Blackbringer (37 page)

 

Everyone stared. For long seconds they couldn’t even gasp. Then Calypso shrieked and flew at the seal, desperately trying to gouge it off. Stunned, Talon reeled in the tether with his good hand. It had been severed clean by the Magruwen’s sealing spell. His mind screamed and resisted believing what he’d just seen.

And then, in the dense mass of dazed faeries and creatures who’d stumbled back into the world after so long adrift, the spiders, released from Magpie’s spell, reawakened.

If any soul that night was pulled down into the dark cracks in the earth and devoured by spiders, none ever knew of it after. When the foul creatures revived, the Rathersting shook off their shock and sprang to life, relishing enemies their blades could bite, thrilling in rescue on so grand a scale. If anyone could have counted in the chaos, they would have discovered some thousand souls newly returned to the world. But it was a time for action, not counting, and by the time the Rathersting had coaxed and dragged every imp and faerie free of the Spiderdowns, most of the snags had slipped away into the forest and the mannies were wandering lost and afraid.

Those who’d been bitten by spiders were Orchidspike’s first patients when she conducted a hasty triage later in the Great Hall at Rathersting Castle. She administered a potion to subdue the poison that was burning in their veins and turned to see to other injuries.

There were many. Dozens of torn wings—those could wait—and wounds of such variety the healer knew they could not have happened this night. Bite wounds with jagged snag teeth embedded in them, clean slashes from sharp weapons, contusions, lashes, burns. Kneeling over a Sayash faerie with long spines from a devil’s barbed tail protruding from her leg, Orchidspike realized these wounds were casualties of the devil wars and were tens of thousands of years old, as were the faeries who suffered them.

As flummoxed as she’d ever been in her life, she had to press her hand to her heart to steady herself. However much she’d hoped Magpie would succeed in her bold plan, it had never occurred to her there might be souls from the Dawn Days still alive within the Blackbringer! Orchidspike could have used Talon at such a time, but she wouldn’t call for him. Not now. She’d had but a moment with him when she bandaged his hand, before the needs of the injured claimed her attention, and now her thoughts kept returning to his shocked face, and to Magpie.

“Lady, might I be of help to you?” asked a red-haired lass the healer didn’t know. About to ask her if she could manage a spell to boil water, Orchidspike paused and took a closer look at her. Her beautiful face wore the same pale, haunted look as all these others, as if she’d just awakened from a nightmare. She too had come out of the darkness.

“Lass, what’s your name?” Orchidspike asked her.

“Poppy Manygreen, Lady.”

Orchidspike, old eyes glistening, said a silent blessing and set Poppy to work mixing purifying balm for the many wounds that surrounded them.

 

Calypso and Mingus dragged the Blackbringer’s bottle into the ragged hole in the mountain that had once been the face of Issrin Ev. The other crows followed, with Talon astride Bertram. All dread the Djinn King had once inspired in them was forgotten as they cried out for him.

“Lord Magruwen!” they cawed, their voices muffled by the dust of four thousand years that blanketed the ancient corridors.

They emerged into a great chamber, where Talon’s light spell glittered over a trove of treasure. They swooped around the room, distraught and shrieking for the Djinn.

“Is it done?” he demanded, emerging from a doorway.

“Where is the lass?”

Calypso and Mingus beat down to him, lowering the bottle. “Lord!” cried Calypso. “Ye got to unseal it!”

“What?” he hissed.

Talon leapt off Bertram’s back to the ground. He held Skuldraig in one hand and the shrouded star in the other. He laid them both before the Magruwen and said, “Just before the seal settled on, a devil attacked Magpie, and the Blackbringer reached out and sucked them both in with him! You got to get her out!”

The Magruwen looked at the bottle, and the blade, and the bundle of old skin pulsing with starlight. No expression played over the sculpted planes of his mask, but flames spewed from his eyes and horns. “Nay!” he choked, and seized the bottle, his golden gloves clashing against its silver. But he didn’t pry off the seal that bore his sigil. He only said, “The seal is fixed. The faerie is lost.”

Until he heard the Magruwen’s words, Talon had not for a moment considered that Magpie might be lost. The absurdity of it! That single second when this thing had happened—it was barely as long as the blink of an eye, and he just couldn’t believe that so small a moment could wreak so terrible a change. A sense of crazed outrage welled up in him, as if a mistake had been made in the arrangement of the moments and he should be able to reach back in time and correct it. It would take so little, just seeing the devil in time or skewering the tongue on his knife as he’d done once before.

But there was not now and never had been magic for reaching back in time. Past moments lay as they fell and nothing would stir them.

Talon collapsed to his knees as his stubborn disbelief was stripped away and with it vanished a feeling he hadn’t even known was growing in him, a new sense that the world was wild with possibility, that the whole of life was not a castle rampart or a single forest, but a mesh of pathways waiting to be forged.

Magpie . . .

The crows were sobbing themselves hoarse and it was the most desolate sound Talon had ever heard.

“What’s all this noise?” he heard someone ask, and looked up into the imp marm’s black eyes as she suddenly appeared.

“Good-imp Snoshti . . . ,” he said, his heart clenching at the thought of giving her the news.

“I had a time finding ye lot, what with the crush out there. All them souls. Blessings! She did it, neh? My lass!” Her furry little creature face was bright with joy that hurt Talon’s heart to see.

“Good-imp—” he started to say, but she cut him off.

“But what’s all this snoolery? Feather!” She tugged at Calypso’s wing. “What’s happened to ye?”

Calypso couldn’t even answer. He pressed his head against the silver bottle and wept.

“It’s Magpie . . . ,” Talon said quietly.

“Eh?” Snoshti’s whiskers twitched. “What of her?”

“The Blackbringer . . . ,” he told her. “He . . . he got her, mistress. She’s in there.”

Snoshti looked at the bottle, then at Talon, then back at the bottle, puzzled. “Lad,” she growled, her face ferocious. Then she chuffed and snorted. It sounded almost like a laugh. “What blither!” she declared. “Magpie’s not in there!”

“Aye, for I saw it myself.”

“Neh, lad! Foolish faerie! And ye birds, who should know her better! Magpie’s not in there!”

Talon looked at her, wide-eyed and confused.

“She’s in the Moonlit Gardens!”

 

Magpie was dreaming of the Tapestry. She lay on a soft white cushion in a little room in the peak of an impossibly tall spindle of rock. It rose from the floor of the dragon’s canyon like a needle standing on end, and at its very tip Fade had hollowed out this little room just for her. A dreaming place of her own. In it were many high windows—a panorama of moon—and the single deep cushion on which she slept.

She had never known such exhaustion.

When she’d found herself yanked suddenly back into the dark, she’d been too weak to think and far too weak to summon the devilishly complex champion’s glyph. It had failed her utterly. But as she felt her edges begin to melt, another, simpler glyph flickered in her mind. Threshold, moonlight, garden, just like Snoshti had taught her. With an effort that felt like an explosion behind her eyes, she’d visioned it, and everything went black as the moth wings took her.

When she arrived on the riverbank she was already unconscious. She’d sunk to her knees and slumped to the grass and she hadn’t opened her eyes since, not when Fade gathered her up in his paw and carried her through the sky, not when Bellatrix treated the wound on her shoulder, visioning healing glyphs, cleaning off the spatter of spider venom and plucking Gutsuck’s teeth out of her torn flesh. And not now, with Bellatrix by her side singing a ballad in Old Tongue and feeding teaspoons of cool water between her lips.

She was deep in dreams, her inner eyes open and tracing the miraculous patterns of the Tapestry’s weave. Her mind found rest as her body healed. It would be days or weeks before she’d wake.

Hungry for news that Magpie couldn’t give her, Bellatrix had sent Snoshti to Dreamdark to learn what had happened. The lady’s voice sounded peaceful as she sang, but her eyes darted anxiously to the windows, watching the sky shapes for one that might be Fade ferrying the hedge imp back across the canyon to her. But Fade didn’t come, and Bellatrix began to think that in all the desperately slow years she’d passed in this timeless place, these moments were the longest.

Her head was throbbing with anxiety when suddenly Snoshti bustled through the door.

“Good-imp,” said Bellatrix, surprised. “I didn’t see Fade coming. Did he carry you?”

“Neh, Lady, I’ve had a lift from another,” said Snoshti, and Bellatrix saw that her black eyes were sparkling.

“What is it, Snoshti? Have you brought news?”

“Aye. The Blackbringer is captured.”

“Blessings be!”

“And the Magruwen has returned to Issrin Ev.”

Bellatrix fell silent, eyes gleaming as a rush of emotion swept over her face. “He has?” she whispered, and when the imp nodded, she clenched closed her eyes to hold back tears. A single shining drop escaped and slid down her cheek. “Then there is hope,” she said quietly.

“And Lady Bellatrix?” said Snoshti.

Bellatrix opened her eyes. Snoshti stepped aside and through the door came a faerie. The spoon in Bellatrix’s hand clattered to the floor.

The Ithuriel’s champion was an Ifrit prince, tall and beautiful and dark as ebony, with immense white moth wings and black braids crowned with a circlet of silver. In the doorway he stood absolutely still and stared at his bride.

A sound—a laugh, a sob—escaped Bellatrix’s lips, and Kipepeo cried out. They met in the air and clung to each other as the force of their flight spun them up toward the ceiling of the vaulted room. They laughed and sobbed and their wings fanned and held them aloft and spun them as their cheeks pressed, tears mingled, and lips met.

Snoshti beamed and chortled. Circling the spire, Fade peered in through the moon windows and exhaled a cascade of fireworks. And in the vault of the sky the seraphim gathered to watch, and even such souls as they who had gone beyond all earthly concerns were moved by the embrace and began to weep.

Kipepeo wasn’t the only one who came to the Moonlit Gardens that day. The elders of Dreamdark had managed to explain to all the gathered souls what had befallen them and had welcomed any who chose to stay. Some did, but many more chose the Gardens, unable to face a world from which their loved ones had been gone already for thousands of years.

A week passed and the throng in Dreamdark thinned. The Rathersting hunted down escaped devils in the dark corners of the forest and found many of the sniveling, mild snags from the catacombs in Rome. These they put in the dungeon and fed on leftovers while they decided what to do with them, but as for the more fiendish devils, these they recaptured in bottles the Magruwen crafted for that purpose. They didn’t know how many still lurked in the great wood, and kept searching.

Talon, returning after dark from a day spent casting a human phantasm to guide the lost mannies to the hedge, found the crowd in the Great Hall composed mostly of Rathersting for the first time since the battle. He piled a plate with mushroom sandwiches and blackberry pie and plunked it down at the chief’s table. His father wrapped his arm around him and left it there, periodically squeezing his son’s shoulder or tousling his hair. Talon beamed and told his father stories as he ate, but as soon as he was done he pushed back his chair and went to his room. All night his knitting needles could be heard clicking unsteadily as he maneuvered them with his bandaged hand. The dawning of the new age might occupy his days, but his nights were for creating, and he worked in secret with a single-mindedness that was driving him to exhaustion.

 

Orchidspike and Poppy worked side by side day after day, mending old wounds from the devil wars, administering potions and poultices, and reweaving all shapes of wings. The healer was each day more astonished by the lass’s gifts and each day more delighted with her sweet nature and surprising twinkling of mischief.

As for the young Rathersting warriors who took to offering the healer their help—something that had certainly never happened before—Orchidspike attributed that to Poppy’s uncommon loveliness. But her new apprentice seemed to have no mind for flirtation and paid the lads no heed at all.