As the Crow Falls | ✔

Chapter Thirty-Four

Even without seeing them all yet, Niccola could sense the Talaks. They filled the silver forest, their presences creeping and slithering through the darkness, their minds pushing on her thoughts in whispers she could finally start to understand. This was a liminal space. It had to be, or else the hand she lifted would look more like a claw. It was still her own. Still the hand that had held Isaiah's every day they'd spent together. Still the hand that had kneaded bread and stoked fires in the Bel Ilan household for the last three months. Still the hand she'd held up in the moonlight countless times, checking for signs of transformation.

The Talaks that had flanked Dinah on the stump were already here. They circled her, and their voices, were the clearest yet. "Voices," though, was an inaccurate description. Like the crows she had so often spoken with in human form, they communicated in impressions: ideas, concepts, feelings, thoughts, all conveyed to her as if imprinting their experience, just for a moment, on her own.

"You broke the contract," hissed one. Niccola could feel its hunger. But it was a different hunger than the one that buzzed against her consciousness on Crow-Moon nights.

"Give it back."

"Want it back."

"Give what back?" returned Niccola, hoping her thoughts would speak the same way.

"Transform. Give it back."

They wouldn't answer her. Of course they wouldn't; Talaks only cared for themselves and their hunts. They had long ago lost the full intelligence of the humans they'd once been.

"Give it back."

Others were approaching. The Talaks could not yet attack while she retained her human form, but if enough of them gathered, that barrier may be overcome. Dinah certainly seemed convinced it could. If that was the case, Niccola had only minutes of conscious existence left. The shifting sentience of the silver forest crowded her senses. She could not feel her own heartbeat, though with the fear coursing through her body, it should by all rights have been pounding. She had to think. She had to find a way out of this.

Scars. Dinah had worn scars, visible after she'd removed her coat. Blood. That was her maintenance offering, slippery and ever-growing, for the Talaks never accepted less than the most they'd ever received from a barrower. If Dinah's knife had slipped even once, back in the early days, she would have reset her baseline offering. Increment by increment, her Crow Moon requirements for maintaining her magic would have increased. They had now been increasing for more than sixty years. At some point, Dinah would not have been able to keep using her own blood. It would kill her. And Erelah had said as much: Dinah sickened in her final moons under house arrest at the Talakova's edge. She would have to switch to others' blood eventually.

Niccola snatched the thought and followed it. For a time, Dinah might have made do with smaller game: rabbits or crows, whose deaths could still spill more crimson than she herself could spare. Those would graduate to larger animals. Goats, perhaps, stolen from Drevo under the guise of beast attacks. A pig or two from the realm on Drevo's other side. And then when even those proved insufficient—or perhaps by an accident or panic-kill—Dinah's Crow-Moon offerings had turned to human murder.

That would explain why human disappearances were only a recent phenomenon. It would explain why Dinah was in her endgame, no longer trying to hide the deaths. She had not started out as a necromantic, and she did not want to remain one.

That revelation hit Niccola with such clarity, it cleared her thoughts despite the Talaks all around. Dinah had started her own magic-line with a modest offering, but been forced to increase it over time. She'd done it to prove it could be done, and if Erelah's word was to be taken, the Calisian royals had responded with violence and shut her down. Only then had Dinah turned to more extreme views.