The crows closed their beaks and shuffled their feet and considered. At last, reluctantly, Calypso said, “Put it like that, maybe we ought to try to warn him,” and the other crows agreed one by one.

Magpie nodded. “Right. To Dreamdark, then.”

“Dreamdark . . . ,” they murmured. “Been a long old time.”

“Aye, Mags, been scores of years since ye been home.”

“Home? Piff!” she replied. “You’re my home, my feathers. Dreamdark’s just some place I was born.”

“Just some place?” repeated Calypso with a short hoot. “Dreamdark? Been too long since ye seen it, if ye can say that.”

She scowled. “This is no sightseeing trip. Now come on, let’s give this brave codger a decent burial before we go.”

As she turned away she thought she heard something, a faint pure ringing of crystal, and her eye fell on the knife she had earlier wrenched from the skeleton’s spine. She hesitated, knelt, and picked it up. The sound was gone and she wondered if she’d heard it at all. The dagger showed no signs of all the years it had lain here. Its blade shone like a sunlit mirror as Magpie slowly turned it, seeing faint arabesques and spirals etched into its steel. A pretty, deadly thing. She searched around until she found, strapped to a skeleton’s thigh, a fine scabbard equally untouched by age. With a feeling of unease she loosed it from the bone and strapped it to her own leg.

She didn’t recognize the designs engraved in the blade as runes or she would have looked it over more carefully. Most were symbols long fallen from knowledge but the glyph for curse, at least, would have been familiar. As for the graceful letters that spelled out Skuldraig, they were writ in the alphabet of a forgotten time and to her eyes seemed only an elegant design.

FOUR

With the vultures egging him on, the imp thrust his nose out into the world. It was the least ratlike part of him, his nose, flesh while the rest was fur, and quite spectacularly large, with each nostril spacious enough to fit his big toes into—which he frequently did. But though large, it was dainty in its way, and it flushed a delicate crimson as soon as he caught the scent of humans.

He thrust his head farther and peered out through the hedge. He saw human lasses leaping about with butterfly nets, dancing near the woods then shying back, fascinated and terrified. Such was the lure of Dreamdark.

The humans had their own name for this most ancient of forests, and their school sat at its very edge, separated from it by only the hedge. But what a hedge! It was an evil bramble, taller than tiptoes and dense as a mermaid’s braid, and it encircled the great wood in an unbroken band. Meddling mannies had found their torches wouldn’t set it ablaze, and those who tried to chop it down would feel the axe seized from within and wrenched from their hands. They stayed away, called it haunted, claimed beasts and fey creatures lurked within.