Whisper The Dead

Chapter 2

The goblin markets were as crowded as a midsummer fair. Witches mingled woth warlocks,goblin spat on cobblestones, amd changeling children pilfered magic trinkets from shops pressed together like disreputable lovers. This was the London Bridge ordinary folk never saw. Under the pomegranate laterns, pegasi were as common as draft horses, ad strange ingredients filled glass jars every turn. Every rooftop, no matter flimsy and poor, was crowned with a gargoyle crouching protectively, ready to gobble up stray magic.
Cautious witches draped themselves with evil-eye beads, carried white-horse banishing powder, and filled their pockets with salt and iron nails. All of these ingredients could be had at any booth, but stronger, and slightly more illegal, items were purchased from a Rover. Or a hag, but hags were even worse than the scarred, belligerent Rovers, who swaggered diwn the bridge, fighting and stealing and generally making a nuisance of themselves. They weren't quite warlocks, but they certainly flirted with the boundaries of magic and good sense.
Tonight Moira was alone under the bridge. The other Madcaps had scattered as soon as the Order doubled its patrols. The rooftops were barely safe, never mind now that the Greybeards were even more insistent on claiming every witch for their own. Especially Madcaps, since they had a way with gargoyle magic. But a Madcap would not be claimed, not in life or in death. Moira would make sure of it.
  Madcap funerals were rare---- too often a Madcap witch went missing, her bones never to be found again. But Moirahad held her friend Strawberry when she died and knew exactly where the body was taken. She'd stolen it herself from the back of a Greybeard's cart, still wrapped in a preserving spell to keep it from decomposing.
   It was bad enough that Strawberry was murdered by a bleeding debutante for the warlock Greymalkin Sisters.