Her eyes never leaving Vesper’s, Magpie slowly unsheathed Skuldraig and held the gleaming blade up in front of her face. With her lip drawing up in a snarl, she growled, “I’m the one who wields Bellatrix’s blade.”

Vesper’s eyes widened and she stared at the knife. She looked back and forth rapidly between Magpie’s eyes and the blade, and her lips contorted into a snarl of her own. Magpie could see cunning in her expression, and greed. “Which do you think’s more useful in a fight, Lady?” Magpie asked. “A dagger or a crown?”

Vesper’s hand moved in her pocket, and Magpie held Skuldraig at the ready, thinking the lady was drawing out a blade of her own. But what she held out wasn’t a blade. It was a mirror.

“Fine time for vanity!” Magpie scoffed.

Vesper replied in her most lilting, musical tones, “Whatever your will, whatever your whim, look into my mirror . . .” Unthinking, Magpie flicked her eyes toward it in irritation, and the lady finished with a hiss, “. . . Your place is within.”

Magpie gasped. Vesper smiled. The mirror warped and Magpie found herself staring at her own horrified reflection as she was drawn toward the mirror by some violent magic. Her body twisted with a thrill of pain. She was wrenched from her feet as her body stretched like a cast shadow, not like living flesh. Her vision blurred and she screamed, her eyes clenched shut in agony as she was sucked into Vesper’s mirror.

The lady reached out and caught Magpie’s wrist before it could disappear inside the glass. She twisted, and Skuldraig dropped to the moss. When she released Magpie’s hand, the strange, attenuated shape of the lass was sucked swiftly in and the silver surface closed over her and calmed like a pond. Vesper gazed into it and smiled. Nothing peered back at her now but her own lovely face. Magpie had vanished.

Vesper knelt and picked the dagger up off the moss.

At Rathersting Castle, Talon and the crows took the steps to the dungeon three and four at a time, arriving breathless before Batch’s prison cell. “What is it, Prince?” asked the faerie on guard.

“You can go, Hesperus. I’ll see to this wretch.”

With a shrug Hesperus left, and Talon turned to Batch, who was leering out at them with his beady black eyes, seeing their distress, already weighing it and calculating.

“Blessings of the morning, Good-imp,” said Calypso.

“Suck lint,” said Batch.

Talon unlocked the cell and went over to the imp reclining in the straw. He knelt and said, “Now listen, imp, I won’t tell you what big things are happening in Dreamdark; sure you know already. But your master’s worse a thing than even you know, and if you don’t help us it could mean the end of everything.”

Batch carefully inserted his big toe into his nostril and rummaged.