“Take them?” Magpie repeated.

“He was trying to rip them off!”

Magpie turned to the imp, her chin lowered and eyes glinting dangerously. “Trying to mutilate a faerie?” she cried.

“Neh!” He was wailing in his desperate wheeze of a voice and trying to squirm away from Calypso’s sharp talons. “I just wanted to fly away! Don’t take me back to master!”

“Cussed vermin!” the crow croaked, and Magpie saw the imp peer up at him with one squinting eye, then fall limp with relief.

“Blessings!” Batch whimpered. “I thought ye was the vultures!”

“Vultures?” Magpie demanded, remembering the lad had mentioned vultures. “And master? What master?”

The imp looked at her, snuffled, and gave her a meek, imploring smile. “Missy faerie call off the bad birdy?”

Calypso was standing on Batch much as Batch had stood on Poppy, and Magpie knelt in front of him. She smelled scorched fur and saw how his whiskers were frizzled like burnt broom straws. In the scamper language she’d learned from Snoshti as a babe, she asked, “What happened to you, imp? Fall in a fire?”

“Fire fell on me!”

She gave him a penetrating look, remembering how the Magruwen had accused her of being a treasure-hunter. “First an imp and now a faerie,” he had said.

“You been to the Magruwen!”

“The who what?” Batch asked. But Magpie had seen his eyes jump open at the mention of the Djinn’s name, and she knew. Vultures, master, and a trip to the Magruwen? It added up to one thing: this imp was in the middle of her mystery.

She nodded to Calypso to let him sit up. “Bold caper, imp,” she said, musing. “The Djinn King himself!”

“I don’t know what yer talking about!”

“However did you find him?” Magpie asked with a hint of admiration. “He’s been missing for ever so long! Sure someone must’ve told you where he was. A faerie told you, I guess.”

“Faerie!” he scoffed. “Faeries couldn’t find yolk in an egg! I found him!”

“For true?” Magpie asked with apparent delight. “You found the Magruwen? That’s a . . . a miracle!”

“It’s a gift,” Batch told her with a dignified sniff.

“Aye, I’ve heard tell. What’s it called, the . . . serenity?”

“Serendipity!” he corrected.

“Aye, that’s it!” Well Magpie knew what it was called: the serendipity, that gift of the scavengers that looked like eerie good luck. Batch and the scant handful of imps like him possessed the uncanny ability of finding just what they needed, just when they needed it. Reliably. That should have made them worthy allies in these times, but unfortunately they were also heartless, reclusive, nasty, and obsessive to the point of madness. They couldn’t even stand each other, which accounted for the very small number of them in existence.

On occasion faeries had tried to bend the serendipity to their purposes. Even Magpie’s parents had once enlisted a scavenger imp named Lick to help them find Amitav Ev, the lost temple of the Ashmedai. And he had found it. And looted it. And disappeared. To this day they had no idea where the ruins lay. They had learned the hard way that, whoever else might claim the title, a scavenger imp has but one master: itself.