“Shall we begin?” asked the imp, nuzzling the babe’s pink cheeks with her whiskers and making her laugh. “Who’ll go first?”

They all clamored to go first. Fur brushed against hide, tusks clashed with horns as they pressed nearer, eager and gentle. Most of these creatures would be long dead by the time this babe had grown up and taken her place in the world. But they would give her their blessings in turn and hope they helped her make her way.

There would never be another chance. So much depended on this tiny faerie whom dreams had at last made real.

ONE

“Devils!” screamed the fishermen, pointing at the sky.

Magpie Windwitch didn’t know many human words, but she knew this one, devil, in more than twenty of their languages, though this was the first time she’d been called one herself.

“Foolish mannies!” she scoffed, looking down at them from the sky where she was circling their fishing boat amid a swirl of crows.

“Aieeee!” the humans wailed, dropping to their knees to pray.

Certainly it was strange to see crows this far out over the open ocean, but to call them devils, that was going a bit far. Magpie shook her head and signaled to the crows to turn away. This wasn’t the boat they sought anyway. The boat they sought would be empty, forsaken by its fishermen and left to drift.

The boat they sought had met a real devil.

The crows rose up and the West Wind gathered them again into his arms and surged across the sky. Behind them the fishermen lay slouched and gasping against the rails of their boat, their turbans unwinding in the wind. They were right to fear devils. Magpie had a hunter’s respect for fear: it sharpened the senses. But those fishermen, she didn’t doubt, for all their prayers and worry, wouldn’t hesitate to uncork any strange bottle they fished out of the ocean, just to see what was inside. It happened all the time these days, and the devils were just delighted.

She fixed her eyes fiercely on the sea and scanned its breadth between identical horizons, back and forth. It had been days since her grandfather the West Wind had heard the albatross’s rumor of an abandoned boat adrift at sea. In the time it had taken him to find her and bring her here, it could have drifted anywhere. The sea was a vast hunting ground and she was getting nervous. Though the wind held the crows aloft in his airy arms, they weren’t made for such long flight and would still grow tired in time. They needed to find that boat.

“How you holding up, my feather?” she asked the crow she rode upon, stroking his sleek head with both hands.

“Like a leaf on a breeze,” he answered in his singsong voice. “A champagne bubble. A hovering hawk. A cloud! Nothing to it!”

“So you say. But I’m no tiny sprout anymore, Calypso, and sure you can’t carry me forever.”