ANGIE. TIME TO TALK TO BIRDS.

“Oh gods and powers, what now?” Angie muttered, sighed, and stepped off the walkway onto the lawn. Then she realized all four magpies were staring at her silently, and an alarm went off in her head. She started counting. They stared at her silently for nineteen seconds, much longer than the necessary thirteen seconds. Then they started jeering and generally making asses of themselves.

A corvid augury.

“Shit. Four magpies,” she said to herself as she walked toward the beech. “Which one is magpies? ‘One for sorrow, two for joy?’ Or was it ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth?’ I think… ravens and jays start with ‘sadness’ rather than ‘sorrow...’” She looked up at the birds as she closed on the tree. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you guys know which rhyme is yours or would remind me if you did?” she asked them, not bothering to hide the worried annoyance in her voice.

“No WAY, cloaca pecker!” replied the magpie that’d been screeching at her.

“Cloaca pecker?” Angie exclaimed, utterly disgusted, as she knew what a cloaca was. “Why would you even—?!” She lowered her voice, muttering to herself, “Why are birds so terrible?” at a low enough volume that the magpies couldn’t hear her. Despite by-and-large being verbally abusive, vulgar jerks, magpies were also notoriously sensitive. Insulting them, Angie knew, could eliminate any chance they might tell her something useful.

At a normal volume, she said, “I’ve asked you lot not to address me with that sort of language, over and over again.” She was vaguely aware of an increase in crowd noise behind her, but kept her attention on the birds.

The birds just laughed in response, the raucous chatter grating. “Four magpies,” Angie muttered. Behind her, a quarter of her mind noted that there was crowd noise approaching from the way she came—possibly Megan coming? “Pretty sure magpies are joy, which means it’s ‘One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl and four for a boy.’ Corvid auguries are so annoying.”[1]

[1] It is well known that if one or more of a single type of most species of corvid stare intently and silently at you for at least thirteen seconds, it foretells a certain or near-certain fortune or event sometime in the near future—a few days, at most.

In Fredonia, the auger delivering species of corvid are magpies, crows, ravens, and jays—the specific prediction is based upon the species of bird and number of birds partaking in the staredown. Fredonic Common has a number of variations of counting rhymes which serve to, more or less, remind you what a given number of birds is foretelling.

However, one peculiarity of this particular mystical phenomenon is that it is impossible to include the actual name of the bird species in the rhymes—universally, with no known work around, people simply cannot learn the rhymes at all if the actual bird name is used as part of the rhyme. So to accurately (and even when you know its coming, the way the augury comes true is often unexpected) predict what a given group of corvids indicates, at least past two, you have to learn four different variations of the same rhyme and do your best to remember which applies to which type of bird.

One and two are easy, though. Those always indicate that things are gonna go wrong, or that things might just go right.

She glared back up at the birds, who seemed to return the favor. “I’m not pregnant, you know, and not likely to become so. And I have a boyfriend. What sort of boy is in my near future that I need to care about ahead of time?”

“‘And I have a boyfriend,’” one of the magpies echoed, more snidely than Angie would have thought a bird could manage before she hit puberty and they all stopped being polite around her. “Aren’t you special, you internally incubating imbecile! What a dumb fucking way to make your babies! Shit eating monkey!”

“Eat a peanut and choke on it,” Angie said, her patience fraying. “Do you have anything helpful to tell me or are you just here to insult me now?”

There was definitely what sounded like a large group of people approaching from behind her, based on the layered sounds of chatter, of a greater density than the general bustle of students around the quad. She glanced over her shoulder. Sure enough, a large group of students, almost parade-like, meandered along the same path she’d come, along the south-side walkway between the Tower in the center of campus and the two buildings on the south side that flanked it. But it looked like they'd probably come from the west quad, rather from the edge of campus to the south like her, based on the length of the semi-organized crowd.

Two single file lines, definitely over five people but probably not more than ten in length, led a much more disorganized mob, with a trio of people at the very front of the lines. The kid at the head of each line flanked a third: a broad-shouldered boy with glossy hair as black as the heads of the magpies Angie was speaking with—even blacker, really, without the magpies’ greenish sheen. It gleamed in the morning sunlight. Hanging from his belt on either hip were two small, beautifully wrought silver lanterns, inlaid with sigils of gold. Their bottom ends were attached to black leather cuffs that wrapped around his thighs such that they didn’t swing wildly as he moved.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

As she took this in, one of the magpies croaked out, “A boy with a birthday, OF COURSE! That’s the sort of boy you should care about, you ungrateful urine-spraying sweat-beast!”

“Don’t call me a Beast!” Angie snapped instinctively at another b-word as she swung her gaze back to the tree with a glare, more of her temper shredding—she imagined it drifting into the air around her, flicker-tongues of flame that she had to keep from destroying everything around her. Gods forsaken shitting birds! Then she processed the rest of the sentence.

“Wait, what?” Angie said, feeling nearly as blind-sided as she had when Megan’d stepped out her front door that morning.[1] “A birthday? Every boy has a birthday.” She knew what the bird must mean, though. It was just a wild thing for it to bring up. It was barely more than a child’s whimsy! But what else could they be talking about? How did the magpie even know about it? It made no sense.

[1] Angie intentionally chose to walk past Megan’s house that morning, of course, daring Fortune to let them encounter each other, finally, with no way to avoid it, just to see how Megan would react. She hadn’t reckoned on Megan intentionally trying to catch her to make up, though.

But what else could it be?

“You couldn’t be fucking four! You were made to be three and one! But your fifth has arrived, so your Silver One has returned to you as well!” the magpie said. Then, at a startling volume compared to the previous sentence, it cried out, “Gots to goes, crotchbleeder!”[1] before it and another took to the wing, swooping out of the tree past her head, too close for comfort. “Sees yas!” one shouted right next to her ear as it passed, making her flinch. When she opened her eyes, though, she found the other two focused on her again, suddenly silent, unlike the last minute or two, when they’d all been cackling at each other’s ‘hilarious witticisms.’

[1] Angie grunted in disgust as an autonomous reaction. Bloody birds.

Were they… were they seriously auguring at her again?

That, Angie knew, was not normal, even for corvid auguries, which weren’t exactly common. She stared back at them, counting, until she reached a count of nineteen, at which point the two of them started insulting her. Ignoring them, she turned again to check out the weird crowd, and as she did, she heard the magpies that had flown that direction start screaming invective so rapidly she couldn’t really follow it all.

The magpies who’d just buzzed her head were now definitely screaming at the magpie-haired boy, hopping up and down on the walkway immediately in front of him. He and the rest of the crowd that could see what was going on were looking at them with the astonished delight of normal-ass people witnessing wildlife acting in a mystical manner. Angie noted that the two kids who’d been flanking the boy when she’d glanced that way earlier were now standing next to each other a couple of meters away, looking at the birds, while kids who’d been behind them in the lines were now standing next to the boy.

“Peace out, enema-breath!”[1] one of the magpies in the beech tree behind her screeched, and then another bird whipped past her head, so close the wind mussed her hair. The magpie landed next to its brethren, who immediately shut up.

[1] Why the shit a magpie knew about enemas Angie didn’t want to know.

The three birds rapidly hopped in a complete circle, following each other spaced equidistant around the circle’s circumference, before flutteringly repositioning themselves into a line facing magpie-black-hair-boy. In unison, they seemed to bow to the boy, and then stared at him. Angie couldn’t keep from counting when their heads went back up, and the crowd, similarly, grew hushed.

At the count of thirteen, the crowd reacted with what was nearly a cheer. They didn’t seem to notice that the birds kept staring until a count of nineteen, but Angie did. At that point, the birds started screaming again, pouring incoherent vulgar abuse on the boy. None of what the birds were saying to the boy seemed in any way related to the auguries, which was just as well, as Angie doubted the boy or anyone else in that crowd could understand them, based on their behavior. After another twenty seconds or so of a truly staggering variety of profanity[1], the three magpies scattered, flying off in different directions.

[1] For no good gods damned reason—it gained the magpies nothing to roast people who couldn’t understand them.

The boy, and the rest of the crowd, took a moment to gather themselves. It wasn’t every day you witnessed a corvid augury, after all. Let alone two in a row.

Angie considered that. That boy, with the very, very black hair and the lanterns and the brightest blue skinny jeans and richest moss-green fashion tee Angie had maybe ever seen, had received a two-magpie augury, more or less simultaneously with Angie’s own second augury, also from two magpies. Two for joy. And then, the boy’d received a second augury, with a third magpie. Three for a girl.

Then the boy looked over at Angie, and a jolt of surprise shot through her. Not because he looked at her, as she’d probably been pretty obviously yelling at the magpies while they’d been in the tree, so chances were good he’d noticed that before they flew over to land in front of him. No, it was because Angie was at least ten meters away from the boy (probably more—Angie, like the typical person, wasn’t so great at judging distances on the fly), but she could see his green eyes so clearly. Like polished green sea glass, with an odd shadow toward the pupils.

The magpie-haired boy started walking toward Angie, giving a ‘just-one-sec’ gesture to the kids he’d been with, who responded with frustrated expressions, comically overwrought, as if being deprived of his presence caused them active suffering.

Which… like… as he approached, Angie could almost see why that might feel like an appropriate reaction.

He was godsdamned bloody beautiful.