“Come on,” Magpie said, dropping Talon’s hand and taking to her wings. Talon followed, leaping easily from cabinet to cabinet. They reached the corner the imp had plunged from and found there a sickening sight. The luna moth wings had not been Batch’s first attempt, clearly. One of the framed displays had been smashed open and plundered, and the cabinet was littered with butterfly carcasses bereft of their wings. One glance over the edge at the floor showed what had become of them. A litter of wings had gathered below in a drift, like leaves beneath an autumn tree, and Batch lay on his side in them, half buried and moaning.

With an icy look Magpie stepped off the edge and dropped to land sharply in front of him. He peeled open one eye and saw her, snapped it shut again, and redoubled his moaning. “Oh, woe . . . ,” he whimpered in scamper. “Woe to poor Batch . . .”

“Get up,” Magpie said impatiently, nudging him with her foot, then harder when he didn’t respond. “I said get up!”

Snuffling, he sat upright. A pretty blue morpho wing was plastered to the dribbling mucus on the side of his face.

“You’re lucky those butterflies were already dead, imp, or you’d have a bitter time of it!”

“Already dead . . .” He nodded and moaned. “Mannies killed ’em, not me! I just want to fly away. . . .”

“You didn’t really think dead wings would fly you, now, did you?”

The great slubbering imp sat in the sad debris of spent wings and sobbed. Talon came headfirst down the edge of the cabinet like a lizard and stood next to Magpie, and they both listened as the imp moaned about how the magic had worn off his flying surrey as he made his great escape.

“Can’t really blame a wretch for wishing to fly,” Talon said under his breath.

“Neh, perhaps, so long as he’s given up on maiming faeries. But you know what I can blame him for?” She knelt down in front of Batch and forced him to look her straight in the eyes as she said, “For not telling me about his master’s tongue.”

The life seemed to drain from Batch, so that he drooped into a miserable, quivering mass. “The tongue . . .” He fumbled for the tip of his tail with shaking hands and shoved it into his mouth, commencing to suckle it with loud, wet sounds, and his eyes squeezed tight shut.

“Imp, listen up!” Magpie said harshly, in no mood for pity. “You left out some details before, neh? And because of it I lost some friends to your master! Now you’ll tell me something else. You said your master sent you to the Magruwen for a turnip. Well, that’s blither! What’s he really after?”

With a long snuffling sigh Batch answered her. Speaking around the tail in his mouth, he said something sounding like, “Mommamammid.”

“Eh?”