Blackbringer (33 page)

What was it? She’d called it obstinacy, but even Magpie, who had but a sprout’s understanding of it, could see that it was love, and it shivered her.

Love. She’d always thought of love as . . . affection, the look that passed often between her parents, or the feel of their arms around her. But wasn’t it this too, the core of iron in someone’s soul that made them capable of impossible things? It seemed a terrifying force.

If Kipepeo had never fallen to the Blackbringer, Magpie wondered, where would the world be now? If Bellatrix had followed the path laid out for her, had lived her life in the world, crossed the river as a biddy, and joined the seraphim when it was her time, there would have been no one here to notice when things began to go wrong. There would have been no one to trick the Magruwen, and Magpie might never have been. It was the lady’s tragedy as well as Fade’s that gave a flicker of hope to the rest of the world.

Magpie longed to give her hope in return. She thought of telling her of her dream, of the sparks trapped inside the Blackbringer, but she was afraid. What if it was all a fancy? Or would it be worse if it wasn’t? Even if she could rescue some souls, surely Kipepeo had long ago subsided to darkness. Surely his spark couldn’t be among those dull embers after so many thousands of years. She resolved to say nothing of it.

Bellatrix sensed her presence then and turned to Magpie, and her face lit up. She stood and held out her arms. “Magpie, blessings, I needed a breath of life just now.” Magpie went the rest of the way down the stairs and stepped into Bellatrix’s arms, and the lady clung to her and whispered, “Child of my heart.”

A little later, when Bellatrix had poured some cordial for them into crystal glasses and they were sitting on the cliff’s edge with their feet dangling over, watching the dragons, Bellatrix asked her, “What brings you to visit, child?”

“I was wondering, Lady, how you . . .” She hesitated, knowing the question would bring memories of Kipepeo, but she went on. “How did you capture the Blackbringer before?”

Bellatrix nodded. “Ah, aye, I thought it might be that.” Her eyes went far away into memory. “We tried many things,” she said. “But it was one glyph that worked in the end, though there were six of us visioning it together. Magpie, do you know what a vortex is?”

Magpie answered hesitantly. “It’s . . . a whirlpool?”

“That’s one kind of vortex,” said Bellatrix. “A vortex can also form in the air, a whirling that draws all things to its center. Let me show you . . . ”

And the two faeries bent their heads together and talked of magic. Bellatrix visioned a glyph and Magpie touched it from her mind with her fingertip, and for a time they practiced conjuring the spell together. Magpie watched with fascination as the empty air below their dangling feet stirred, then spun, lazily at first, then whipping steadily faster until it began to tug blossoms off the tufts of nightspink overhanging the cliff and suck them in. She could feel the tug on her feet and hooked her toes to keep her slippers from flying off. “Sharp!” she said.

But the spell faltered when a voice distracted them. “Mistress! Mistress!” Magpie and Bellatrix both spun to see Snoshti hurrying down the stairs. The imp paused when she saw Magpie, then rushed down, crying, “Blessings! My lady, my lass, it’s bad, it’s awful bad!”

The faeries both lifted themselves with their wings and rushed to meet the imp. “What is it, Snoshti?” asked Bellatrix.

“It’s—” she gasped, struggling for breath. “It’s the Magruwen! Strag . . . the shindy—” She gasped again. “He saw . . . the Blackbringer . . . go down the well!”

In Dreamdark the Blackbringer seeped through the trees, seeming like a shadow cut loose from its moorings. Other nighthunters—foxes, bog hags, bats—fled before him as his hunger reached long fingers into the night. He was moving away from the school and the Djinn’s well, headed back to the Spiderdowns, where he would sink out of reach of the coming light.

Throughout the great wood, creatures and faeries crouched hidden in cellars and burrows, tense and sleepless, knowing the darkness could come for them at any moment. Only in Never Nigh did the faeries sleep soundly within their wreath of ancient spells. But one bed, at least, was empty, for the Blackbringer was not the only one hunting this night. Queen Vesper sailed among the treetops, clutching her mirror in her hand and whispering a steady chant, “Whatever your will, whatever your whim, come back to my mirror, your place is within” as she searched furiously for her wayward slave.

At Rathersting Castle, Talon too was awake. All through the night he had hunched by his fire, clicking his needles together and knitting glyphs into spidersilk. All night his mind had flowed with the river of energy he now knew was the Tapestry, and it had guided his fingers and his mind as he made this new thing, rushing to finish it before the break of day.

Beyond the hedge, Magpie glimmered in silently beside the Magruwen’s well. She lifted her head and sniffed the breeze like a creature. She prowled up the side of the well, cocked her head to listen, and sniffed again. Then she descended into the sulfurous dark. When she reached the bottom she saw the Djinn’s door stood open. Within was . . . darkness. Neither flame flickered nor ember glowed. Sick with memories of the Vritra’s dreaming place, Magpie sagged against the door frame.

The Magruwen was gone.

Despair filled her like a cup. She could scarcely find breath as panic overtook her, and she leaned there, gasping and dizzy. The Magruwen had only just awakened, and the world had trembled on the brink of a new age, but now . . . he was gone. She hadn’t even gotten the seal or the pomegranate seed. It was too late. The Blackbringer would have the pomegranate. Even now, he could be peeling back its withered skin. The light of all those stars could be flooding back into the fabric of night, unlocking the ancient being imprisoned within.

At any moment the Astaroth could burst free to destroy the world. Millions and millions of lives would subside into the endless ocean, just as the Magruwen had predicted. And then there would be nothing. Ever again.

Magpie fought to steady her breathing and as she did she became aware of the pulse of the Tapestry all around her, aswirl and urgent, tugging at her like a tide, lifting her like a wind. She stood. She rose up on her wings, following it. So strong was its compulsion she felt she had scarcely to beat her wings but simply let it carry her, and as it did, a small hope flickered within her.

In the grip of the current of magic she flew swiftly westward across the vast expanse of Dreamdark as the sun rose.

At the castle, Pup straggled bleary-eyed down the corridor to wake Magpie and opened her door to an empty room. Thinking she had already gone to the Great Hall for breakfast, he went to find her there. Within moments the crows were in a panic. They raced along the corridors, down to the dungeon where Batch lay muttering in his sleep, up to the ramparts where the warriors nodded grim good mornings to them. Magpie was nowhere to be found.

Hearing a ruckus, Talon laid his work aside and hurried from his room. Visions of the knives scattered at Issrin filled his mind and for a terrible moment he was certain he would find that the guards had been swallowed in the night. But as he rounded the corner of the uppermost stair with a bound he saw the guards all gathered with the crows and his panic eased . . . until he got a look at Calypso.

The bird’s eyes were wild. “Magpie’s missing, lad,” he said.

 

Magpie hovered uncertainly above Issrin Ev. The ruin was as forlorn by dawn as it had been by dusk, more so, now that grim memories of Poppy and Maniac haunted the place. She shuddered and wondered why she was here. The pulse had simply ebbed away and left her. She hung in the air and looked down, and then, through shadow and pine bough, suddenly she saw eyes peering up at her. A jolt went through her, and her first reflex carried her backward and away, but an instant later she realized whose eyes they were and who it was lurking down in Issrin Ev.

It was Vesper.

With a steely look, Magpie dove like a hawk, swooping low to the ground and coming in for a sharp landing in front of the lady, who drew back a step and looked at her with hate-filled eyes. “Alive?” she hissed.

“Aye, and why should I be otherwise?” Magpie hissed back. “If you’re hunting your devil, you’ll have no luck.”

“My devil?” repeated Vesper with a forced laugh.

“Aye, laugh!” Magpie spat. “Even if the world wasn’t about to rip wide open, I wouldn’t trouble my mind with you, Lady. You’re less than nothing. But it aches me something sick to see Bellatrix’s crown on you, and her tunic. Give them to me now,
queen
!”

Vesper laughed again. Her hair was still hidden in its layers of scarves, still wrapped in pearl strands and crowned with Bellatrix’s golden circlet. Standing there with the light of dawn shimmering across her firedrake scales, tall and elegant in her headdress of silks, she did look like a queen, like a cold, vicious queen on the wrong side of a legend. “Little gypsy,” she purred, “who are
you
to threaten
me
?”

Her eyes never leaving Vesper’s, Magpie slowly unsheathed Skuldraig and held the gleaming blade up in front of her face. With her lip drawing up in a snarl, she growled, “I’m the one who wields Bellatrix’s blade.”

Vesper’s eyes widened and she stared at the knife. She looked back and forth rapidly between Magpie’s eyes and the blade, and her lips contorted into a snarl of her own. Magpie could see cunning in her expression, and greed. “Which do you think’s more useful in a fight, Lady?” Magpie asked. “A dagger or a crown?”

Vesper’s hand moved in her pocket, and Magpie held Skuldraig at the ready, thinking the lady was drawing out a blade of her own. But what she held out wasn’t a blade. It was a mirror.

“Fine time for vanity!” Magpie scoffed.

Vesper replied in her most lilting, musical tones, “Whatever your will, whatever your whim, look into my mirror . . .” Unthinking, Magpie flicked her eyes toward it in irritation, and the lady finished with a hiss,
“. . . Your place is within.”

Magpie gasped. Vesper smiled. The mirror warped and Magpie found herself staring at her own horrified reflection as she was drawn toward the mirror by some violent magic. Her body twisted with a thrill of pain. She was wrenched from her feet as her body stretched like a cast shadow, not like living flesh. Her vision blurred and she screamed, her eyes clenched shut in agony as she was sucked into Vesper’s mirror.

The lady reached out and caught Magpie’s wrist before it could disappear inside the glass. She twisted, and Skuldraig dropped to the moss. When she released Magpie’s hand, the strange, attenuated shape of the lass was sucked swiftly in and the silver surface closed over her and calmed like a pond. Vesper gazed into it and smiled. Nothing peered back at her now but her own lovely face. Magpie had vanished.

Vesper knelt and picked the dagger up off the moss.

 

At Rathersting Castle, Talon and the crows took the steps to the dungeon three and four at a time, arriving breathless before Batch’s prison cell. “What is it, Prince?” asked the faerie on guard.

“You can go, Hesperus. I’ll see to this wretch.”

With a shrug Hesperus left, and Talon turned to Batch, who was leering out at them with his beady black eyes, seeing their distress, already weighing it and calculating.

“Blessings of the morning, Good-imp,” said Calypso.

“Suck lint,” said Batch.

Talon unlocked the cell and went over to the imp reclining in the straw. He knelt and said, “Now listen, imp, I won’t tell you what big things are happening in Dreamdark; sure you know already. But your master’s worse a thing than even you know, and if you don’t help us it could mean the end of everything.”

Batch carefully inserted his big toe into his nostril and rummaged.

Talon went on, “Not just the end of faeries, you ken, the end of everything!”

Batch yawned.

“Listen!” Talon cried. “We need you to find Magpie, do you hear? I know you find things. It’s got to be you. You’ve got to help!”

Batch withdrew his toe from his nose and commenced to gnaw on his thick toenail. In exasperation Talon cried, “Answer me!”

Calypso stepped forward. All too well he remembered the scavenger Lick and the events of Amitav Ev, and he knew the motives of imps better than Talon did. He said, “Look, ye blighted soul, what’s it going to take?”

And Batch released his toenail from between his teeth and looked at the crow with a gleam of interest.

“What’s it going to cost?” demanded Calypso. “What is it ye want?”

“Well,” said Batch with a wicked grin, “I always been keen to fly.”

 

Vesper had slid her mirror back into her pocket and was feasting her eyes upon the elegant designs engraved on Bellatrix’s blade. She laughed softly at her own good luck and wondered what that twig of a gypsy lass was doing with such a knife. Her mind turned to what Magpie had said about Gutsuck and she wondered, where was he? Well, she could only hope that whatever had happened to the cur, he’d at least dispatched that scavenger first. There was no place for Batch Hangnail in the world, not with what he knew.

She was just rising on her wings to return to Never Nigh when the crows plunged through the pines, caught sight of her, and began to caw. “It’s that wormy queen!” she heard one of them shout.

She turned with a sneer to retort but caught herself when she saw the Rathersting prince was with them, and carefully she rearranged her face into the look of lovely tranquility for which she was known. “Young Lord Rathersting,” she said sweetly when he drew nigh, riding astride a crow.

“Lady Vesper,” he returned, his eyes narrowed with suspicion.

A small falcon flew at his side and Talon asked it, “Are you certain?” to which it nodded and spiraled down to land in the temple courtyard, seeming strangely clumsy for such a hunter of the skies.