Blackbringer

Magpie fought to steady her breathing and as she did she became aware of the pulse of the Tapestry all around her, aswirl and urgent, tugging at her like a tide, lifting her like a wind. She stood. She rose up on her wings, following it. So strong was its compulsion she felt she had scarcely to beat her wings but simply let it carry her, and as it did, a small hope flickered within her.

In the grip of the current of magic she flew swiftly westward across the vast expanse of Dreamdark as the sun rose.

At the castle, Pup straggled bleary-eyed down the corridor to wake Magpie and opened her door to an empty room. Thinking she had already gone to the Great Hall for breakfast, he went to find her there. Within moments the crows were in a panic. They raced along the corridors, down to the dungeon where Batch lay muttering in his sleep, up to the ramparts where the warriors nodded grim good mornings to them. Magpie was nowhere to be found.

Hearing a ruckus, Talon laid his work aside and hurried from his room. Visions of the knives scattered at Issrin filled his mind and for a terrible moment he was certain he would find that the guards had been swallowed in the night. But as he rounded the corner of the uppermost stair with a bound he saw the guards all gathered with the crows and his panic eased . . . until he got a look at Calypso.

The bird’s eyes were wild. “Magpie’s missing, lad,” he said.

Magpie hovered uncertainly above Issrin Ev. The ruin was as forlorn by dawn as it had been by dusk, more so, now that grim memories of Poppy and Maniac haunted the place. She shuddered and wondered why she was here. The pulse had simply ebbed away and left her. She hung in the air and looked down, and then, through shadow and pine bough, suddenly she saw eyes peering up at her. A jolt went through her, and her first reflex carried her backward and away, but an instant later she realized whose eyes they were and who it was lurking down in Issrin Ev.

It was Vesper.

With a steely look, Magpie dove like a hawk, swooping low to the ground and coming in for a sharp landing in front of the lady, who drew back a step and looked at her with hate-filled eyes. “Alive?” she hissed.

“Aye, and why should I be otherwise?” Magpie hissed back. “If you’re hunting your devil, you’ll have no luck.”

“My devil?” repeated Vesper with a forced laugh.

“Aye, laugh!” Magpie spat. “Even if the world wasn’t about to rip wide open, I wouldn’t trouble my mind with you, Lady. You’re less than nothing. But it aches me something sick to see Bellatrix’s crown on you, and her tunic. Give them to me now, queen!”

Vesper laughed again. Her hair was still hidden in its layers of scarves, still wrapped in pearl strands and crowned with Bellatrix’s golden circlet. Standing there with the light of dawn shimmering across her firedrake scales, tall and elegant in her headdress of silks, she did look like a queen, like a cold, vicious queen on the wrong side of a legend. “Little gypsy,” she purred, “who are you to threaten me?”

Her eyes never leaving Vesper’s, Magpie slowly unsheathed Skuldraig and held the gleaming blade up in front of her face. With her lip drawing up in a snarl, she growled, “I’m the one who wields Bellatrix’s blade.”

Vesper’s eyes widened and she stared at the knife. She looked back and forth rapidly between Magpie’s eyes and the blade, and her lips contorted into a snarl of her own. Magpie could see cunning in her expression, and greed. “Which do you think’s more useful in a fight, Lady?” Magpie asked. “A dagger or a crown?”

Vesper’s hand moved in her pocket, and Magpie held Skuldraig at the ready, thinking the lady was drawing out a blade of her own. But what she held out wasn’t a blade. It was a mirror.

“Fine time for vanity!” Magpie scoffed.

Vesper replied in her most lilting, musical tones, “Whatever your will, whatever your whim, look into my mirror . . .” Unthinking, Magpie flicked her eyes toward it in irritation, and the lady finished with a hiss, “. . . Your place is within.”

Magpie gasped. Vesper smiled. The mirror warped and Magpie found herself staring at her own horrified reflection as she was drawn toward the mirror by some violent magic. Her body twisted with a thrill of pain. She was wrenched from her feet as her body stretched like a cast shadow, not like living flesh. Her vision blurred and she screamed, her eyes clenched shut in agony as she was sucked into Vesper’s mirror.

The lady reached out and caught Magpie’s wrist before it could disappear inside the glass. She twisted, and Skuldraig dropped to the moss. When she released Magpie’s hand, the strange, attenuated shape of the lass was sucked swiftly in and the silver surface closed over her and calmed like a pond. Vesper gazed into it and smiled. Nothing peered back at her now but her own lovely face. Magpie had vanished.

Vesper knelt and picked the dagger up off the moss.

At Rathersting Castle, Talon and the crows took the steps to the dungeon three and four at a time, arriving breathless before Batch’s prison cell. “What is it, Prince?” asked the faerie on guard.

“You can go, Hesperus. I’ll see to this wretch.”

With a shrug Hesperus left, and Talon turned to Batch, who was leering out at them with his beady black eyes, seeing their distress, already weighing it and calculating.

“Blessings of the morning, Good-imp,” said Calypso.

“Suck lint,” said Batch.

Talon unlocked the cell and went over to the imp reclining in the straw. He knelt and said, “Now listen, imp, I won’t tell you what big things are happening in Dreamdark; sure you know already. But your master’s worse a thing than even you know, and if you don’t help us it could mean the end of everything.”

Batch carefully inserted his big toe into his nostril and rummaged.

Talon went on, “Not just the end of faeries, you ken, the end of everything!”

Batch yawned.

“Listen!” Talon cried. “We need you to find Magpie, do you hear? I know you find things. It’s got to be you. You’ve got to help!”

Batch withdrew his toe from his nose and commenced to gnaw on his thick toenail. In exasperation Talon cried, “Answer me!”

Calypso stepped forward. All too well he remembered the scavenger Lick and the events of Amitav Ev, and he knew the motives of imps better than Talon did. He said, “Look, ye blighted soul, what’s it going to take?”

And Batch released his toenail from between his teeth and looked at the crow with a gleam of interest.

“What’s it going to cost?” demanded Calypso. “What is it ye want?”