Blackbringer (Page 65)

“Quite a night for dreams it was.”

“Aye, and maybe we dream such things each night and don’t remember them. Think of what’s lost! Bellatrix said dreams are how everything begins, and I dreamed I let the darkness overtake me and then, inside, I held up a light—”

“No light can withstand that darkness. It will fade like everything else.”

“There are lights there, though,” she said. “I’ve been there. I was inside him for an instant—”

The Magruwen flickered, surprised.

“And I saw dying lights everywhere. Sure you could fashion something. Stars—stars burn bright in the emptiness each night, neh?” A thought struck Magpie then. “Wait. When you made the Blackbringer’s skin, you said you plucked out all the stars?”

The Magruwen said nothing.

“Well, what did you do with them?” Magpie asked.

But even as she asked, she knew. Traceries spiraled across her vision, gleaming and glorious, as she caught a glimpse of the Tapestry with her inner eyes, without the Djinn’s help. In that instant she saw the threads the Djinn had spun in secret so very long ago, gathered in hiding while the Astaroth raged against the Tapestry. Here it was, not just the skin of night, but also the receptacle for the stars the Djinn had plucked from it like berries.

“The pomegranate!” she cried. “That’s what it is! That’s where you hid the stars!”

Before Magpie’s eyes and Talon’s, the Djinn suddenly flared again, as he had when Magpie had first mentioned the pomegranate, but now he didn’t catch himself, and the deep blue fire of his core surged and overtook him. The heat, like a woodstove door blowing open, knocked the faeries backward from their perch and into the deep smoke.

Lying on their backs with treasure poking into them while the smoke swirled madly just over their heads, Talon whispered to Magpie, “I wish you’d quit surprising him like that. He’s going to torch us one of these times.”

“Don’t I know. First Fade almost snorted me into ash and now him. I wish he’d put on a skin.”

They rolled over onto their bellies and crawled through a spill of jewels. “Look,” said Talon, holding up the edge of a piece of tattered fabric. It was much heavier than his own skin but he knew it for what it was. “There’s why he isn’t wearing a skin.”

“Ach, that thing must be mad ancient.”

“Aye, I reckon. Bet it has dragon scale woven in it, by the weight of it, to make it fireproof.”

“Come on.”

They rose and scampered under the smoke to a place where a stack of helmets rose like a tower with its peak lost in clouds. They climbed it cautiously, holding their breath through the choking layer of smoke, and peered out to see that the Magruwen had gathered himself back in. He was waiting for them. “There are . . . lights . . . within him?” he asked.

Magpie and Talon clambered onto the uppermost helmet and stood. “I saw them,” Magpie answered. “And in my dream I held up a light and they all flared to life!”

“It was a dream.”

“Aye, a dream. And don’t you think it could be true, that those could be their sparks still burning? Poppy, who made that cordial, could be trapped there, and Maniac, my crow brother, and Talon’s kin. . . . Lord, I have to try. I can’t capture the Blackbringer without knowing—I could be trapping all those sparks in the darkness with him forever!”

“What you speak of, going willingly into him, it is suicide. He will do to you what he did to your friends and kin. He will unmake you. You will never enter that empty place, do you hear me?”

“But Lord Magruwen, if you give me the pomegranate, I—”

“In this you will be ruled by me! I would no sooner give you the pomegranate than unfasten the skin of night and loose the Astaroth on the world. It would amount to the same thing. Don’t you see? That’s what he wants. It’s all he wants.”

“Oh,” said Magpie, understanding. “The stars . . .”

“Restored to the skin, they would unlock it.”

Talon said, “And he’d be free . . .”

“To destroy the Tapestry,” concluded the Magruwen.

“But one star—” continued Magpie stubbornly.

“Beyond question!” the Djinn King roared with such scorching finality that Magpie’s mouth, opening out of habit to argue and cajole, found itself empty of words and snapped right shut.

“You will capture the Blackbringer,” the Djinn went on. “And I will seal the bottle. You will attempt nothing else, do you understand?”

Magpie’s mouth had pinched itself into a straight line, and her eyes flashed as she stared up at the Djinn, unblinking, and said nothing. He flared brighter, and still she didn’t blink. Talon looked back and forth between them, the towering figure of living fire with his terrible horns and the twig of a lass perched on a teetering stack of helmets. The stare they held in common was like a fuse running between their eyes that any moment could ignite an explosion.

Finally Magpie said in a tight voice, “I will make no promise to forsake my friends and brothers, if there is any possible chance I might save them.”

When the Magruwen let out an exasperated hiss, Talon had to duck under the spray of sparks.

“Pigtail delivery,” squawked Calypso from the doorway. They all turned to him unsmiling, and he caught sight of Magpie’s face. “Ach,” he said, flying over. “Ye got on yer ornery mouth.” He whispered hoarsely in her ear, “Sure ye’re not defying the Djinn King, pet. I was that sure ye were no eejit.”

She turned her stern face on him then, and the line of her mouth softened into a frown. “Ach, well, you may yet be surprised,” she said, then looked back up at the Magruwen. “Lord,” she implored. “Please . . . how better to start a new age than to right old wrongs? All those sparks the Blackbringer stole leave a lot of cold places behind in the world, empty shoes and torn lives, and why not start fresh by stealing them back and making things whole? Whatever it was faeries did in the past, whatever treachery, it’s done, and sure the past can’t be undone, but it can be forgiven. I swear I’ll do everything I can to make you proud of faeries again, and how much finer will it be to build a new age on forgiveness than on anguish?”

“There will always be anguish.”

Magpie heard what he said but paid closer heed to what he didn’t say. He didn’t say there would be no new age; he didn’t say he could never forgive. With a stir of hope she tried one last thing. “And Lord, what of this? I saw all those lights in him! What if he keeps their sparks burning inside him? What if he needs them? What if they give him strength, and we can take them away?”