“Don’t kill us, Masters!” The voice rasped and whistled, but the words were clear. “Us’ll never do wrong at you again!
Us were only so hungry!”
“You can speak,” said Vansen, reduced to the obvious.
The raven turned one bright yellow eye toward him, beak opening and shutting as it tried to get its breath. “Aye. And most sweetly, too, given chance, Masters!”
Prince Barrick sat up, tousle-haired and puffy-eyed, looking at least for this moment more like an ordinary sleepy young man and less like the maddening enigma he had been. “Why precisely are you two pummeling a bird?” He squinted. “It’s rather spotty. Might it be good to eat?”
“No, Master!” the raven said, struggling uselessly. Patches of gray skin showed where it had lost feathers, making it seem even more pathetic. “Foul and tasteless, I am! Pizen!”
Gyir changed position to steady the squirming bird, poised to kill it.
“No!” Vansen said. “Let it be.”
“But why?” asked the prince. “Gyir says it’s old and going to die soon, anyway. And it was thieving from us.”
“It speaks our tongue!”
“So do many other thieves.” The prince seemed more amused than anything else.
“Aye,” the bird panted, “speech it good and well, thy sunlander tongue. Learned it by Northmarch when I lived close by your folk there.”
“Northmarch?” It was a name Vansen had barely heard in years, a haunted name. “How could that be? Men have not lived at Northmarch for two centuries, since the shadows rolled over it.”
“Oh, aye, us were young then.” The raven still struggled helplessly in Gyir’s grasp. “Us had shiny pins and joints all supple, and us’s knucklers were firm.”
Vansen turned to Gyir, forgetting for a moment that it was harder to communicate with him than with the raven. “Two centuries old? Is that possible?”
The fairy came the closest to a human gesture Vansen had yet seen, a kind of slithery shrug. The meaning was clear: it was possible, but why should it matter?
“Yes, it matters.” Vansen knew he was replying to words not spoken and perhaps not even intended, but at this moment he did not care: in the land of the mad, a land of talking animals and faceless fairies, madness was the only sane creed. “He talks like my mother’s father, although that means nothing to you. I have not heard speech like that since I was a child.” Vansen realized that he ached for conversation—ordinary talk, not the elliptical mysteries of spellbound Prince Barrick, each answer bringing only more questions. In fact, he realized, he was so lonely that he would accept comradeship even from a bird.
But it wouldn’t do to make that clear just yet—even a bird could be suspect in these treacherous, magical lands. “So why shouldn’t we kill you?” Vansen asked the struggling raven. “What were you doing in our camp, poking around? Tell, or I will let him slit your throat.”
“Nay!” It was half shriek, half croak, a despairing sound that made Vansen almost feel ashamed of himself. “Mean no harm, us! Just hungry!”
“Gyir says he smells of those creatures,” Barrick offered, “—the ones who attacked him and killed his horse. ‘Followers,’ they’re called.”
“Not us, Masters!” The raven struggled, but despite its size, it was helpless as a sparrow in the fairy-warrior’s hands. “Was just following the Followers, like. Can’t fly much now, us—pins be all a-draggled.” It carefully eased one of its wings free, and this time Gyir allowed it. More than a few shiny black feathers were certainly missing. “Went to eat summat a few seasons gone by, but that summat be’nt quite dead yet,” the raven explained, bobbing its head. “Tore us upwise and downwise.”
“And the smell of those...Followers?”
“Us can’t stay high or fly long like us did oncet. Have to follow close, go from branch to branch, like. Followers have a powerful stink.” It ruffled its parti-colored feathers with its beak. “Can’t smell it, usself. Poor Skurn is old now—so old!”
“Skurn? Is that what you’re called?”
“Aye, or was. Us were handsome then, when that were our name.” He poked his beak toward Gyir. “His folk drove all the sunlanders out from Northmarch. Life were good then, for a little while, in the fighting—dead ’uns every which side! But then sunlanders were gone and poor Skurn was leaved behind to shift as us could when twilight come down.” The beak opened to let out a mournful sigh, but the shiny eyes looked to Vansen with calculating hope, like a child searching for the first light of forgiveness.
He had no stomach to kill the thing. “Let the bird go,” he said. Nothing happened. Gyir was not looking at him but at Barrick. “Please, Highness. Let it go.”
Barrick frowned, then sighed. “I suppose.” He waved his hand at Gyir, still showing a remnant of the royal manner even here beneath the dripping trees. “Let it go free.”
As soon as the blade was withdrawn the bird rolled to its feet and took a few hopping steps, quite nimble for all its professed age. It flapped its wings as though surprised and pleased to find it still had them. “Oh, thank you, Masters, thank you! Skurn will serve you, do everything you ask us, find all best hiding places, rotting dead ’uns, birds’ nests, even where the fish go scumbling down in the muddy bottom! And eat so little, us? Never will you know us is even here.”
“What is he talking about?” Vansen said crossly. He had expected it to bolt for the undergrowth or fly away, but the bird had distracted him and he had forgotten to watch where Gyir hid the knife; now the Twilight man’s hand was empty again.
“You saved him, Captain.” Amusement rippled coldly across Barrick’s face. Suddenly he seemed a boy no longer, but more like an old man—ageless. “The raven’s yours. It seems you’ll finally taste the pleasures of being lord and master.”
“Lord and master,” said the raven, beginning to clean the mud from his matted feathers with his long black beak. He bobbed his head eagerly. “Yes, you folk are Masters of Skurn, now. Us will do you only good.”
The forest track they followed seemed to have once been a road: only flimsy saplings and undergrowth grew on it, while the larger trees—most with sharp, silvery-black leaves that made Vansen think of them as “dagger trees”—formed a bower overhead, so that the horses paced almost as easily as they might have on the Settland Road or some other thoroughfare in mortal lands. If the going was easier, though, it was not a peaceful ride; Vansen had begun to wonder whether saving the wheezing raven might not have been his second-worst decision of recent days, exceeded only by the choice to follow Barrick across the Shadowline. Reprieved from death, Skurn could not stop talking, and although occasionally he said something interesting or even useful, Vansen was beginning to feel things would have been better if he had let Gyir the Storm Lantern spit the creature.
“...The other ones, Followers and whatnot, are pure wild these days.” Skurn bobbed his head, moving continuously from one side to the other off the base of the horse’s neck like a cat trying to find the warmest place to sleep. It was a mark of how the last days had hardened Vansen’s mount that it paid little attention to the creeping thing between its shoulders, only whinnying from time to time when the indignity became too much. “Scarce speak any language, and of course no sunlander tongue, unlikes usself. There, Master, don’t ever eat that ’un, nor touch it. Will turn your insides to glass. And that other, yes, th’un with yellow berries. No, not pizen, but makes a fine stew with coney or water rat. Us’d have a lovely bit of that now, jump atter chance, us would. Knows you that soon you be crossing into Jack Chain’s land? You’ll turn, o’course. Foul, his lot. No love for the High Ones and wouldn’t lift a hand but for their own stummicks or to shed some blood. They like blood, Jack’s lot. Oh, there’s a bit of the old wall. Look up high. A fine place for eggs...”