Page 84 of The Guardians of Dreamdark
Magpie answered hesitantly. “It’s...a whirlpool?”
“That’s one kind of vortex,” said Bellatrix. “A vortex can also form in the air, a whirling that draws all things to its center. Let me show you...”
And the two faeries bent their heads together and talked of magic. Bellatrix visioned a glyph, and Magpie touched it from her mind with her fingertip, and for a time they practiced conjuring the spell together. Magpie watched with fascination as the empty air below their dangling feet stirred, then spun—lazily at first, then whipping steadily faster until it began to tug blossoms off the tufts of nightspink overhanging the cliff and suck them in. She could feel the tug on her feet and hooked her toes to keep her slippers from flying off. “Sharp!” she said.
But the spell faltered when a voice distracted them. “Mistress! Mistress!” Magpie and Bellatrix both spun to see Snoshti hurrying down the stairs. The imp paused when she saw Magpie, then rushed down, crying, “Blessings! My lady, my lass, it’s bad, it’s awful bad!”
The faeries both lifted themselves with their wings and rushed to meet the imp. “What is it, Snoshti?” asked Bellatrix.
“It’s—” she gasped, struggling for breath. “It’s the Magruwen! Strag...the shindy—” She gasped again. “He saw...the Blackbringer...go down the well!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
In Dreamdark the Blackbringer seeped through the trees, seeming like a shadow cut loose from its moorings. Other nighthunters—foxes, bog hags, bats—fled before him as his hunger reached long fingers into the night. He was moving away from the school and the Djinn’s well, headed back to the Spiderdowns, where he would sink out of reach of the coming light.
Throughout the great wood, creatures and faeries crouched hidden in cellars and burrows, tense and sleepless, knowing the darkness could come for them at any moment. Only in Never Nigh did the faeries sleep soundly within their wreath of ancient spells. But one bed, at least, was empty, for the Blackbringer was not the only one hunting this night. Queen Vesper sailed among the treetops, clutching her mirror in her hand and whispering a steady chant, “Whatever your will, whatever your whim, come back to my mirror, your place is within” as she searched furiously for her wayward slave.
At Rathersting Castle, Talon, too was awake. All through the night he had hunched by his fire, clicking his needles together and knitting glyphs into spidersilk. All night his mind had flowed with the river of energy he now knew was the Tapestry, and it had guided his fingers and his mind as he made this new thing, rushing to finish it before the break of day.
Beyond the hedge, Magpie glimmered in silently beside the Magruwen’s well. She lifted her head and sniffed the breeze like a creature. She prowled up the side of the well, cocked her head to listen, and sniffed again. Then she descended into the sulfurous dark. When she reached the bottom, she saw the Djinn’s door stood open. Within was...darkness. Neither flame flickered nor ember glowed. Sick with memories of the Vritra’s dreaming place, Magpie sagged against the doorframe.
The Magruwen was gone.
Despair filled her like a cup. She could scarcely find breath as panic overtook her, and she leaned there, gasping and dizzy. The Magruwen had only just awakened, and the world had trembled on the brink of a new age, but now...he was gone. She hadn’t even gotten the seal or the pomegranate seed. It was too late. The Blackbringer would have the pomegranate. Even now, he could be peeling back its withered skin. The light of all those stars could be flooding back into the fabric of night, unlocking the ancient being imprisoned within.
At any moment, the Astaroth could burst free to destroy the world. Millions and millions of lives would subside into the endless ocean, just as the Magruwen had predicted. And then there would be nothing. Ever again.
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 guttersnipe,” she purred. “Who areyouto threatenme?”
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.
