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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.
There would never be another chance. So much depended on this tiny faerie whom dreams had at last made real.
their place in the world was everywhere and nowhere, like gypsies on wing.
“Another loose devil? Skiving plague of meddlesome mannies, can’t leave a bottle well enough alone!”
These were the skulls of a species who had not yet walked the world when he had last been abroad in it. So long had he drifted in the sea that in that time a new species had risen, built cities, fought its own wars, and been dying long enough to overflow its cemeteries. So many years, so many bones.
This is not my world. It was some other idea of the world laid atop the geography of her own, smothering it. It was the humans’ world.
“There’s some telling of a wind gone underground, missy, down where the mannies stack their skeletons.”
“The fire that burns its bellows can only fall to ash. What poetry in a traitor’s death!”
“So you’d like to fly, would you?” asked the Magruwen. Batch brightened. But before he could answer, the Magruwen sucked all the encircling smoke into himself and blew. A fiery gust somersaulted Batch backward and right out the door. Up, up, and up the well he rocketed until he flew out into the world and landed in the branches of a tree. He lay there, skin singed bald and whiskers sizzled to bristles, unconscious and twitching, for quite some time. It had not been the kind of flight he’d had in mind.
“So,” he whispered. “Ocean spit you out? Have this world, then. I don’t use it anymore.”
“All I’m saying, ’Pie,” Calypso went on, “is don’t get yer hopes up.” “You want me to fly around hopeless?” she asked. “That what you’re saying?” “Ach,” he sighed. “Neh. Hope away! And may we be blessed with the luck to find creatures in Dreamdark as nosy as ourselves.”
She’d thought she would dream of devils, of darkness and greedy, sucking hunger, and she did, but not right away. First she dreamed of a tapestry, once glorious but now moth-eaten and faded. She’d dreamed of it before and never remembered with waking, but in her dream she somehow knew that, threadbare though it was, it was the only thing holding the darkness at bay, the best and only thing.
