At the castle, Pup straggled bleary-eyed down the corridor to wake Magpie and opened her door to an empty room. Thinking she had already gone to the Great Hall for breakfast, he went to find her there. Within moments the crows were in a panic. They raced along the corridors, down to the dungeon where Batch lay muttering in his sleep, up to the ramparts where the warriors nodded grim good mornings to them. Magpie was nowhere to be found.

Hearing a ruckus, Talon laid his work aside and hurried from his room. Visions of the knives scattered at Issrin filled his mind and for a terrible moment he was certain he would find that the guards had been swallowed in the night. But as he rounded the corner of the uppermost stair with a bound he saw the guards all gathered with the crows and his panic eased . . . until he got a look at Calypso.

The bird’s eyes were wild. “Magpie’s missing, lad,” he said.

Magpie hovered uncertainly above Issrin Ev. The ruin was as forlorn by dawn as it had been by dusk, more so, now that grim memories of Poppy and Maniac haunted the place. She shuddered and wondered why she was here. The pulse had simply ebbed away and left her. She hung in the air and looked down, and then, through shadow and pine bough, suddenly she saw eyes peering up at her. A jolt went through her, and her first reflex carried her backward and away, but an instant later she realized whose eyes they were and who it was lurking down in Issrin Ev.

It was Vesper.

With a steely look, Magpie dove like a hawk, swooping low to the ground and coming in for a sharp landing in front of the lady, who drew back a step and looked at her with hate-filled eyes. “Alive?” she hissed.

“Aye, and why should I be otherwise?” Magpie hissed back. “If you’re hunting your devil, you’ll have no luck.”

“My devil?” repeated Vesper with a forced laugh.

“Aye, laugh!” Magpie spat. “Even if the world wasn’t about to rip wide open, I wouldn’t trouble my mind with you, Lady. You’re less than nothing. But it aches me something sick to see Bellatrix’s crown on you, and her tunic. Give them to me now, queen!”

Vesper laughed again. Her hair was still hidden in its layers of scarves, still wrapped in pearl strands and crowned with Bellatrix’s golden circlet. Standing there with the light of dawn shimmering across her firedrake scales, tall and elegant in her headdress of silks, she did look like a queen, like a cold, vicious queen on the wrong side of a legend. “Little gypsy,” she purred, “who are you to threaten me?”