Blackbringer (28 page)

“And what do ye think ye’ll do if ye see him? Fight him, in this state? That’d serve the world poorly, I ken, getting yerself killed!”

“I’ll be fine!”

“I’m sure ye will be, after some food and some sleep.”

Magpie tried to argue, but Calypso just looked back at her through eyes narrowed to slits, and she knew this was one she wouldn’t win, because she knew he was right. She wasn’t fit to meet either the Djinn or the Blackbringer right now. But she did hate to lose an argument so she kept on, hands on hips. “What if the Blackbringer goes back for the Magruwen tonight, eh? And we just sleep through it?”

“Is that the well?” Talon asked, pointing across the school gardens that lay blue in the twilight below.

“Aye, that’s it.”

“Can’t we just keep a lookout while you rest?”

Magpie chewed her lip.

“Aye, Mags. Sure there’s someplace cozy to camp in the attic,” said Bertram. “It’s just under our feet. We can fix ye up a nice little bed.”

And so it was decided, they would take a few hours of rest while the crows kept a close eye on the Djinn’s well.

The sprawling attic of the great manor was one long, dark, low-ceilinged room full of cobwebs and sheet-draped shapes that loomed like phantoms in the crimson light of evening. Mingus and Swig flew off together to steal food while the rest went in through a broken window. The faeries prowled among the stacks of old steamer trunks, dressmaker’s mannequins, and crates of mysterious junk, looking for a place to make camp. They peered through the cracked door of a giant armoire and found it already occupied by bats. They lifted the visor of a suit of rusted armor to a pungent wilkie nest. In one corner a fort had been built of musty books, but a hobgoblin was curled up inside reading a romance by candlelight and he waved them angrily away.

Finally they found a trunk with its lid flipped open, filled with a pile of old silk slips. Dust lay over it thick as snow, but Magpie and Talon climbed in and pushed the top layer of slips carefully into one corner, rolling the dust up with it, and the layer beneath made as soft a nest as they could have hoped for. Magpie called out quietly to the crows, and they winged their way through the dim forest of broken hat racks to perch on the trunk’s edge, depositing Batch inside with a grunt and a squeal.

The faeries watched as the scavenger rubbed at his backside and dug through the silks to come up with a diamond ring. His eyes lit up. Magpie just shook her head, the serendipity never ceasing to amaze her. Why, she wondered, had no scavenger imp happened to be present at her blessing? Here was a gift she could have used. Not for diamonds, sure, but useful things, like where the Blackbringer was lurking now. Batch mumbled, “I sat on it, it’s mine!” and Magpie and Talon shrugged as he strung the ring onto his tail with all the others.

Finally giving in to her fatigue, Magpie collapsed into the deep cushion of silks and groaned, “I can’t decide if I’m more hungry or more tired.”

“Ach, Mags, ye don’t need to decide. I know ye can eat in yer sleep,” teased Bertram.

“Aye, that I can. I’ll just lie here with my mouth open and when the food comes, drop some in.”

That sounded good to Talon too, who flung himself down on the silks and lay there, sunk in the luxurious fabric, while a bone-deep exhaustion settled over his limbs and eyelids. The exhaustion was strangely satisfying. It brought to his mind the warriors returned from a web raid, lounging in front of the great fireplace laughing and chewing lazily at whatever was put into their hands before falling asleep one by one to the glissando of their aunts’ harps.

Swig and Mingus returned, carrying between them a linen napkin that they unfolded in the trunk to reveal an instant picnic of white cake, walnuts, sugared plums, and damp, dirty radishes just plucked from the garden. Pup and Pigeon took some away with them to keep the first watch, while Mingus tossed Magpie a little square wrapped in paper. “Here, Mags,” he said.

“What’s this . . . chocolate?
Chocolate?
” She swooned. “Ach, Mingus, you always were my favorite!”

The other crows squawked in protest and Talon watched with curiosity as Magpie unwrapped the paper to reveal a simple brown square. She sniffed it and swooned again with rapture, and it all seemed a bit of a fuss to Talon, over a little brown square. He could tell Mingus was pleased, but the crow didn’t say much until Magpie insisted he take the first bite.

“Not on yer feathers. I stole it special for ye. Eat, lass, eat.”

“I’ll save it for dessert,” she decided. “I like that, cake for dinner and chocolate for dessert!”

Talon found that hunger did in fact win out over exhaustion, and he dragged himself within reach of a walnut, a plum, and a bit of cake. Between six crows, two faeries, and an imp the feast didn’t last long, and soon they were listening to Batch lick and suck every last dribble of plum syrup from his fingers and toes.

Magpie caught a glimpse of his pink tongue gently probing between his toes, and she grimaced and turned toward Talon, producing again the little brown square. “Ever tried chocolate?” she asked.

He shook his head and she grinned. “You won’t believe this,” she told him, breaking him off a corner.

Skeptically he took it, and he saw she was waiting to watch him eat it, and he squinted at her. “This some prank?” he asked.

“Neh! It’s why humans aren’t all bad. The Djinn might’ve dreamed up the cacao tree, but humans made this from it! Go on.”

So he tasted it. His eyes went wide, then closed, and he sank back into the silk and let the flavor overtake him. He could hear Magpie and the crows laughing at him, but it wasn’t nasty laughter and it didn’t bother him at all. When he’d finished eating his bit, he asked shyly, “Do you think I might take a taste to my sister?”

Magpie smiled. “Aye, sure! It can be my thanks for the use of her room!” She ate her own corner of the sweet and insisted on all the crows having a nibble. Then, catching a longing look from Batch, she flicked him a little piece too. The remainder she wrapped back up in the paper to save for Nettle, then sank back with a groan. “Thanks for the food, birds and mannies,” she said sleepily, then, as if remembering something, turned to Talon. “That was a fine phantasm you made before.”

“You saw it?” he asked. “What, can you see through fences too?”

“Neh, but when it jumped out of the tree and near landed on the cat’s head.”

Talon laughed. “That? No doubt it looked a fine phantasm—that was me.”

“
You,
you?” She lifted her head. “I thought you were doing a spell.”

“Sure, but first I had to get him to follow me, neh? Once he came through the fence he caught sight of the phantasm and chased it off.”

Magpie shook her head at him. “You tetched?” she asked. “Pouncing on that meat? I wouldn’t have let you.”

“And who are you to let or not let me?” he asked, amused.

She shrugged. “It’s your first journey beyond, neh? I feel responsible for you.”

“Well, you’re not.”

Calypso cut in, “We’re all responsible for each other and that’s how it is, lad. When ye’re with us that goes for ye too, be ye a prince or neh.”

Talon flushed at the scolding. “I didn’t mean—” he started to say, but Magpie cut in.

“Piff! You should’ve seen him jump on that cat, birds. Like a lunatic!” It sounded like a criticism, but Talon saw the same wondering smile at the corners of her lips as when she’d called his skin “uncommon,” and he found himself blushing just the same too. “I want to see a phantasm, though,” she went on. “You too tired to make one?”

“I can muster one up,” he said, pushing himself up on his elbows. He squinted a little in concentration, and while Magpie and the crows looked on, a ghost of himself seemed to stand up and step out of his body. It flickered a little, looked around, and suddenly leapt up onto the edge of the trunk between Calypso and Bertram, where it performed a silly dance before backflipping off the side and blinking out in - mid-air.

The crows squawked and laughed and Talon collapsed back onto his back, grinning. “Sharp!” Magpie cried, clapping.

Within his fort of books the hobgoblin had come to a smooching scene and shouted for them to pipe down.

“How’d you do it?” Magpie asked Talon.

“It’s the fifth glyph for phantom,” he told her, “joined with what you want your phantasm to be—I used ‘self’ there, but you don’t have to. Then you just picture what you want it to do.”

Magpie’s brow furrowed in thought. “I only know four glyphs for phantom,” she said.

“Oh, aye?” he asked casually, adding, “I know six.”

“Six?”
she demanded. “Flummox me! Can you show me that one you just did?”

“
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?”