In that dreadful instant when Magpie realized she’d been clinging to a shadow and that Poppy was gone, she leapt away from the Blackbringer and flicked open her wings to flee. But as she struggled skyward, the tongue was suddenly on her, cold and clammy. It whipped round her wings and jerked her back, helpless as a bug.

Her fierce crow brother Maniac descended like a fury and seized the stretched tongue with his talons. It released Magpie at once and snapped back into the darkness so quickly . . . so quickly Maniac didn’t have time to release it. His feathers riffled and there was a sound like an intake of breath as he was sucked backward and engulfed in the darkness.

Magpie plummeted fast. It wasn’t one of her sharp landings, but a graceless thudding skid down the slope until a headless statue of Bellatrix finally halted her slide. Woozy, she shook her head and tried to lift her wings. Her wings. They didn’t respond to the flexion of her shoulders but hung limp.

They had been crushed.

It had all happened so quickly Maniac was gone before she even hit the ground. Her arms and legs were scraped but unbroken, but Magpie crouched motionless, as if she had no notion how to move without flying. Her breath came shallow and quick and she had the odd sensation she was just a shadow stretched over the stones. She looked up. The wheeling birds were erratic black shapes against a black sky. And Maniac was gone.

Dizziness overcame her. Time careened off balance, speeding and slowing as the shrieking of birds warbled from deafening to dull. Blood flowed fast from a gash at her temple. Her head felt hollow. Her vision dimmed. She struggled against it, knowing if she closed her eyes now she would never open them again.

“Lass!” a voice rang out. Dazed, Magpie looked around. “Pie!” It came again, and to her surprise she spotted the tattooed Rathersting lad. He was perched atop a freestanding pillar in the old courtyard, poised to spring. The clarity of his eyes seemed to sear a path through her confusion, and the world stopped spinning. She wiped the blood away from her eyes and got shakily to her feet. No sooner had she risen than the lad cried out, “Stay down!”

But it was too late. The Blackbringer had seen her.

Magpie saw the wretched tongue shoot toward her, and the sick certainty of her own doom gathered within her like held breath. She couldn’t move, but only watch, mesmerized, as it came for her.

The lad sprang from his perch.

Magpie saw him leap—powerfully—and dive and stretch and reach. And his knife pierced the shooting tongue at its tip, intercepting it and pulling it along with him in his smooth trajectory. Away from her.