“What?”

“Little hamlet called West Mirth? There’s bats who hunt bugs round the pigeon stables there by night. They say last night something came through.”

“What kind of something?”

Swig shook his head. “Don’t know. Bats said their echo sense went right through it. Just darkness, they said.”

Magpie’s stomach lurched. “Darkness? Not the hungry one! Not in Dreamdark!”

“No one came out of those houses this morning, Mags, and Algorab says it’s some eerie kinda quiet.”

“Quiet,” Magpie repeated, remembering the terrible hush of the catacombs. ”Neh . . . ,” she said, leaning heavily on the window ledge, her head spinning. It was mad. Dim as devils were, they’d always known to steer clear of Dream-dark in their day. If the beast had come here, then she’d been right about one thing, one awful thing: it had come for the Magruwen. “Where’s Calypso?” she asked Swig.

“Pup went for him.”

She glanced at Poppy, who was watching them, puzzled. “All right,” she told Swig, “I’m coming.” To Poppy she said, “We’ll go gather up the rest of the ingredients. The shadow and wind and that? You got the oats and flour and all?”

“Aye, sure my mum has it at home.”

“Good, then, I’ll meet you back here.”

Poppy watched with a slight frown as Magpie flew out the window to join the birds. After they’d flown away she stepped out into her garden and pondered what she’d overheard. Then she knelt beside a patch of crimson primroses. “Good morning, beauties,” she said. “What gossip in the wood?”

FOURTEEN

A falcon hung weightless in the updrafts that rose along the rocky Sills. Suddenly it plunged into a harrowing dive, spiraling hard groundward before swooping into a long, smooth upward glide. There was something joyful in the sight of it, a wild, bracing freedom that the flightless could only dream of. After a hundred years of standing on heavy feet watching other wings rise, Talon felt as if a flare had been lit over the world, revealing all new colors. He’d never felt so alive.

He came to perch in a pine above Pickle’s Gander, the smallest of the three hamlets on the Sills. Inside his skin he was winded and grinning. No other faerie had to work this hard to fly, sure. They didn’t have to learn to knit and they didn’t have to operate false wings with their arms. But no faerie had ever done what he’d done. Not ever. Skin-making was the work of elementals and none other. Until now.

It was washing day in Pickle’s Gander. In the creek below his perch the sprouts were splashing their feet while the biddies taught the lasses glyphs for cleaning linens. He knew everyone. These were the Rathersting’s nearest neighbors and several of his cousins were courting here. He spotted Shrike’s lass, Lyric, laughing and tossing her long yellow hair, and his grin subsided. She hadn’t yet heard the news. He remembered the sight of the fourteen knives at Issrin Ev and his joy turned cold. Just because East Mirth and Pickle’s Gander were carrying on as usual didn’t mean the trouble wasn’t real. He would just go check on West Mirth before he flew the skin back to Orchidspike for safekeeping, then he’d return to the castle.