#vally

He has to squint to spot the clifftop nest. (Abandoned, says Mol. Full of treasure, I reckon, says Mol.) The light that strains through the clouds so early in the morning is weak and watery, like the whey he and Mum used to squeeze through cheesecloths. Even the river's still sluggish and gray. In the dawn's dim pall, muffled with mist, only a voice drifts down bright and clear—if distant—from the top of the ravine. Someone's singing.

Miss Alfira, thinks Mirkon with an uneasy twitch of his tail, must be up on the hill with her lute. She must be. She doesn't sleep well—

A wing stirs the mist. Something huge circles in it, dips, settles by the nest. Mirkon, too frightened to breathe, stares at the shapes hunched and jostling above him on the crag: vulture-pink faces, stained mouths, tangled masses of clotted hair.

(It'll be easy, the Mol in his head repeats, suddenly sounding less sure.)

"Um," Mirkon gasps, his mouth and nose filling with the stench of old, dry blood. The bird-women lean forward. One has a gob of gristle stuck to her chin. "I—I'm sorry—"

One of the bird-women opens her mouth. What comes out, rather than a condemnatory caw, is the most beautiful noise he's ever heard.

Closer, she sings in wordless and tremulous appeal, so sweet that Mirkon's throat closes up. Closer. So close, just a few steps away, there are good things waiting for him: bread and cheese, squeaky floorboards underfoot, hands ruffling his hair. Mum and Dad calling him slugabed. His sister squalling in the cradle, his growly old cat butting his hand.

He's so tired of blisters, of watery gruel, of weeping at night so no one overhears. He starts forward. His head feels fuzzy and full. Everything will be fine, he thinks dreamily, once he gets there—

"—once was a lady," bellows a voice that's not right, that doesn't belong, "who met with a merrow—"

The voice rips something from Mirkon's ears. He stumbles with a cry, clutching his head, and pitches forward. Something splashes. Whatever else the lady did roars round his ears in a garbled rising rush, sounding more like water than words.

He won't be fine, he thinks as he sinks, shocked stiff by the cold. He'll drown. Mol will read his stories out loud to everyone. His curls float before his eyes, tangled with streaming bubbles and the stringy roots of some clingy river-weed, as the light bursts into a wriggle of fleeing fish.

Hands plunge in after him. They seize him under the arms. Abruptly he finds himself thrashing above water, dripping and gasping, dazzled by the sudden grayish sun.

"Got him!" someone cries, triumphant, and swings him onto solid ground. His legs wobble under him. He stares with wide eyes into a halfling's broad, scarred, hugely beaming face. "Be off, now. Run!"

She spins him round and shoves him between the shoulders, businesslike, as though he's a calf stuck in a gate. Bewildered, he staggers and looks back. The halfling snatches up an old washboard from the bank an instant before the bird-women, blotting out the sky, drive her to the ground in a screeching tangle of wings and limbs.

"He's ours!" one shrieks, battering the halfling and her sisters alike with her great wings. Her voice pulls Mirkon like a talon in his chest. In terror, powerless to disagree, he finds himself tottering on traitorous legs towards the scuffle. "Our morsel! Our meat!"

The halfling rolls free and swings the washboard. It crashes over the bird-woman's head with a splintery crack. "Shadowheart!"

Possibly the prettiest lady Mirkon's ever seen strides across the bank, tossing back her perfect braid, and wallops one of the bird-women with a wet shirt. They must have come down to the river to wash their clothes.

"Where's Wyll?" the lady shouts, collaring the halfling to her feet. Her bare arms are like a brawler's. With her free hand she plucks a flame from thin air and thrusts it in a lunging bird-woman's face. "Silk! Get this boy out from underfoot—"

The bird-woman, staggering blind, lifts her voice in anguished song. Mirkon, trying not to, stumbles towards her. The halfling hooks him back by the shirt and pushes him at the lady, who shoves him into a straggly man Mirkon's height, who claps his hands over Mirkon's ears and drags him out of the way of a raging wing.

“What’s your favorite song?” the man yells over the din. Mirkon tries to tear away from him; you can't trust a grown-up, Mol says so, and this one's got a crazy red eye caked with crust. But the man wrestles him back, cursing with words Mirkon doesn't know, and tugs him into a run. "Your favorite song!"

“I—I dunno!” Mirkon's coughing so hard he can hardly keep up. He must have swallowed half the slimy river—only he doesn't remember doing it, not at all. The bird-women wail after him, promising baubles, buttermilk, bilberry pie. He almost bursts into tears. “The—it’s got a sailor—”

“Fine,” gasps the man, dragging Mirkon uphill by the shirt. “Good. Let’s sing it as loud as we can. A sailor went to sea, sea, sea—”

It's the same voice that had sung about the merrow. Behind them the bird-women’s song, interrupted again, rises to a furious screech. Mirkon, stumbling, throws his voice against it: high and brackish, half a sob, half a shout. He's not afraid. He's not. Mol wouldn't be. “—to see what he could see, see, see—”

The man with the horrible eye gives him an encouraging shake. The man's a trained singer; even hoarse, his voice is like a clarion. It comes all the way up from the bottoms of his feet. “And all that he could see—”

"—s-see—"

"—see—"

Mirkon's head feels less sloshy. He tries to sing like the man's singing: from his toes, from the tip of his tail. “—was the bottom of the deep blue—”

Someone behind them shouts. The man shoves Mirkon over, and turns with gray terror in his face, and above them the sky goes black and bristly with wings and claws cannoning down—

The world flashes hellpit-green. Thunder cracks. A bolt of light shears sideways across the ravine, straight as lightning ironed out, and blasts the bird-woman aside in an explosion of feathers.

One spirals towards Mirkon's face in a slow, smoldering twirl. He stares at it open-mouthed. The air stinks like smoke and bad eggs. On the far side of the ravine the bird-woman slams the cliff face—crunch—and falls all floppy to the ground.

In the enormous, echoey silence after that, broken only by the ringing in Mirkon's ears, the man who'd stood between him and the claws wobbles on his feet. His hair's mussed from the bird-woman's wings. He rakes a hand through it, staring at the heap of sizzling feathers like it might swoop on them a second time, and sits down hard on the ground.

Mirkon throws himself at him. Mol would jeer. Mol, it occurs to him with a sick lurch, is going to be so mad—

“All right,” croaks the stranger, trying to pry Mirkon off—only he seems at the same time to be trying to smooth Mirkon’s curls, and to wipe the dirt and snot from Mirkon’s face, and to generally pat Mirkon back into shape. “All right. Have”—he chokes on something like a laugh, only shakier—“have you ever thought about Fochlucan?”

"Hellfire!" pants the halfling, limping up from the riverbank.

The lady's voice follows her, coolly surprised. “They’re actually alive."

“Bravo!” cries the Blade of Frontiers, leaping down to them from a tall crag. He's grinning. Green sparks are still snapping between his fingers. “Bravo! Bravissimo!”

* * *

"Not every minstrel, Silk," he says later, when all of Mol's small thieves have been scolded and tweaked back to their lair, "can boast that he's outsung harpies. Try not to blink."

It's a lovely spin, the minstrel thinks with an astringent smile, on blundering in poor voice through a children's rhyme—and terrifying a small boy to tears, and nearly getting him killed. The minstrel's still half-sick with it. He stares straight ahead, flexing the tremor from his hands, as the Blade of Frontiers—whose friends, he keeps saying, call him Wyll—shines a dolorous green light in his infected eye.

Wyll-of-Frontiers catches the thought. His scars crease like lines of laughter when he smiles. "Do your friends call you Silk?"

His patroness's servants call him Patch. Sometimes Tatter. He must look like a Tatter, just now.

"You look every inch that boy's hero," says Wyll, serious as death. Then his true eye twinkles. "Boldly bedraggled, that is. Doughtily disheveled. Gallantly"—oh, by all the jewels in Blingdenstein—"grubby."

If the Blade of Frontiers didn't exist, some twee treble like that girl on the hill would have made him up. The minstrel clears his throat. Fiercely, against orders, he blinks. "Well?"

"I think you'll keep the eye," says Wyll gently, and flicks the hellfire out.

"Ugh." Shadowheart, striding past, shakes out her sodden shirt. "It's even dirtier than before."