“You’ll warn the folks hereabouts?” Magpie asked Talon.

“Aye. I’ll bring them to the castle.”

“Good. That’s good. And . . . be careful, neh?” She rose to her wings but hesitated a moment in the air with a thought on the tip of her mind. She said, “Lad, that skin . . .” She gestured to the gossamer fabric that still clothed him from neck to toes. “You really made it, neh?”

“I finished it this dawn.”

“Well, it’s . . .” She groped for a word and settled on “Uncommon,” then turned and flickered away into the sky, flanked by birds and wickedly quick.

Uncommon. It wasn’t much of a compliment, not by itself. It was the way her mouth curled up at its corners into a kind of marveling smile when she said it that made it one. Talon found he was blushing. She was gone by the time he realized he still had no idea who she was. “Pie?” he murmured. “What kind of a name is that?”

FIFTEEN

In the sky above the Manygreen lands Magpie unfastened the pins Snoshti had put in her hair and let it tumble down around her shoulders. Like an arrow off a bowstring she shot through the air with mad speed, zinging back and forth once over Poppy’s workshop with her hair streaming behind her. Then she froze, folded her wings, and dropped like a stone out of the sky for one of her frightful sharp landings. A flick of her wings and she caught herself at the moment the earth loomed to meet her. She ran inside the workshop.

Poppy looked up, startled. “Magpie!” she exclaimed. “Where—?”

“That the batter?” Magpie asked, cutting her off.

“Aye.”

With three long sweeps of her fingers Magpie combed the wind from her hair. It cascaded invisibly into the bowl of cake batter and settled there. “Calypso’s waiting outside with his shadow,” she said.

Poppy followed and watched as Magpie held the bowl in outstretched arms in the brightest spot in the garden. Overhead, Calypso flew in spirals, slow as he could, and Magpie chased his shadow round and round. Several times she nearly captured it but it always seemed to slip over the lip of the bowl to freedom. At last, though, she trapped it, and after just the briefest shadowless moment another sprouted in its place, growing larger as Calypso dropped in to land. Behind him came Swig, carrying a small bird’s nest in one foot, with an acorn and a blackened twig nestled inside it, and holding a porcupine quill in his beak.

Once Magpie took the quill, he said, “Ye’ve Maniac to thank for that, Mags. The porcupine weren’t keen to part with it.”

“Maniac?” Magpie groaned. “It had to be him? He’s already mad at me! Didn’t hurt him bad, did it?”

“Neh, but he does make a fuss.”

“For true.”

“Magpie . . . ,” Poppy cut in hesitantly. “Did you find out anything . . . about the devil?”