!

The book was her journal and almanac. It was crammed with maps so old their creases had worn white, with brittle leaves and colored feathers and twine-tied packets labeled in strange alphabets, with threads from magic carpets and beaded dreadlocks clipped from the beards of hobgoblins.

She flipped to the first page and traced the slanted writing inscribed there.

Our Magpie ,

There is a hole in the pocket of the world, and the magic is slipping through it.

So much has gone beyond retrieval. Memories have gone slack.

Young minstrels disdain to learn the old songs, and the notes pass away with the last old ears to hear them.

So much has been forgotten. Faeries are living upon threadbare magic, and they scarcely know it.

It falls to us to preserve what remains in this fading age.

May this book come to teem with the spells and songs you will collect in it.

The first volume of many. Good luck and happy hunting!

Your loving parents ,

Kite & Robin

When they’d written that, Magpie thought, they’d probably envisioned their little daughter jotting down the tea potions and dust magic of old faerie biddies before they passed to the Moonlit Gardens.

At most maybe spying on Ifrit witch doctors and rescuing artifacts from the plunder monkeys of Serendip.

And Magpie had gathered tea potions and such.

In her book were no fewer than nineteen dust spells, including one that made its victims ravenously hungry for goat’s milk.

But whatever else her parents might have imagined, Magpie knew it hadn’t been their only sprout stalking devils across human-infested lands.

Not that it should have come as a surprise.

Ever since she was wee she’d clamored to hear the legends of Bellatrix, the huntress-princess of Dreamdark.

She’d loved to play at tracking and had been surprisingly good at it.

Eight years ago, when she came upon her first rooster tracks on a moon-silvered beach, it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to follow them.

She’d caught that first devil by trapping it in sunlight with only its bottle to escape into or perish in the light.

It had been thrilling and even a little easy.

Snags were dumb as weevils—no match for a faerie!

Not until now had she guessed there could be another sort out there, an unimaginable devil to whom, she had a grim suspicion, the magic of this fallen age would seem but sprout’s play.

Weary and worried, she lay down her head and fell asleep with her cheek upon her parents’ words.

She’d thought she would dream of devils, of darkness and greedy, sucking hunger, and she did, but not right away.

First she dreamed of a tapestry, once glorious but now moth-eaten and faded.

She’d dreamed of it before and never remembered with waking, but in her dream she somehow knew that, threadbare though it was, it was the only thing holding the darkness at bay, the best and only thing.

Outside, Calypso perched atop a caravan, keeping the watch after the other crows had shuffled off to bed.

He puffed smoke rings and turned slowly, surveying the array of shining eyes that peered out at him from the encircling woods.

Imps, nightjars, weasels, dryads, toads, all staring in awed silence at the spectacle of the caravans.

Calypso noticed a raven who lingered longer than most, and after glancing over his shoulders furtively, he glided down to where the larger bird stood withdrawn in shadows.

“That Algorab?” Calypso croaked in a hoarse whisper.

“Aye, blackbird. Heard ye lot were moving north and had to see for myself. Reckoned it might mean something.”

“Well, it don’t. Least, not what ye’d like to think. There’s years yet till... that .”

The raven grunted and scratched his head with his foot. “Are ye for Dreamdark or neh?”

Calypso nodded. “We are. Can ye carry a message ahead of us?” he asked.

“I’d be blessed to bring the news.”

“It en’t news! She comes to Dreamdark on her own business. It’s nothing to do with nothing, got it?”

“Oh, aye? And what is it to do with?”

“Ye wouldn’t believe me if I told ye.”

“Sure I would. En’t I believed since I was hatched?”

“En’t we all? We’ll see ye there, Algorab. Meantime, don’t get worked up, eh? It en’t time.”

“All right, all right. Sure, feather.”

“Blessings fly with you.”

“And with you.” The raven spread his wings and rose into the sky.