Magpie shook her head and spread her wings, stepping back into the air to follow the crows down the avenue. When she saw the city, thoughts of the lights faded from her mind.

The trees grew wild and strange here, of any shape the Djinn had had a mind to try as they honed their treecraft. The trees were the city. Their roots wove across the ground like interlacing fingers and spiraled up into walkways and bridges. Everywhere paths meandered in hidden ways and from every nook and fissure in the bark sprouted fanciful spires. The massive arms of the yews were festooned with palaces and hanging gardens. Each generation of faeries had added its own flourishes and the grove was a marvel of towers and domes, balconies and catwalks, chimneys and carved gates and porticos and stained-glass windows. For all the exotic places Magpie had been, no city could hold a candle to Never Nigh for sheer audacious beauty.

The crows and their caravans rocketed beneath soaring bridges and over domes tiled with gold, down the main thoroughfare toward the Ring, the gathering place where they would set up stage. Magpie glimpsed tiny stairways and lamp-lit courtyards among the branches as she flew. She swooped past a nectar parlor, a haberdasher, a teahouse, and Candlenight’s Bookshop, her father’s childhood home. As the way widened and branches opened to the Ring, she caught sight of Alabaster Palace gleaming white in the branches above, and her breath caught in her throat.

The crows spiraled in to land and Magpie eased the floating spells off the caravans and set them gently down on the moss. Then, as the crows shrugged off their harnesses, she turned her gaze up to the treetop palace.

It was white as sugar, its many graceful spires flowing seamlessly into one another as if the whole palace was shaped from one immense block of marble, but with a look of lightness, like it could float into the sky. It stood as a monument to greater times. No one had lived in it, Magpie knew, since that day twenty-five thousand years ago when Bellatrix had announced to the cheering folk that the devil wars at last were at an end.

“Dance and rejoice, my friends, my faeries, and my kin,
No longer fear to fly at dusk, no longer hide within.
Come out and feel the pulse of night,
clawless, fangless, free.
The devils are all gone and shall no longer
trouble thee.”

Looking up at the palace now, Magpie couldn’t help wondering, for a thousandth time—a millionth?—what had become of Bellatrix after that. How many libraries and crypts had Magpie searched, how many books and scrolls had she scoured for some word on what became of the Magruwen’s champion after that day? The greatest faerie of all legend had simply dropped from history, leaving an empty throne in Dreamdark and no heirs to fill it ever again, and so it had stood empty all these long years since.