by Laini Taylor
The vultures were different. Talon leapt atop the tower’s crenellations and trained his eyes on them. There were a half dozen, moving with grim purpose just above the treetops, their wings vast, too vast. There were no vultures in Dreamdark. These birds were a long way from home. His daydreams forgotten, he visioned the glyph for the deep chime that would summon his cousins and he watched to see where the vultures’ path would lead.
His cousins arrived on wing almost at once from their own guard posts around the ancient tree. They were a fearsome sight, these Rathersting warriors, lean lads just across the threshold of manhood, their shoulders and sharp cheekbones patterned with coal-black tattoos, no two alike. Talon wore the tattoos too, though he was yet a lad. And he wore something they didn’t, a circlet of woven reeds on his wild pale hair.
“Prince,” said his cousin Shrike, alighting beside him on the tower’s high wall. “What is it?”
“There.” Talon pointed. “Vultures, from beyond. Monsters. Six of ’em.”
They looked. Wick whistled low. “Nasty meat.”
“Aye. Fetch the chief,” ordered Shrike, and Wick dove over the edge of the tower, dropping nearly to the rampart before snapping open his wings and whirring away into the deep courtyard of the hollow yew.
By the time the chief came the vultures had sunk into the forest near the upsweep of the great spine of rock where the Magruwen’s temple lay in ruin. “At Issrin Ev, sir,” Talon told him, pointing. “They circled and went down less than a minute ago.”
The chief of the Rathersting clan was a formidable faerie. Coming on seven hundred years old, his beard had gone silver but his hair was still white-gold and gleaming, like Talon’s. He was thick in the chest and narrow in the hips and he moved like a peregrine on the hunt, a few fast flicks of his wings launching him into a long deadly glide. He wore a dagger on each arm and each thigh and had slung his crossbow over his back. He looked at his son. “Good eyes, lad,” he said, and gripped Talon’s shoulder hard.
Talon couldn’t feel proud, though, because he was already tasting the shame of what would necessarily come next. “Shrike, Wick, Corvus, come with me. We’ll see what we see, neh?” said the chief, his eyes flicking to his son and away. Talon pretended not to notice. He knew the look too well, the look where his father still, after a hundred years, seemed puzzled to have found himself with such a son. “Keep on the watch, son,” said he, heaving skyward. “We hunt!” he bellowed, and Wick and Corvus and Shrike launched after him, eager and blooded for danger.
Talon watched them all the way and saw them breach the forest canopy just where the vultures had. At his shoulders his own stunted wings twitched with the yearning to follow them but he bit his lip. He would keep the watch. He might be a prince of the Rathersting, but with wings too small to lift him in flight, guard duty was about all he was good for.
He watched and watched the distant treetops, waiting for their return. His daydreams had slipped away completely and he forgot to send word to Orchidspike to tell her he wouldn’t be coming today. She would watch the gate all afternoon and frown while she worked, wondering. And Talon would be frowning and wondering too, and pacing and scanning the treetops with his hawk-keen eyes, watching for the small distant shapes of his father and cousins returning. But the relief and jealousy that usually flooded him when a triumphant war party returned to the castle would elude him today.
His father wasn’t coming back, and neither were his cousins. Talon would find their knives that night, abandoned deep in a fissure in the ruined face of Issrin Ev.
EIGHT
In their caravans behind the stage the crows were getting into their costumes. Pup looked on as Magpie helped Pigeon with his gown. The crows each played multiple parts in Devils’ Doom, the epic of Bellatrix. Pigeon would start out as Queen Fidrildi and later change into armor. Pup played assorted devils throughout.
Magpie, as Bellatrix, wore her own battered hunting tunic over breeches, with a circlet on her head that had been an opera singer’s earring until Swig swiped it in a daring dive. Strapped to her thigh was the skeleton’s knife, partially concealed by the crow-feather skirt she had not yet removed.
She gave Pigeon’s flounces a final fluff and slapped his tail feathers. “There you are, m’lady, pretty as a flower! Do try not to outshine me, if you please.”
Pup squawked, “Ach! Him? I’m much outshinier than him!” He twirled in his devil costume, got tangled in his tentacles, and sat down hard.
“Careful, meat,” said his brother. “Ye’ll ruin yer costume!”
Magpie laughed and helped Pup stand.
“Come along, ye lot,” called Bertram. “Curtain’s in ten!”
Magpie grimaced and listened to the commotion of faeries and creatures in the Ring. “Come on, then,” she said to the brothers. “Let’s do this skiving thing so we can get on with what we came for.”
“Ye’ll be great, Mags,” said Pup, tossing a tentacle over her shoulders as he hopped along by her side. They came round the corner of a caravan and nearly collided with a small group of faeries coming the other way. “Hoy!” cried Pup, swerving to avoid putting out a gent’s eye with his beak.
There was a mild commotion as they stumbled over one another, but Magpie had stopped dead in her tracks and was standing before a tall young lady, her head tilted up to stare at her. It was the lady from the tower window, the one with the golden circlet. Magpie stared at her and at her crown. Unlike her own circlet, this was no human’s earring. It looked exactly like the one Bellatrix wore in all the statues. Then Magpie noticed the lady’s tunic and knew from its shimmer it could be naught but real firedrake scales—impossible to come by since the creatures went extinct. Her eyes moved to the lady’s face. Exquisite features, a sweet smile with a twist of amusement at each corner.
“Blessings!” said the lady in a rich, musical voice. “What a small warrior!”
The gents at her sides laughed. “Aye, Lady,” said one. “I fear this must be our Bellatrix! A far cry from the huntress.”
“Indeed, it should be you upon the stage,” fawned the other gent. “Then we would all have an excuse to gaze at your loveliness for hours together!”
But the lady smiled at Magpie and said, “You wrong the pretty child, sirs. She does my ancestress great credit.”
“Ancestress?” repeated Magpie.
The lady said, “Aye, my great foremother, Bellatrix.”
The gents looked at Magpie as if they expected her to collapse into a curtsy at the revelation, but she only squinted and said flatly, “Blither. Bellatrix left no heirs.”
Again the lady laughed her lovely tinkling laugh. “Oh, but she did, as you see.”
One of the gents cut in, “Hasn’t word spread to the world? You can carry the news, gypsy, when you go away. Tell them Lady Vesper, many-greats-granddaughter of the warrior princess, is come to Dreamdark.”
Magpie snorted. “Come from where?” she asked. “And with what for proof?”
The gents, both frocked in frippery to rival the lady’s, their hair fragrant with pomade, gaped at Magpie. One managed to say in a voice choked with shock, “Lady Vesper needn’t defend her claim to a ragamuffin!”
Maniac, who’d come to fetch them to the stage, puffed up at once. “Ragamuffin!” he cried. “Ye don’t call Mags names!”
“Nay, gents, nay, birds,” said the lady with a look of imperturbable sweetness. “Don’t scuffle on my account. I know how it sounds.” She knelt before Magpie and took her hands in her own. “It was a shock to me as well when my grand-dame told me, just before she crossed to the Moonlit Gardens. She showed me where the ladies of our lineage had long hidden Bellatrix’s crown.” She inclined her head, and as the sunlight rippled over the circlet’s surface it had the look of molten gold, and there was something else. A pattern like living glyphs sparkled around it then faded again, like a secret. Magpie blinked. There could be no doubt the crown was forged in a Djinn’s fire. “And her tunic,” continued Vesper, b
rushing her fingertips over the scales. “These are my greatest treasures, and they belong in Dreamdark, as do I.”
Magpie felt a surprising rush of longing to believe her. She looked at her, so beautiful, so like the warrior princess, and it seemed right that such a lady should exist in this place. She might have stepped from a legend.
There had been a time when the Djinn strode the world in splendor, winking new creatures into being and reaching up to arrange the stars into patterns in the heavens. Faeries had been different then, not only beautiful, but powerful. Magpie’s longing for such times was a deep and wrenching ache, and looking into Lady Vesper’s eyes she felt the ache begin to give way to a bloom of possibility.
One of the gents was speaking. “And besides the crown,” he said, “m’lady has records discovered in the crypts of Chijal Ev showing Bellatrix’s descendants back twenty-five thousand years, and the elders of Dreamdark have studied it—”
Magpie blinked. “Chijal Ev?” she repeated. “The temple of the Iblis?”
“Aye,” said Vesper fondly. “Home of my early life.”
“You grew up at the temple?”
“Aye.”
“And you’re saying Bellatrix lived there after the wars?”
Vesper nodded. “A long quiet life, until she passed to the Gardens.”
“At Chijal Ev?” Magpie felt the bloom of possibility wilting. The gent had said Vesper possessed ancestral records unearthed from the crypts of Chijal Ev, but Magpie and her parents and grandmother had discovered and excavated those crypts themselves! If there had been even a hint or a runestone that mentioned Bellatrix, they would have found it. There had been nothing of the sort.
“And when did you leave there, lady?” Magpie asked with a frown.
“I arrived in Dreamdark last moon, at long last.”
Magpie squinted at her. “So recently? Strange we didn’t meet in Ismoroth in the snows, then. We performed there for the Stormlash clan at the winter festival and stayed some weeks.”
“Ah, the winter festival, how lovely,” said Vesper, but something cold and hard flickered in her gaze. “Lords Winterkill and Brambling,” she said without turning to the gents, “won’t you go and find us a seat for the play?”
“Aye, my jewel,” said one.
“Your wish, my sweet,” said the other.
They left, and Vesper turned to Magpie. “So, you’ve traveled to Ismoroth, have you? That’s far for a little lass to go, is it not? Across oceans? Who are you, sprout?”
“Magpie Windwitch, Lady. But who are you . . . really?”
“I am exactly who I wish,” Vesper said gently, “and irkmeat little lasses would do well to show proper respect while they’re in my wood.”
“Irkmeat!” hooted Pup, slapping Pigeon with his wing. “Irkmeat! I like that!”
“Your wood?” said Magpie, incredulous. “Dreamdark?”
“Mags! Birds!” cried Bertram from the backstage door. “Get yer feathers over here, now!”
“Calm yer pepper, irkmeat!” Pup called back. “We’re coming!” But Magpie didn’t move. “Come on, Mags,” he started to say, but Pigeon hushed him, seeing the look that blazed between the lady and the lass.
Vesper said in her honeyed voice, “You heard the bird, little one. Go on, take your phony crown and your preposterous skirt—”
“Eh!” protested Pup, and Magpie’s hands flew to her feathers.
“Go and play at Bellatrix,” Vesper went on. “But remember as you speak her lines who wears her real crown, and practice your curtsies, lass. If we meet again I shall expect to see the very best you can muster.”
“I’ll never curtsy for you,” Magpie said in a low, seething voice.
“And no one will be surprised, will they, if a savage doesn’t curtsy for the queen?”
“Savage?” growled Maniac.
“Aye, a little savage who doesn’t know herself from a crow and wears their stink as proudly as her own. Really, you reek of cigarillos!” She wrinkled her nose and pretended to fan away a bad smell. “Surely that’s just one hazard of slumming with low creatures.” Her gaze fell with disdain on Maniac, Pup, and Pigeon, and Magpie felt a sudden flash of fury.
It tingled like a chill down her arms and she saw curls of light unwind from her fingertips. They spun with lazy grace toward Vesper and wreathed round her head. Alarmed, Magpie clasped her fingers into fists and shoved them behind her back. The lights faded away, and Vesper seemed not to have noticed them.
Bewildered, Magpie could only think to snap, “My brothers smoke cheroots, not cigarillos!” as she turned away. But she stopped when she saw the looks on the crows’ faces.
“Jacksmoke . . . ,” whispered Pigeon, still staring at Vesper.
Magpie glanced back over her shoulder and the first thing she saw was the look of confusion on the lady’s face. Then she noticed Vesper’s hair. “Oh,” she said.
Vesper’s hands fluttered to her head and jerked away. Her hair was writhing. “There. Are. Worms. In. My. Hair,” she gasped between deep breaths as a look of horror spread over her face.
But she was wrong. Biting her lip, Magpie stared. Where a moment ago had been shining, perfumed black hair, now there were living worms, rooted at the scalp and wriggling. Lady Vesper didn’t have worms in her hair. She had worms instead of hair.
“Get them off!” she cried.
“Um—” Magpie said.
“Um?” Vesper hissed at her. “Whatever you’ve done, minx, undo it now or you’ll wish you’d never breathed Dreamdark air!”
But Magpie had no idea what she’d done. She stared at her fists, clasping them tighter to quell the faint tingling, and shrugged helplessly.
The lady spun wildly around. “I mustn’t be seen like this!” she said, and paused to fix Magpie with a vicious glare. “The day you next look into my eyes will go badly for you, do you hear me, savage?” A worm made an effort to explore her nostril and her hands flew to her face. She cried out in disgust and spread her wings and whirled suddenly away into the shadow of the trees.
Magpie turned to look at the birds, who were still staring, - gape-beaked.
“Gorm, Mags, what’d ye do to her?” breathed Pigeon.
She shook her head and looked again to her fingers, wiggling them hesitantly. “I don’t know!”
“Jacksmoke, feathers,” said Calypso, coming up behind them. “En’t ye heard me calling ye? It’s curtain time!” He saw the looks on their faces and stopped short. “What did ye do, ’Pie?” he instantly asked.
“Why do you assume I did something?”
“Well, did ye?”
“Aye,” she admitted in a woeful voice.
“She turned some lady’s hair into worms!” Pup broke in breathlessly, hopping from foot to foot. “Ye should’ve seen it!”
Calypso’s eyes widened.
“It’ll be trouble,” said Pigeon, glancing around nervously. “Trouble!”
“I didn’t mean to—” Magpie began, but just then one of the pomaded gents poked his head around the caravan.
“Little gypsy, do you know where the queen has gone?”
“Queen?” croaked Calypso, shooting Magpie a quizzical glance. “Since when has Dreamdark had a queen?”
“Since last moon, crow. Isn’t it fine? A new queen in Alabaster Palace! Spread the news when you go. Tell everyone!” cried the gent, ducking away again.
“Ach, ’Pie! Tell me ye didn’t—” Calypso began, turning back to her, but where Magpie had been there was only a human earring lying on the moss and a stir in the air from her hasty passage. Magpie had fled.
NINE
The epic of Bellatrix had been put into verse by Magpie’s father, Robin, years ago, years even before he had met Kite. In his wildest daydreams as a young poet he had never imagined that one day it would be performed all around the world. And certainly, not in his weirdest fit of whimsy had he imagined it would be performed by crows! But then, nor had he dreamt he would elope with the daughter of
the West Wind but that had come to pass, and many a stranger thing too.
Besides, crows have a flair for the dramatic.
“The moon . . . ,” Calypso, as King Valerian, opened the play, “whispers o’er the waters; come north and meet thy fate. Daughter, come forth and listen well, for destiny does you await.”
When a crow hopped out onstage wearing a lady’s wig, the audience burst into laughter. Maniac shuffled his feet and glowered out at them, which only made them laugh harder. “Aye, Father,” he began, pitching his coarse voice high. “Destiny is the wind that carries me. . . .”
Hiding on a high branch by the river Wendling, Magpie could hear faint laughter coming from the Ring. Her cheeks burned. Maniac would not be pleased with her! She was ashamed of herself. With a crow as Bellatrix the epic became a comedy, and in the very shadow of Alabaster Palace, no less. Her hero deserved better, and so did Maniac. But she was still shaking from what had happened. Just thinking of that supposed . . . queen . . . brought a new surge of fury.
The vixen had insulted her crows! Magpie fidgeted with the feathers of her skirt. They did smell like cigars, she had to admit, just like the crows did themselves. They also held a hint of wood smoke from their campfires, and the tang of rainy skies, and the strong coffee they favored in the morning. The feathers smelled like her crows, her family, and she felt more comfortable in them than in her own unpredictable skin!