“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?”