“It’s ready,” he said.

Orchidspike looked it over closely. “It’s more than ready. You’ve done something true here, lad. It’s perfect.”

Talon glowed with pride.

Orchidspike said, “Once the sun’s full up I want you to go to the hamlets on the Sills and see how they fare there. If anything seems awry—anything—shepherd the folk to the castle for safekeeping, you ken?”

He nodded and shook out the skin—for that was what he had made—and stepped into it, visioning the glyph that would awaken it. After that, even Orchidspike couldn’t have distinguished him from a real falcon.

The clot of darkness had returned to Issrin Ev. Before sunrise it slipped into a deep fissure in the rubble of the temple, and five vultures hunkered down on branches to wait out the day, restless and hungry. They’d eaten nothing since their brother’s corpse, a whole day past. And though their master had hunted through the night, he had left them no bones to pick over. He never did.

THIRTEEN

Magpie woke half buried in pillows in a blanket nest on the floor. She stretched like a cat and rolled over, blinking up at the root-ribbed ceiling of Snoshti’s burrow. It smelled sweet in the close space, of tea and earth and spice. “Up and greet the day!” Snoshti called, and Magpie got to her feet and ambled down a low corridor to the kitchen, where hot scented water awaited her in a copper tub.

“Ach,” grumbled Magpie, for whom a bath was a dip in a pond or a quick shine with the last gulp in her cup.

“Sure even crows bathe sometimes,” Snoshti told her, frowning at the feather skirt, for Magpie had slept in her clothes same as she always did. As she stepped out of them she unstrapped her new knife from her leg and laid it aside. It caught Snoshti’s eye and the imp did a double take behind her back. A little later, when Magpie’s head was underwater, she looked closer, sucking in her breath when she saw the knife’s runes, but when Magpie surfaced, Snoshti didn’t say a word about it.

She lathered Magpie’s chestnut hair with pear-scented soap and watched fondly as the lass used magic to float a scone across the room from the stove to her mouth, leaving it suspended in the air before her face and taking great bites without the use of her hands. Crumbs cascaded into the bathwater. “Little barbarian.” Snoshti chuckled.

A dozen families lived in the hedge imp village, an intricate warren beneath the earth with wide tunnels for avenues, and passages that Snoshti said reached all the way to other villages. Glossy gem-hued beetles milled about as Magpie made her way topside, and impkins darted up to touch her shyly and giggle, never having had a faerie visit them underground before nor ever having met one so ready to smile at them or carry them into the air on short flights.

The crows were up and smoking in their dressing gowns, and Mingus poured Magpie a cup of sludgy coffee.