She wished she could talk to her parents. They were so far away, probably shape-shifting themselves into fish with the elders of Anang Paranga right this moment. She would tell her book instead, and maybe in the writing things would come clear. She tapped her quill against her lip and began to write.

Behind her, holding Magpie’s right wing taut while Orchidspike worked on it, Talon could just see the page over her shoulder. The crows were all around, though, so he couldn’t stare, and he caught only a word or two now and then when the birds nodded off for little naps. Magpie didn’t nap. Head bent over her book, she wrote. Orchidspike’s needles clicked steadily and the spidersilk reeled off the bobbin. Rows of spells danced off the knitting needles, rows of words filled Magpie’s page, and time passed.

She had been writing, pausing, frowning, remembering, and writing again for several hours when she finally gave voice to what was frustrating her. “Is he a snag, or isn’t he?” she blurted suddenly.

“Eh?” muttered Calypso sleepily.

“It’s just not right somehow. I can’t get past it. He leaves no rooster tracks, he’s got no smell, he’s not stupid like a snag. . . . That snag the so-called queen set on me, now that was a devil, horrid and sure. To compare them—”

“What snag, ‘Pie?” asked the crow.

“Ach! I never told you!” she cried. “Aye, it was why Poppy came to Issrin Ev, to warn me that Vesper had a snag slave she’d set after us, and it came, sure, and it was some nasty meat, I tell you.”

Talon cut in incredulously, “Lady Vesper set a devil after you?”

Magpie glanced over her shoulder at him. “Aye,” she said defensively. “Your fine queen’s got some dark dabblings.”

“She’s not our queen!” he returned hotly. “Lady Orchidspike and my father were the only elders in Dreamdark who wouldn’t recognize her claim and the others ignored them. Only time those Never Nigh fops care what Rathersting think is when they nick their wings dancing or spot Black Annis too near their hamlets!”

“Ach, well . . . Lady Orchidspike, you were right. Vesper’s a fake and worse. That snag was grim, and it’s because of him Poppy’s . . .” She choked on the word dead and finished instead with a bleak “. . . gone.”

“Is it still out there?” asked Mingus, puffing himself up.

“Neh. The Blackbringer got it, just like that. Like it just vanished or melted. That’s the thing, feathers, I can’t get past it. That was a devil, and we seen plenty and that’s what they’re like, stringing drool and snaggle teeth and suckers and stink? But the Blackbringer, he’s not like them at all. . . .” She paused. “The Magruwen called him a contagion of darkness—”