“Curiosity killed the eejit,” Calypso replied with a shrug.

Magpie frowned at him. Usually pity was the last emotion humans inspired in her, but something about those empty shoes tugged at her heart. She reached toward the frayed fabric of the nearest slipper, forming pictures in her mind as she did so. Glyphs—symbols drawn in one’s thoughts—were the basic element of faerie magic. The simplest were mere shapes that every sprout mastered with learning to read. Making light and fire, floating, hiding, protection from trespass, basic healing, and housework; these things were as easy as the alphabet. Real magic came with more complex glyphs and fusing multiple glyphs together in precise ways, being able to conjure them from memory and “vision” them, hold them burning in one’s mind with perfect concentration.

The glyphs Magpie visioned now were for “memory” and “touch,” and no sooner had she laid her fingers on the human’s slipper than a jolt surged up her arm and she was engulfed in darkness. It went as soon as she jerked her hand away, but the shock drove her to her knees and she gasped.

“ ’Pie!” squawked Calypso. “ ’Pie, darlin’, what is it?”

Her fingers were still tingling from the jolt. She said, “Darkness.”

“Eh? That all?”

The mannies’ last memory, seared into the last thing they’d touched, was of darkness. This spell for memory touch, learned from faeries in the high Sayash Mountains, had become a valuable snag-hunting tool, more than once showing Magpie the face of the devil she was seeking as glimpsed in its victims’ last moments. But these mannies had seen only darkness. Or had there been something else?

She hesitated and touched the shoe again. This time, braced for it, she didn’t let it knock her to her knees, but she couldn’t stop the gasp it forced from her lips. She drew her hand hastily away and said, “Hunger.”

“Hunger?”

“Aye. Mad hunger.” She shivered and with one last quick look around said, “Let’s go,” and they flew back up on deck, several crows lugging the devil’s bottle between them. “Rest awhile,” she told them. “It’s a long sky till landfall and I don’t want to feed any crows to the sea.”

Calypso stretched his wings and yawned. “Just a catnap, then. Wake us when it’s time to go, ’Pie.” He tucked his head against his breast and closed his eyes.

Magpie stretched too and looked around. Her grandfather had conjured his faerie skin and was waiting for her in the midst of a clump of napping crows, looking just like a jolly old codger with whiskers, broad-chested and lively. Elementals like the winds or the Djinn could put on skins and enjoy a taste of mortal life, which was how Magpie came to have the West Wind for a grandfather. Six hundred years ago he’d taken one look at a lovely lass named Sparrow, fallen head over heels for her, and gone to craft himself a faerie skin handsome enough to woo her in.