PRELUDE
The wolf tasted the babe’s face with the tip of his tongue and pronounced her sweet, and the fox licked the back of her head to see if it was so. For the rest of her life, when this child grew into a faerie with bright eyes and a laugh as loud and unladylike as a crow’s, that spot on her hair would never lie flat. And though she wouldn’t remember the night the creatures had gathered round to look at her and taste and smell her, she would call those unruly hairs her foxlick, without knowing why.
The branches overhead thrummed with birds. They would wait their turn but they wouldn’t be quiet about it. No matter. The creatures weren’t worried about being interrupted by faeries. The imp had smuggled the babe far from home, floating her down Misky Creek on a linden leaf so that this unusual starlight gathering would draw no unwanted notice. The creatures had her for the night, and by morning she would be back snug in her cradle with no one the wiser.
“Shall we begin?” asked the imp, nuzzling the babe’s pink cheeks with her whiskers and making her laugh. “Who’ll go first?”
They all clamored to go first. Fur brushed against hide, tusks clashed with horns as they pressed nearer, eager and gentle. Most of these creatures would be long dead by the time this babe had grown up and taken her place in the world. But they would give her their blessings in turn and hope they helped her make her way.
There would never be another chance. So much depended on this tiny faerie whom dreams had at last made real.
ONE
“Devils!” screamed the fishermen, pointing at the sky.
Magpie Windwitch didn’t know many human words, but she knew this one, devil, in more than twenty of their languages, though this was the first time she’d been called one herself.
“Foolish mannies!” she scoffed, looking down at them from the sky where she was circling their fishing boat amid a swirl of crows.
“Aieeee!” the humans wailed, dropping to their knees to pray.
Certainly it was strange to see crows this far out over the open ocean, but to call them devils, that was going a bit far. Magpie shook her head and signaled to the crows to turn away. This wasn’t the boat they sought anyway. The boat they sought would be empty, forsaken by its fishermen and left to drift.
The boat they sought had met a real devil.
The crows rose up and the West Wind gathered them again into his arms and surged across the sky. Behind them the fishermen lay slouched and gasping against the rails of their boat, their turbans unwinding in the wind. They were right to fear devils. Magpie had a hunter’s respect for fear: it sharpened the senses. But those fishermen, she didn’t doubt, for all their prayers and worry, wouldn’t hesitate to uncork any strange bottle they fished out of the ocean, just to see what was inside. It happened all the time these days, and the devils were just delighted.
She fixed her eyes fiercely on the sea and scanned its breadth between identical horizons, back and forth. It had been days since her grandfather the West Wind had heard the albatross’s rumor of an abandoned boat adrift at sea. In the time it had taken him to find her and bring her here, it could have drifted anywhere. The sea was a vast hunting ground and she was getting nervous. Though the wind held the crows aloft in his airy arms, they weren’t made for such long flight and would still grow tired in time. They needed to find that boat.
“How you holding up, my feather?” she asked the crow she rode upon, stroking his sleek head with both hands.
“Like a leaf on a breeze,” he answered in his singsong voice. “A champagne bubble. A hovering hawk. A cloud! Nothing to it!”
“So you say. But I’m no tiny sprout anymore, Calypso, and sure you can’t carry me forever.”
“Piff! Ye weigh no more than a dust mouse, so hush yer spathering. ’Twill be a sore day for me when I can’t carry my ’Pie.”
Magpie went back to scanning the sea, her chin resting on Calypso’s head. Ever since she was a tiny thing she’d loved riding him, but as she grew up she did so less and less, generally flying alongside him instead. Her own dragonfly wings were sleek as blades, many-paned like stained glass and as swift as any wings under the sun or moon. But she was tired, still drained from a two-day chase in the desert. That scarab devil had given her a time, to be sure, so she hadn’t put up a fuss when Calypso insisted on carrying her.
As far as her keen eyes could tell, the surface of the sea spread out empty all around them. They flew on, deeper into the vastness of it.
An hour passed before at last Magpie spotted a listing, slack-sailed boat. The crows circled, heaving and panting, and dropped out of the arms of the wind to go in for a closer look. Magpie stood up on Calypso’s back. She took one step into thin air and plummeted some thirty feet straight down before flicking her wings open like a fan and coming in for a sharp landing on the boat’s rail. She crouched, paused, then prowled forward like a creature, ready to spring into the air if surprised.
The boat seemed empty. Magpie waved and all seven crows came in to land. Seeing nothing amiss on deck, they cautiously descended into the fishing boat’s small cabin. There they found signs of recent human habitation: tobacco, dirty tin cups, a backgammon board open on the table. On the same table Magpie found just what she was looking for and had hoped not to find. She had hoped this would turn out to be some human mystery of no interest to herself or any of her kind. But that was not the case.
Lying on its side on the table was a tarnished silver flask with a long neck and elegant scrolled handle. Its wax seal had been broken and lay in two pieces beside it. She and Calypso exchanged a somber look.
“Might just be a coffeepot,” the crow offered hopefully. He had a chip in the left side of his beak that made him seem perpetually to grin.
Magpie’s eyes swept over the table and settled on the two halves of the seal. She took it up in her hands and her face paled. “It’s no coffeepot,” she said.
“What is it, ’Pie?” Calypso asked, hopping toward her. The other crows crowded in, curious.
“What ye got, Mags? Eh, Mags?” asked the smallest one, Pup, in a quiver of spasmodic energy.
Magpie held the pieces together. Emblazoned in the wax was a hand in the center of a flame. “It’s the Magruwen’s seal,” she said in a hushed voice.
“The Magruwen?” they all squawked, puffing up their feathers.
“The Djinn King?” gasped Pup’s brother, Pigeon.