Excerpt

A piebald crow looked down on Nightjar Island. It would be winter soon. The clouds would close in for days at a time, and the forest below would be limned in frost. For now, the air was warm, and he meant to enjoy every moment.

Two days earlier, the wind had stripped the trees. This morning, sunlight patterned the forest floor. A line of white-tailed deer moved along a trail, rooting for apples and mushrooms. The ground was covered in leaves, from staghorn sumacs, white birches, oaks, trembling aspens and maples. The crow recalled their names like lines of poetry. The evergreen trees had names as well, tamarack, jack pine, black spruce, balsam fir, red and white pine. The boy, the one that the women of the order called the Monster, had once spoken these names out loud as he stood in the deepening snow in a courtyard. At the time, he had been drawing in a book with a sharpened nib made from one of the crow's feathers. Ink had fanned in the fallen snowflakes. The deaf Attendant, a special role conferred by the order, had stood nearby, shivering and holding the bottle of ink in a cold, spattered hand. The crow had listened and remembered the names, because he had a remarkable memory, but he did not know which name belonged to which tree. The line of deer became untidy as they nuzzled dried stalks and seedpods. Names. Words. They fell easily from the mouths of men and monsters. Their meanings gave them agency over all things.

The crow soared higher, angling his wings to take advantage of the thermal. The air pressed the feathers against his skull. He cawed for no reason but to celebrate the glorious morning, and reasserted his grip on a twitching mouse. The crow was missing a toe on his left foot, and the adjustment gave the mouse a fortunate opportunity. It flattened its body and fell, as though it had turned to sand. Watching the plummeting rodent, the crow followed the rising air in a lazy arc. He was neither irritated by the loss, nor inclined to follow. Mice were plentiful.

In the north end of the island, the forest dwindled, becoming meadow and then hardpan where little grew except lichen. Past the barren land, the empty city of Absentia was visible as overlapping shades of blue. The city appeared lifeless, but the crow had flown among the wind-sculpted domes and towers and seen the choking ivy, honeysuckle and nightshade. He had also seen survivors of the Purge, fewer every year, searching for anything useful in the ruins. Absentia, abandoned and ruinous, did not suit his mood this morning. He was light of heart and more than happy to turn his gaze to the west.

In this direction, a turbulent body of water divided Nightjar Island from the mainland. Along the coast, the forest broke into copses and scrub, and ended in prominences of limestone. At the foot of the cliffs, pitched slabs of rock were home to seals and cormorants. Testing the limits of his vision, the crow could make out the landscape across the channel and felt a familiar longing to fly there. His reverie was interrupted. There was something unexpected in the air, a trace of smoke. The crow swiveled his head, scanning the forest. He was flying over the low-lying center of the island, the great crater, where the rains had collected on the clay-rich soil and flooded acres of land. Curious, he angled his wings and spread his tail feathers.

He dropped through the trees into a different world. Here, the air was heavy with fungal damp. Tangled branches and the glitter of sunlight on pooled water obscured visibility. He skimmed over a horse carriage, its wheels and axles caked in mud. A second later it was lost behind him. As the crow flew through the forest, the taint of smoke became pronounced. It was the crow's fifteenth autumn. He was still agile on the wing and proud of it. He moved with grace through a maze of branches that would have confounded a younger bird, ignoring the rodents scattering among the roots, and the warnings of a blue jay. Now the smoke was all around him, a layer of blue, acrid and warm. He dipped under it. Seeing movement ahead, he alighted on a tree limb with a soft slap of feathers against the air.

Driven by curiosity, the crow had entered the part of the forest that made him tremulous with dread. Here, the old-growth trees, blanketed with moss, muffled all sound. Water dripped into hollows formed by fallen branches and roots thrust from the earth. The ground was higher than the surrounding landscape, forming an island in the swamp. A shuttered building rose out of a confusion of rooftops, casting a deep shadow. It was known as Little Eye, the Monster's prison up until the time of the forced evacuation at the war's end. That had been several years ago. The crow never knew the fate of the Monster. He knew only that the boy had lingered after the summary execution of the dwindling members of the order. The soldiers, eager to be away from this haunted place, had overlooked him in the mayhem. Whether the Monster had died, taken by the harsh winter that followed, or found some way to escape the island was impossible to know. The crow was aware that the reason he could feel badly about this was the Monster's gift of consciousness, given one day with a touch as soft as a petal.

Smoke poured from a brick furnace. The snap and hiss of burning wood sounded closer than it was. The furnace's conical shape was blackened at the top and mottled with lichen at the base. Concrete walls spread out from the foundation and disappeared under a heavy growth of deadly nightshade, a sign of a once greater industry. A pile of dead branches leaned against the chimney, a green layer on top of one much thicker and darker. Sacks and wood blocks, iron implements and mounds of shattered green glass surrounded a work area.

A girl opened a grate in the side of the furnace, unfazed by the blast of heat and a shower of sparks. Nearby, seven human-sized puppets sat knock-kneed on a wall, each wearing an animal mask. The crow was familiar with the shapes of a bird, a fox and a frog. They were a part of his world. The others he found unsettling. Staring in different directions were four disturbing amalgams of multiple creatures, with split snouts, multiple eyes and bared teeth, no less frightening because they were carved from wood. Although there was no puppeteer to be seen, the group's hands and feet twitched. A black dog lay panting before them, its tongue hanging like a ladle. The girl was as indifferent to the puppets and their fidgeting as she was to the breath of the fire.

She wore a leather apron over a ragged dress and mud-caked boots. Her tangled black hair was tied back with a strip of cloth. She worked a blowpipe through the grate into the flames, turned it for a few seconds, and then pulled it back. A globule of molten glass clung to the tip of the pipe. The crow, which had sidestepped his way along the bough, stood with head cocked, watching with a beady eye.

The girl turned, squinting against the smoke. Climbing onto a stump, she whispered to herself. With the pipe held vertically she lowered the glass through the opening of a wood mold that sat on the ground. She blew into the end of the pipe, causing steam, or smoke to pour from the mold's seams. The crow smelled burned cherry wood and felt excitement in his breast. The pipe came away on a ribbon of smoke. Resuming her whispers, the girl let it fall into the mud and stepped down. She kneeled before the mold and pried the halves apart, releasing a glass form. It looked like a large moth pupa. It squirmed, a living thing of glass, as she retrieved it with tongs pulled from the belt of the apron. The crow cawed and hopped on the branch. He could not help himself. The girl paid him no mind and carried the magical thing back to the furnace, where she placed it on a cooling ledge.

What was this? The pupa had joined several other miniature writhing glass pupae. Each one was iridescent and irresistible. A beautiful prize, thought the crow. He sidled further along the bough, flapping to maintain his balance. One pupa was nearer to the edge than the others. It seemed to beckon to him, an illusion brought on by excitement no doubt. The girl had returned to the stump and now sat with her face in blackened hands, as though depleted by her work. She had shed the apron on the ground. Taking advantage of her distraction, the crow leapt and crossed the clearing with three surging wing beats. He landed on the ledge and seized the object in his beak. It clinked against the brickwork.

"No," screeched the girl, as she jumped to her feet. "Idiot bird."

The crow, a master thief, was already in the air. He flapped his wings, plunging through the trees. But from the start something was wrong. The pupa was heavier than expected and threw off his center of gravity. He misjudged his movements and twice came close to dropping the prize. The girl's angry shouts followed him, but then stopped as he shot free of the forest. A few more strokes carried him away from Little Eye. It was when he was once again in the great vault of the sky that he understood that back in the forest something had been forming in the air above the glass pupae. He understood now, the girl had been performing a summoning magic. What had he gotten himself into?

1

"Echo," the girl said to the air thickening in the clearing. "Echo, you will never be complete now."

The form coalescing around the glass pupae, drawing into itself a rind of forest detritus, leaves, lichen and scraps of tattered wasp's paper, answered with a voice of howling fire. "Elizabeth, undo this. Unmake me."

Elizabeth laughed. "That I cannot do. You must be whole to be sundered, and that silly crow has stolen your heart."