Blackbringer

FIFTEEN

In the sky above the Manygreen lands Magpie unfastened the pins Snoshti had put in her hair and let it tumble down around her shoulders. Like an arrow off a bowstring she shot through the air with mad speed, zinging back and forth once over Poppy’s workshop with her hair streaming behind her. Then she froze, folded her wings, and dropped like a stone out of the sky for one of her frightful sharp landings. A flick of her wings and she caught herself at the moment the earth loomed to meet her. She ran inside the workshop.

Poppy looked up, startled. “Magpie!” she exclaimed. “Where—?”

“That the batter?” Magpie asked, cutting her off.

“Aye.”

With three long sweeps of her fingers Magpie combed the wind from her hair. It cascaded invisibly into the bowl of cake batter and settled there. “Calypso’s waiting outside with his shadow,” she said.

Poppy followed and watched as Magpie held the bowl in outstretched arms in the brightest spot in the garden. Overhead, Calypso flew in spirals, slow as he could, and Magpie chased his shadow round and round. Several times she nearly captured it but it always seemed to slip over the lip of the bowl to freedom. At last, though, she trapped it, and after just the briefest shadowless moment another sprouted in its place, growing larger as Calypso dropped in to land. Behind him came Swig, carrying a small bird’s nest in one foot, with an acorn and a blackened twig nestled inside it, and holding a porcupine quill in his beak.

Once Magpie took the quill, he said, “Ye’ve Maniac to thank for that, Mags. The porcupine weren’t keen to part with it.”

“Maniac?” Magpie groaned. “It had to be him? He’s already mad at me! Didn’t hurt him bad, did it?”

“Neh, but he does make a fuss.”

“For true.”

“Magpie . . . ,” Poppy cut in hesitantly. “Did you find out anything . . . about the devil?”

Magpie dropped the porcupine quill in her shock and turned to her friend. “How do you know about that?”

“All the forest knows of it,” she said. “Well, except the faeries. All they’re worrying about is why Queen Vesper keeps to her chamber!”

“But what have you heard?”

“The trees say the age of unweaving has begun.”

“Unweaving? Unweaving what?” asked Magpie.

“I don’t know. They’re saying it’s the faeries’ doom to forget what ought never be forgotten and that this devil hunted in Dreamdark once before.”

“What? I never heard of a snag who . . . but that’s the point, neh? That’s our doom.” She said it bitterly, then asked, “Did they at least have a name for it, Poppy?”

Poppy looked flustered as she nodded. “Aye, they called it something, but you might not believe it. . . .”

“Poppy, what?”

She let out a nervous laugh. “It sounds so silly. It’s the bogeyman, Magpie. They’re saying it’s the Blackbringer!”

Magpie let out a short laugh too. The Blackbringer? The name inspired no shiver. It had been dragged through too many nurseries, worn thin by the empty threats of countless faerie mothers and grannies. The Blackbringer was the thing that would get you if you were naughty, that was waiting to grab up sprouts who stayed out past dark. The Blackbringer was the dark come to life. . . .

Magpie’s laugh fell hollow. Perhaps it didn’t sound quite so silly. “Well, whatever it is, let’s make this cake. I’ve got to get to the Magruwen.”

With the cake tucked into the starling’s nest as the recipe directed, Magpie carried it across the whole of Dreamdark in her arms. Calypso flew at her side, wings flashing in the sun. Mile after mile they surged over the wide, wild forest, until at last they were cresting the hedge and sailing over the grounds of the human school that Father Linden had described to Poppy.

Magpie spotted the well and they spiraled down to land on its crumbling lip. A draft of deep-buried heat rose from within the earth, cooling as it passed them and merged into the world. “Here we are, feather,” Magpie said with a tremor in her voice. “Onward and downward.” She spelled up a light and dropped down into the pit, Calypso following closely.

After a long, steady downward drift they reached the bottom. The stones of the shaft flared wide into a cavernous space and Magpie could see a few ill-formed paths snaking off and twisting away where the light couldn’t follow. There was a door and, carved on it, the Magruwen’s sigil intertwined with the glyph for dream. The tree had told true. Magpie trembled. To think the king of Djinn was on the other side of a door . . . It was as unreal as if a statue of Bellatrix were suddenly to flick its wings and fly from its pedestal. It was legend meeting life.

Standing on the threshold of a being who had wrought the world, Magpie felt very small, very young, and utterly insignificant. Who was she to presume to awaken a Djinn? But she knew the answer to that. As with each devil she captured, she was the only one trying.

Magpie took a deep breath and walked toward the door.

In his sleep the Magruwen sensed their coming. He smelled feathers, and an image of vultures came into his mind, planted there by the imp’s riddle. He recalled the distant day his brother Djinn had made them. Some creatures had been made as art; others were pure utility. Vultures had been shaped in haste to clean a field of slaughter when a powerful elemental had first begun to toy with death in the new-made world. The notion of murder had been born that day, and the Djinn had fashioned vultures to spare themselves the sight of it. They’d made them out of shame and had done well to make them; vultures had never fallen out of use since.

But there was no scuff of death on these feathers that beat heavily down the well shaft; they smelled of rain and fires. And there was another scent: faerie.

The Magruwen came awake. His sleep had been troubled and he had not sunk far. Flames took the shape of a horned beast rising to its feet. The scent of faerie, pure as dew, was bitter to him. His flame hands clenched with the memory of betrayal, and he waited.

Magpie leaned on the door with all her might to push it open a crack. It creaked, and a trickle of smoke began to seep out. Magpie pushed harder, cradling the cake to her chest, and stepped into the Magruwen’s cave, heart pounding. “My lord Magruwen . . . ?” she asked tentatively. The lake of smoke before her moved with a sluggish tide, and the scuttle of salamanders up and down the stalactites sounded like a chorus of otherworldly whispers. The source of light seemed to be in the deep reaches of the cave where the ceiling sloped down like rows of teeth in a giant jaw.