Blackbringer

“And the dragons?” asked Magpie, looking up at them.

“Ah, bless the Djinn for giving the dragons the temperament for immortality. They’ve no need to become. They’re perfect just as they are. They’ve been good companions to me these past five thousand years, especially Fade. I visit the seraphim sometimes too, up in the high planes. But I admit I prefer the riverbank, the faeries fresh from life in all their beautiful skins, bursting with gossip of the world! And then there’s you, best of all.” She reached for Magpie’s hand and squeezed it. “Glorious with life!”

Magpie blushed. Glorious with life. Bellatrix’s words chased away any fancy she still harbored about the darkness and she felt herself, for the first time since falling through the Blackbringer, settle solidly in her own skin. She hadn’t left any piece of herself behind there, and it was a lucky thing. She knew absolutely that there would have been no hope of defeating the devil if she had.

“You’ve a world to go home to now, and much to do. I wish I could come with you.”

“I wish you could too,” Magpie admitted, feeling a thrill of fear. Where was she to begin? She snuck a look at her hands, wiggling her fingers, thinking of what Bellatrix had said about the magic that was finding its own way out. Indeed. It was like rescuing a stolen artifact from a plunder monkey’s stash and not knowing what magic lay dormant in it. But it was stranger by far when the mysterious power lurked inside her own skin! “I’m not ready yet,” she said. “I don’t understand what I’m to do—”

A riffle played suddenly through the air and the hairs on Magpie’s arms stood on end. She had just time to look aside at Bellatrix before that urgent feeling of onslaught invaded her senses. Again something was hurtling toward her fast, and the air crackled like a storm surge.

Dragon.

Her first instinct was to take to her wings.

Her wings hung crushed from her shoulders.

A single heartbeat passed between her sense’s warning scream and the shuddering of the cliff as a dragon caromed into it, hooking hold with his great claws. If Magpie’s wings had been whole, that heartbeat would have been enough time to leap clear. As it was, her instinct to leap into the air simply plunged her right over the edge of the cliff, and she fell.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Again the Magruwen wondered, Who is she? Since the faerie left, he’d been going over the Tapestry, thread by thread and glyph by glyph, finding every moment more of her handiwork. Who was this lass who’d made such tangles in the Tapestry?

He focused on a new glyph and turned it around in his mind. He winced. Graceless! Fused threads, clumsy stitches, no symmetry, no pattern! When he had first become aware of Magpie’s inexplicable ability to alter the Tapestry, he kept expecting to find devils born of her twisted threads. For so it was in ancient days that the monsters had first been brought into being, by another creature’s artless meddling. Instead, in the faerie’s glyphs, again and again he found new magic. Strange new magic.

Between the great warp threads of the Tapestry stretched the sheen of countless weft threads, and each one, each fire-bright fiber, represented a dream made real on earth. One for granite and one for salt, one for the tiny biting bugs in the swamp, one for mildew, one for pollen, one for the bees that carried it flower to flower. One for everything, some long, some short, and all connected into a living, shimmering whole. And all across that whole the threads intermingled in patterns. It was in the patterns—the glyphs—that dwelled such of the Djinns’ dreams as love, flight, memory, laughter, invisibility, luck, music, and many, many more. These were the mysteries and complexities of the world and the magicks too, and the faerie, without even knowing it, had been making her own.

The Magruwen traced the threads of one of her glyphs to their origins and saw what she had done this time. He scowled, and then from deep within him welled up . . . laughter. It was absurd. Henceforth, because of this unlikely clump of threads, a cake with the footprints of a gecko in its frosting would enable any who ate it to walk on the ceiling!

Surely she had no idea what she had done. What she had was an unconscious intuition about the unweaving, a sensitivity to weakness in the Tapestry. These whimsical glyphs, they didn’t exist for their own sake; they were simply the by-product of something much more profound. Once a thread or glyph failed in the Tapestry, the dream failed too, and the world was changed. And each messy, tangled glyph the lass wove caught the end of some unraveling thread before it could dissolve forever and take a Djinn’s dream out of the world with it. Here: she had tied a jumbled knot in the glyph for invisibility as it unraveled. She had tethered it hastily to other threads, those for the crocus flower and the cinnamon tree, and all were bound tight to the massive warp thread for fire. Now one had only to drop powdered crocus petals into the ashes of a cinnamon wood fire and a new dust spell for invisibility would be born. Just like that.

The dust spell was new magic in and of itself, but more important, the knot had stopped an ancient art from slipping out of the world, and even more important, it had kept the Tapestry from weakening further. Most of Magpie’s knots were like that. She had saved such glyphs as footprint magic, scrying, fire husbandry, and hypnosis, to name but a handful. She had even rescued the sixth glyph for flight from oblivion, which had resulted in a funny little spell involving eggshells and rain.

Most of the spells born of the knots relied upon confluences so unlikely they would never be discovered by accident, such as this one: playing a harpsichord while wearing emerald rings on every finger would make plants grow at twice their natural speed. What harpsichordist had emeralds enough to stumble innocently upon this spell?

But the important fact remained: the knots were strong. They would hold. Indeed, they were holding the world together.

The Magruwen could wish them to be less unlovely, though.

And so, while he muttered much and sighed long and shook and reshook his great blazing head, he found himself consumed with something he had long forgotten the flavor of: curiosity. He had thought the world empty of surprises and himself past caring. Things had been done that could never be undone, that could never be forgiven, and what had changed? Not much. It was the same world he had turned away from, filled with pettiness and wasted gifts. One intriguing sprout and a few new glyphs didn’t heal all that had passed.

The Magruwen roared, and a trembling was felt in the fields and dwellings near his well. He paced. He sought the peace of sleep, but it had been stripped from him in that cunning explosion. He was not only curious now; he was alert. He was confounded. And he was impatient. Impatient for the faerie to return. She needed to learn what the clever fingers of her mind were up to.