“It’s all right, pet, they’re not waiting for ye. They know no more of ye than living faeries do. They’re waiting for their loved ones to come over. We’re all tied to the world so long as our folk are still in it. It can take lifetimes to let all that go and become.”

“Become? Become what?”

Snoshti pointed into the sky. Magpie looked, but all she could see was a sparkle of some far thing passing before the moon, and she swayed a little on her feet, staring into the fathomless depths of the sky. She looked back down. They were nearing the end of the bridge and Magpie caught a hint in the air of that snow-sharp fragrance she’d detected in her caravan and on the recipe card. She looked sharply at the imp, only now realizing who had slipped it into her book.

She stepped off the last stone of the bridge onto the grass of the Moonlit Gardens, where no other living faerie had ever trod. The clusters of picnickers were all watching her and she looked from face to face. She’d never really wondered what faeries would look like in the afterworld, and she saw they looked much the same as they did in life, though muted somehow, like reflections in an old mirror. Their edges were blurred, their substance soft and silvered. And in their eyes, mingled with calm, she saw pity. Snoshti nodded to them in greeting and bundled Magpie along.

“Why were they looking at me like that?” Magpie asked.

“Like what?”

“Pitying, like.”

“Ach, well, it en’t often a sprout comes across that bridge. Biddies and codgers, that’s who comes. They think ye’re here unnatural early, and that can’t mean any good for ye. They’ll be thinking ye were killed.”

Magpie stopped walking and looked back over her shoulder at them, struck by a thought. “They’ll have seen Poppy and Maniac then, neh? Can’t I ask them?”

“Pet . . . ,” Snoshti said, clasping Magpie’s wrist with her paw and keeping her from turning back. “I’ve already asked. They’re not here.”

Magpie’s insides lurched. “They’re not here?” she demanded. “But . . . they must be! I saw them die!”

“I’m sorry, I am, but it’s sure . . . and it’s an older mystery than ye know.”

Magpie stared at the imp, horrified. Not death, she had said of the darkness. Unmaking? They couldn’t have been . . . extinguished . . . but wasn’t that what she felt her own self at the brink of? In a raw voice she whispered, “Then where are they?”

Still clutching her wrist, Snoshti tugged her along. “I don’t know, pet, but ye’re not the only one who wonders. My mistress has long been wanting to know that same thing. Come now. She’s waiting.”