Page 55 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
Bellatrix nodded and squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, they were filled with such sadness and longing that Magpie asked hesitantly, “Did you love him?”
“He was my husband.”
After a long pause Magpie said, “I never knew you were married.”
“No one did. We had eloped. We were married only three days when we met the Blackbringer in battle. After, those of us who remained went back to our home forests with word that the devils were vanquished. I never told anyone I was a widow. They hadn’t even known I was a wife! And I didn’t want them to try to stop me.”
“Stop you?”
Bellatrix smiled, but her smile was bleak. “It wasn’t my time. I knew that. But all I’d done for two hundred years was hunt devils, and now they were gone, and Kipay was, too. There was nothing left for me. I just wanted to find my husband. It was wrong; it was too soon. But I went where no one would find me, and I spoke the ancient words, and...came here.”
“And Kipepeo wasn’t here,” Magpie said, and Bellatrix shook her head.
So that was what had become of her. That was how she had slipped out of history. She had come in mourning to the Moonlit Gardens, unnaturally early. Magpie imagined what it must have been like when she realized Kipepeo wasn’t waiting for her at the riverbank, wasn’t anywhere here, and she couldn’t change her mind and go back to find him in the world. She was trapped. “How terrible, Lady...” she whispered. Her own feeling of helplessness was nothing next to that. At least she could go back and find out what had become of the Blackbringer’s victims.
She looked up at Bellatrix. “I’ll find out what happened to them,” she declared.
“Aye,” Bellatrix said, and it dawned on Magpie that this was the real reason she’d been dreamed into being, so a mourning widow could learn her husband’s fate at last.
She was meant to do this.
She chewed her lip and pondered it as Bellatrix silently braided her hair. She decided finally that it’s not so bad to find out you have a destiny when it’s something you were going to do anyway.
Bellatrix tucked night-blooming blossoms into the intricate seven-strand braid. “There, perfect! Your foxlick, though...” She laughed as the tuft freed itself from the braid. “It won’t be tamed!”
“Don’t I know!” said Magpie. She inhaled. “Those flowers...” It was the fragrance she had already come to associate with the Moonlit Gardens. “What are they called?”
“Nightspink. They grow everywhere here.”
“They’re so delicate.”
“Aye, delicate!” agreed Bellatrix with a sigh. “What I wouldn’t give for a big brash rose now and then, a scent you can drown in! All this tranquility! Give me a thunderstorm! A stampede, an avalanche, a wild red sunset...”
“Sunsets would be something here,” said Magpie, going to the edge and looking out over the dragons’ immense canyon.
“I miss sunrise even more. The green scent of dawn in the forest, the color blushing back into the world, different every day?”
Magpie remembered a long winter of night she’d once spent in the northern icelands and how desperately she’d craved daylight. “Why did the Djinn make it like this? Always night?”
“Ah, well, it suits the seraphim.”
“Who?”
“Well, they’reus, really. What we become? There are two parts to a creature, Magpie, the spark and the skin. The longer we’re in the Gardens, the closer we are to our spark, and the more we relinquish our skin and all the drama and fleshly stuff of being alive. Love and anger and jealousy? Our hungers and longings. We couldn’t go on like that for eternity. We’d go mad.”
“But haven’tyoubeen here twenty-five thousand years?”
Bellatrix smiled. “I? But Iammad! The Magruwen always said I was the most obstinate faerie who ever lived. Sure he never thought he’d have such proof as this, me clinging to my skin all these thousands of years! This isn’t what it’s meant to be like, child. Everyone I ever knew—except Kipay, of course—they’ve come and become. And I’ve stayed just the same.”
“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—”
