Blackbringer

by Laini Taylor

  “Show you?”

  “Aye, look, just vision it and I’ll use memory touch to see it.”

  “Memory touch? I read about that in one of Orchidspike’s books. . . . You’re a memory mage?”

  “A what? I don’t know. I just learned the spell from some Sayash faeries. I’ll teach you, if you teach me the phantasm.”

  So Talon visioned the glyph and Magpie touched her finger to his brow and the glyph burned to life brightly in her own mind too. Within a few moments she had a phantasm of her own doing a silly dance, and it was soon joined by another of Talon’s, which mimed kicking Magpie’s in the fanny. “Eh!” cried Magpie, and they dueled with their phantasms until they were laughing too hard to hold the glyphs clear, and the images faded away.

  Once they’d stopped laughing, Magpie used the mirror image of the memory touch spell to touch the glyph into Talon’s mind, and he carefully committed it to memory before opening his eyes.

  Bertram had begun to snore on his perch, and Calypso gave Magpie a stern look and said, “’Pie, for the love of all that’s blessed, sleep.”

  “Ach. Bossy bird,” she grumbled, lying down and nestling herself into the silk. “Good night, Talon,” she said, adding, “and once we get back to the castle, you have to teach me the sixth glyph for phantom.”

  “Sure,” he said softly. He closed his eyes. The castle, he thought, and a strange reluctance overcame him at the reminder of his real life. Not that the day had been all magic— neh, he felt sick just remembering the dead things floating in jars—but the thought of returning to the castle ramparts to stand watch, after all he’d seen today, all he’d done, made him feel dull and weary.

  “It was a lot to take in all at once today, neh?” Magpie whispered, as if reading his mind.

  “Aye,” he whispered back. “This what it’s like for you every day?”

  “Neh, we keep clear of mannies as much as we can. But there’s a wide lot to see in the world, sure, and a lot to do. And not just catching devils either. There’s spells to save, and things to steal back from plunder monkeys, and temples to find, and the Djinns’ old libraries to explore.”

  “So that’s what you do?” he asked. “You go around hunting down spells and things?”

  “Aye. My parents figured out a long time ago that magic is slipping out of the world, but it turns out it’s worse than they know,” she said, thinking of the Tapestry, the unweaving, the Astaroth. “Far worse.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I been finding out some things lately,” she said. “Some real dire things. But the one to worry on first is the Blackbringer.”

  “What was all that you were saying back at the castle? About it being the . . . what was it? Asterisk?”

  “Astaroth,” she corrected. “He was a wind elemental, as ancient as the Djinn, who helped them make the world.”

  “Eh? I never heard of that.”

  “Neh, no one did. Things went bad betwixt ’em. The Astaroth made the devils, so the Djinn did away with him. I thought Fade meant they killed him, but now I think maybe they just changed him somehow, into the Blackbringer.”

  “What’s this about Fade?” Talon asked, arching an eyebrow at her.

  “Er . . . ,” Magpie said, and nimble lies filled her mouth, ready to tumble out. But she bit them back. “Well,” she said slowly, her eyes holding his gaze steady. “When Snoshti took me away before . . . I met him.”

  “What?” he asked with a laugh, thinking she was joking. “Where?”

  “In the canyon where he lives.”

  He stopped laughing. “I thought he was dead.”

  “He is.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve been to the Moonlit Gardens.”

  She just looked at him.

  “Impossible!” he exclaimed, remembering only as he said it, What do I know of impossible? Less and less every minute, sure, he thought, and paused before asking, “Okay, but . . . how?”

  “That blessing ceremony I told you about . . . ,” she said, and took a deep breath, blushing. “Talon, listen, this is all going to sound mad, but here it is.”

  She told him everything in one swift rush. By the end of it he was just staring at her, and she said peevishly, “You wanted to know, now you know. Say something.”

  “So it’s . . . the Tapestry? The . . . energy . . . that’s all around us? Like a river?”

  Magpie cocked her head and looked at him keenly. “You feel it too?”

  He nodded. “When I’m knitting, it’s like my mind falls into a river full of glyphs that just takes me. . . .”

  Magpie was nodding too, and that wondering smile was playing at the corners of her lips. “Flummox me,” she said. “And Poppy felt it too. I guess I’m not alone like I always thought.”

  “Do you think all faeries feel it?” Talon asked.

  “I know they used to, before the Djinn forsook us.”

  “Maybe when the Magruwen dreamed you, his dreams sort of spilled over and touched other sprouts who were being born too.”

  “We are all the same age,” she mused. “And we were all born in Dreamdark. I wonder if it’s just us or if there are others too.”

  “I wonder.”

  “So you . . . believe me?” Magpie asked timidly.

  He shrugged. “Sure I never knew anyone like you before,” he said easily. “But Magpie . . . if you were in the Gardens, did you happen to see . . . my folk?”

  “Neh. The Blackbringer’s victims aren’t there.”

  “What? Then where are they?”

  “I don’t know,” she said in a bleak voice.

  Batch rolled over then and farted in his sleep and Magpie and Talon both had to suppress snorts of laughter. “It’s good to know,” said Talon, “that nothing’s ever so serious that a squelch can’t make you laugh.”

  “Words to live by,” Magpie agreed.

  Calypso said in an exasperated voice, “Jacksmoke, faeries! Do I have to knock ye on the heads to make ye rest?”

  They tried to stifle their laughter. As she rolled over onto her side, Magpie felt something dig into her hip, and she sat up suddenly. “Oh!”

  “What is it?” Talon asked.

  Magpie was holding a little metal flask that was hooked onto her belt. “I forgot about this,” she said sadly. “Poppy gave it to me the day she . . .” Her mind rejected the word died, and she just trailed off. “It’s a potion she made. It’s supposed to help you remember your dreams.” She unscrewed the little cap and took a deep breath before drinking a swig of it. “Hmm,” she said. “It tastes nice. Want some? Dreams, you know, Bellatrix said that dreams are everything.”

  Talon shook his head and murmured, “Bellatrix” with wonder as he reached for the flask. He took a sip and handed it back.

  They flopped down back to back and nestled snug in the deep silks. “Good night, Talon,” said Magpie.

  “Good night, Magpie.”

  They were fast asleep within a minute. On the edge of the trunk Calypso muttered, “About time!”

  THIRTY-TWO

  That night Talon dreamed of flying, as he did most nights. But when Calypso woke him a few hours later he was filled not with longing or disappointment as he often was on waking to his real wings, but with an idea. His eyes snapped open, and he stared unseeing at the dust drifting overhead as an image spun slowly in his mind. An image of all twelve glyphs for flight joined into one exquisite pattern, a pattern he was certain had never existed before in all of time. A new spell for flight, which he would use to knit his next skin.

  Magpie dreamed she was pursued by darkness, and in the dream she stood and let it steal over her like a numbing tide. She tossed in her sleep, murmuring. All around her the emptiness spread like a devastated sky, its dead and dying stars all but extinguished. But then in her dream she held aloft a light, a pure and piercing light, and those sparks flared in answer, one by one, and began to shine. She turned in a circle and they were everywhere. She walked on with her light, and th
ey began to fall into step behind her, and all night long in her sleep she walked through the darkness, until at last she found the edge of it and stepped back into the world. They filed out of the emptiness behind her, one by one, Poppy, Maniac, the tattooed warriors, even the fishermen, their turbans fallen sadly askew on their huge human heads as they came blinking back into the light.

  She woke with a gasp and sat straight up, expecting to see them all around her, but she saw only Talon lying on his back, staring at the ceiling with a look of awe. He turned slowly to her, and when their eyes met, they were shining, bright with dreaming, filled with new magic, new ideas, and new hope.

  “I think I know what happened to them,” Magpie said. “The Blackbringer’s victims, I think I know how to save ’em!”

  THIRTY-THREE

  The huge human cook awoke before dawn with her mouth watering from a dream of strawberries, but when she went yawning into the dooryard to gather some, she found the runners plucked clean of every last fruit. She didn’t know who to blame, the kitchen maids or the cat, so she woke them all by banging two pots together and set them to work early without any breakfast. Some hedge imps took advantage of the noise to knock over a jar of nutmeg and stuff their pockets full before vanishing in a blink.

  Not far away, two faeries and a crow stood on the lip of the old well with their bellies uncomfortably full of berries. “You shouldn’t have eaten that last one,” Magpie whispered to Talon.

  “Couldn’t leave one,” Talon replied with a groan. “Got to finish what you start.”

  “I don’t know if my floating spell will hold you up now!”

  Talon snorted, remembering the floating spell that had swept every soul in Rathersting Castle off their feet. “You’ll manage,” he whispered back.

  “Ready, love?” asked Calypso. The other five crows had positioned themselves in the trees to keep watch from every direction.

  “Aye. Here we go.” Magpie touched the spell to Talon’s shoulder and when he stepped into the darkness he drifted slowly downward. His moth wings fanned the air, guiding his drift, while Magpie hovered beside him and Calypso heaved overhead. They descended. A small ring of spelled light clung to them, but it made the darkness below all the blacker. The plumes of magic wafting up the well shaft were stronger than they had been the first time Magpie had come, and the air was hot and acrid as bad breath.

  Magpie glanced at Talon and saw his face was white. “You sure you want to come?” she whispered, at which he looked irritated, and some color came back into his cheeks.

  “Aye,” he said. “Why? You scared?”

  “Sure. Only a fool doesn’t fear. But it’ll be okay . . . ,” she said, and mumbled as an afterthought, “I’m almost sure of it.”

  Down below, the Magruwen could hear their whispers as clearly as he could smell their bouquet of scents. Crow and cheroot, a breath of berries just eaten, and a curious whisper of nightspink that reminded him of the imps who used to bring Bellatrix’s messages from the next world. He also detected the faint musk of that other imp, the Blackbringer’s stooge, and wondered what business the lass had with such a dismal creature.

  His pacing had worn a track through the treasure, and the smoke had taken on the motion of a tide, surging with him as he strode. He stopped now, an inferno contained by nothing but will, and faced the door.

  “He wasn’t wearing a skin before,” Magpie whispered to Talon when their feet touched down, “so be careful for your eyes.” She pushed the door open and called out, “Lord Magruwen?” as she stepped into the cave. “It’s Magpie Windwitch, Lord. I hope it’s okay—”

  The Magruwen swept toward her. She felt his great restless energy and saw he had grown still brighter than when she had sparked him awake. His flames whipped in a frenzy within his rough shape and she could scarcely look at him. He was pulsing, frenetic, thinly contained. Here was the Djinn King at full strength, and he was terrifying.

  “You should have come years ago,” he hissed. “You must learn to see before you wreak more havoc.”

  “Havoc?” Magpie blinked in surprise, but before she could say any more the Magruwen sucked her toward him in a funnel of heat and then flared wide, whipping himself into a vortex around her and sealing her from sight.

  “ ’Pie!” Calypso squawked, charging forward. The ends of his feathers sizzled against the wall of fire and he had to hop back. He couldn’t see through it. He tried to fly around it. There was no opening. Magpie had been enveloped. Frantic, Calypso called out to her.

  Talon gaped at the cyclone of fire that had swallowed Magpie. He looked quickly around, crouched, and leapt, catching a stalactite and swinging himself up to a crevice in the cave ceiling where he wedged his feet and squinted down into the eye of the fiery tornado. He saw Magpie suspended within, apparently unconscious with her head thrown back, eyes closed, feet drifting above the smoke as she spun, limp, inside the wide whorl of flames.

  “Calypso!” he called, and the crow beat his way over the flames, the stench of singed feathers strong on him. He spotted Magpie and exchanged a look with Talon. They both nodded, then the lad leapt and the crow dove, down into the center of the flames roaring round Magpie’s floating figure. They perched upon the arched lid of a coffer that rose like a small island from the sea of smoke, one on either side of her, to guard her.

  Magpie’s eyes were closed, but other eyes had opened. Whether within her or beyond her, she knew not. A door had been flung open in her mind to reveal the thing she had always sensed waiting there, that coiled and patient power, the unseen pulse. The Tapestry.

  Here the living lights didn’t shimmy off the edges of her vision. They were all she saw. She lost track of her body and just stared at them, dazzled. Streamers of light shimmered and undulated in a pattern as intricate as the whole history of dreams poured tirelessly into its weave. It was vast, curving over every horizon of this mystical space where Magpie’s mind now joined the Magruwen’s.

  He guided her eyes across the mesh of harmonious traceries and came to rest on a bright clot of light where they didn’t interweave so much as snarl and snag. A flaw. Twisted threads, tangles. This was how devils were made. The Djinn was showing her what the Astaroth had done, Magpie thought. Did that mean he was going to help her? But his next words stunned her. “Behold your handiwork, little meddler,” he said.

  She gasped. “My—? Neh, I’ve never . . .” Her voice trailed off. But of course she had. Hadn’t Bellatrix told her she could weave it? All these years of feeling the pulse all around her, was this what she’d been doing? She’d been desecrating the Tapestry! She was flooded with horror. “I made snags?” she asked in a tiny, desperate voice.

  He said, “Nay, little bird. I don’t know why these hideous knots of yours have wrought no devils, but they haven’t.”

  “I haven’t . . . ruined it?” she asked.

  “Nay,” he said. “These knots of yours, you could consider them . . . scabs.”

  “Scabs?”

  “Ugly things, but without which a wound would never heal. They were a dream of the Vritra’s, in fact, back in the time of the devil wars when wounds were many. Healers know the glyph for them and use it in their magic. It was one of those you saved when the Vritra was killed.”

  “I saved . . .”

  “Aye. Your knots have healed the Tapestry, little bird. Without them, the nothingness would have bled through its wounds and overtaken the world.”

  Magpie was too stunned to respond.

  “And we would not be here now,” the Magruwen’s voice continued. “I don’t know where you came from or whether the world deserved to be spared, but it seems that choices were made whilst I slept and I will accept them, for I had forsaken my place. But I am awake now, and I can’t allow the fabric of creation to become an eyesore.”

  Magpie braced herself. He was going to tell her not to meddle in the affairs of the Djinn. To close these new mystical eyes he’d just opened for her. Was he also going to tell her to let
the Tapestry fall apart?

  “You must control your wild magicks, child. If you knew the things you’d done! Gecko footprints in frosting! Is this the stuff of magic? You must learn to see and to weave. We must begin at once!”

  “What? Lord, do you mean you’ll teach me?”

  “It’s that or spell you into a bottle for safekeeping. The choice is yours.”

  “But—teach, of course, Lord. Thank you!” Magpie cried. She could scarcely believe it. He didn’t want to stop her! The Djinn King was going to teach her! “I know just where to start,” she said eagerly. “Stopping the Blackbringer—I haven’t figured out how to go about that yet, you can help me with that, but there’s something else—”

  The Magruwen interrupted her. “We will begin at the beginning. Hush.”

  She closed her mouth.

  The Tapestry began to roll before her then and she had the sensation she was flying over a luminous landscape. The rolling slowed and stopped, and before her gleamed a thread, straight and true and much brighter than the smaller ones that anchored onto it. “A warp thread,” the Magruwen told her. “These are the bones of the Tapestry and all other threads hang on them. The greatest are earth, air, water, and fire, and the lesser are the component elements of everything in this world, carbon, gold, manganese, and on. . . .”

  Magpie had never been to school. She’d learned at campfires while fanning cheroot smoke out of her face, or in selkies’ caves or dungeons, or wherever the caravans set down for a season. With her parents and grandmother she’d excavated the ruins of the Djinns’ forsaken temples in four far-flung lands, those of the Ithuriel, the Sidi-Haroun, the Iblis, and the Azazel, and she had helped her father bind and translate the ancient manuscripts they unearthed there. She had learned her glyphs from dozens of faeries in as many forests, from books she stole back from monkeys, even from the eyeless imps who swam the unfathomable springs of the water elementals.

  Now here she was at the fount of all mystery, the Tapestry, with the Djinn King himself for a teacher. She knew her parents would pay toes for this chance and so, ordinarily, would she. But her mind kept turning to the shadow that hunted in Dreamdark and the look in Poppy’s eyes as she dissolved right out of life.