The Magruwen interrupted her. “We will begin at the beginning. Hush.”
She closed her mouth.
The Tapestry began to roll before her then and she had the sensation she was flying over a luminous landscape. The rolling slowed and stopped, and before her gleamed a thread, straight and true and much brighter than the smaller ones that anchored onto it. “A warp thread,” the Magruwen told her. “These are the bones of the Tapestry and all other threads hang on them. The greatest are earth, air, water, and fire, and the lesser are the component elements of everything in this world, carbon, gold, manganese, and on. . . .”
Magpie had never been to school. She’d learned at campfires while fanning cheroot smoke out of her face, or in selkies’ caves or dungeons, or wherever the caravans set down for a season. With her parents and grandmother she’d excavated the ruins of the Djinns’ forsaken temples in four far-flung lands, those of the Ithuriel, the Sidi-Haroun, the Iblis, and the Azazel, and she had helped her father bind and translate the ancient manuscripts they unearthed there. She had learned her glyphs from dozens of faeries in as many forests, from books she stole back from monkeys, even from the eyeless imps who swam the unfathomable springs of the water elementals.
Now here she was at the fount of all mystery, the Tapestry, with the Djinn King himself for a teacher. She knew her parents would pay toes for this chance and so, ordinarily, would she. But her mind kept turning to the shadow that hunted in Dreamdark and the look in Poppy’s eyes as she dissolved right out of life.
“It will take you years to learn to read it,” the Magruwen went on, plucking each thread and glyph as he named it so it glowed brighter. “Diamond, flamingo, rust, snow . . .”
“But I don’t have years!” she said. “The Blackbringer—”
“Be still. The Tapestry will be no use to you unless you can understand it.”
Unhappily, Magpie listened. “Fig, lava, zinc, spider, teeth . . .” She wouldn’t have thought that here, beyond her body, she would be in danger of getting the wiggles, but she couldn’t help herself. The Djinn’s rasping voice began to wear away like a file at Magpie’s patience. She fidgeted.
He came to a glyph she recognized, and she called out its meaning. “Threshold!” It was part of the spell Snoshti had taught her for traveling to and from the Moonlit Gardens. It hit her how when she’d held that glyph in her mind, this was what she’d called upon, this bright symbol—it was something real—and she began to understand how it all worked. In her excitement, she felt a tingling in her fingertips. She gasped, and froze. Three curls of light were winding away from her like water snakes.
“Stop!” the Magruwen commanded, but it was too late. The threads careened into the Tapestry and sent a ripple through its weave. They burrowed into the fabric and cinched tight, making one more ugly knot.
“I’m sorry!” Magpie said. “I didn’t mean to!”
The Magruwen’s voice seethed through her mind, filling it like the Blackbringer’s had. “You have no control. It’s stronger than you, this gift. It will crush you.”
“Neh, Lord. Please! I can learn.”
“Look what you’ve done!” He guided her eyes closer to the new knot. “Wild faerie feelings set loose? Is that the way to weave the world? There was not even a tear in the fabric here. Do you see what you have done?”
Her new threads had bound the thread for teeth to the glyph for threshold. The Djinn plucked at them and fell suddenly silent. Then, while Magpie watched, the whole of the Tapestry spun with a dazzle of traceries as if the Magruwen were shifting it to see it from below. “Nay . . . ,” he hissed. “Devils?”
“Devils? I made devils?” Magpie cried.
He shifted the Tapestry again, fast. Threads glowed bright as he plucked and tested them. In agony, Magpie waited while he hissed and muttered to himself. Just a few days ago she’d been fretting about turning a queen’s hair into worms, and already she’d moved on to devils? Unable to contain herself, she asked, “Lord? What did I do? Did I make a devil?”
“Nay . . . ,” he said at last. “I thought—but, nay. It is a protection spell. . . . It seems that now, a devil’s tooth embedded in a doorway—threshold, you see?—will prevent other devils from entering.”
“But that’s—”
“Rather fine, aye,” he interrupted. He was still muttering but his tone had changed. “You’ll want to remember that,” he said. “It may prove useful to you.”
Magpie was already itching to write it down in her book. She thought that if she learned to read the Tapestry, her pages were going to fill up fast. Her parents wouldn’t believe it! She’d need a new book—or ten! “Aye, mad useful!” she agreed. “Of course, it probably won’t work against the Blackbringer, since he’s not a devil.”
“What?” asked the Magruwen sharply.
“Neh, for is he not the Astaroth dressed in shadow?”
No sooner had the words left her lips than the Tapestry disappeared and Magpie found herself shunted back into the sleeve of her body, falling. Some arms caught and held her. She peeled open her eyes, her real eyes, and blinked them back into focus to see a ring of fire racing around her.
“ ’Pie!” Calypso squawked.
The Magruwen’s voice cut in. “What do you know of the Astaroth?” he demanded, abruptly coming to a halt and sucking all his swirling flames together into one blazing beast.
Talon’s arms steadied Magpie on her feet, and she stood as brave as she could on the little island in the smoke, and she said, “I know he’s in Dreamdark right now, masquerading as the Blackbringer!”
“How could you know that?” he demanded, flaring close to her face so she had to close her eyes against the searing heat. “You stink of scavenger imp. And you, crow, of vulture! Who are you? More minions, come for it? No other could have told you. Are you his work after all?”
“Neh!” cried Magpie. “I’m your work!”
“My work?”
A blush came to her cheeks and she cast sidelong looks at Calypso and Talon. She had a sudden thought and pulled the flask of moonlight mist off her belt. “If you drink this, Lord, it can tell you better than I could.”
“Tell me what?”
“How . . . how you dreamed me . . .”
“I? I went to sleep to forget your deceitful race. I would never dream a faerie such as you.”