“I don’t know,” he answered. “Listen well. The beast that got Papa and the others, it’s in Issrin.”

“Let’s get the creeper, then!” his uncle Orion snarled. “To war!”

The three younger faeries began to answer with shouts but Talon halted them with a sharp, “Neh!” and commanded, “You’ll stay well clear of it!”

His uncle, the chief’s own battle-scarred brother, regarded him with astonishment.

“I’ve just seen what it can do. Stay well above the treetops. It has a wicked long tongue. Don’t get in range of it. Your only plan”—he glanced at the lass, who was struggling valiantly to stay conscious—“is to stay alive and save the crows. Do you hear me? Save the crows. Now! To battle!”

Talon—“Prince Scuttle”—who was usually just the wistful shape growing small on the ramparts behind them as the war parties whooped away, spoke with such kingly command that his cousins and uncle, and even his sister, stared at him for a moment in blank surprise.

Nettle rallied first. “To save the crows!” she cried, raising her knife.

The others echoed her.

“I’m taking her to Orchidspike,” Talon told Nettle quickly. “Bring the crows there.”

Nettle nodded and whirled away. Talon didn’t linger to watch the battle. He glanced at the lass just as her eyes flickered shut and didn’t reopen. He gathered her against him with one arm, scampered down from the tree, and ran.

Orchidspike met him at her cottage door and gasped to see the bloodied lass in his arms. “Bring her in, lad.”

He eased past her into the cottage and carried the lass straight to the little room where Orchidspike kept a cot for patients. He laid her on it and looked at her anxiously. She hadn’t once regained consciousness during the journey through the Deeps. She was white as a bone against the black-dried blood that painted her face.

Orchidspike came with cloths and hot water and started to fuss over her, cleaning the blood from her face and, Talon knew, visioning powerful healing glyphs that would wrap the lass like invisible bandages of magic.

“I think her name is something like Pie . . . ,” ventured Talon after a while.

The old healer looked up at him. “Pie? Not Magpie!” she exclaimed. “Eyes like aquamarines?” she asked him, to which he blushed and nodded gruffly.

“Little Magpie Windwitch!” said the healer. “I’ve been wondering when she’d come home.”

“Home?”

“Aye. Well, she was born in Dreamdark but left as a tiny thing. Her father was a Never Nigh lad.”

“What clan?”

“Robin? None. He was a foundling, raised by Widow Candlenight in the bookshop in Never Nigh. Sure you heard the story. The babe who hatched from a robin’s egg in the widow’s maple?”

“Don’t tell me that story’s true!”