“I know. That’s just what Bellatrix said.”
He wavered. “Bellatrix?”
“Aye.” Magpie held out the cordial.
“That scent of nightspink . . . ,” he began.
“Please just drink it,” she pleaded. “It helps you remember your dreams. Then you can tell me I haven’t dreamt it all myself!”
The Magruwen was still so close. Magpie, Talon, and Calypso were breathing raggedly, choking the hot air down in gasps and the flavor of their own scorched hair with it. Then the Djinn reached out his arms, took the flask, and tipped it into himself. A hiss of black steam issued forth where liquid met fire. He dropped the flask into the tidal smoke and said, “Moonlight” heavily, before drawing closed his vertical eyes with a sigh.
THIRTY-FOUR
The Magruwen hadn’t seen moonlight in the four thousand years since he’d buried himself under the earth. The taste of it from the bottle flooded through him and he experienced an intense craving for light, any light—sunset, starlight—and for horizons and wind and a feast of open sky. The cave seemed to be closing in around him.
Then the potion took effect. The first he knew of it was the remembered touch of Fade’s mind curled against his own.
Fade’s was the first life he had ever dreamt, when the world was yet a bare young orb, unpeopled and ungreen. And until the dragon’s terrible death their minds had touched, like two countries with a shared border. After the dragon was ripped away from him—screaming, hot wind and hot blood—one edge of the Djinn’s mind lay ravaged and bereft, a cliff that fell away to nothingness. But in dreams the Magruwen became whole again, for there Fade’s mind met his as it always had, even across the worlds.
So in his fury with this world and its treacheries, he had chosen sleep.
He had dreamed and dreamed, century after decade after day. Now those dreams washed over him anew. Memory opened, and all that had passed lay plain before him. And much had passed. The lass spoke true. He had indeed dreamed her, but the dream, he saw, had come from across that border, somewhere in the deep realms of Fade’s mind. Or rather, he thought, from deeper still. He knew Fade’s dreams. These wild fancies of faeries—a faerie who could weave the Tapestry!—had not been born in a dragon’s mind. In that far moon-washed world there was another mind he knew well, one obstinate soul who wouldn’t shrink from such a trick. He had gone where her imps couldn’t find him, so she had found another way of reaching him.
“Bellatrix,” he said, opening his eyes and blinking down at the lass.
“Aye, and Fade too, Lord,” Magpie said.
“You’ve seen him?”
“Aye.” She twisted around and waggled a finger through the hole in the back of her shift. “This is from his claw. He caught me falling off a cliff when my wings were crushed. Of course, he made me fall in the first place. He gave me a mad shiver. He—” She squinted up into the Djinn’s bright face. “He frets for you, Lord. He about roasted me when he heard the Blackbringer was back.” To the relief of the faeries and the crow, the Magruwen ebbed down to a thin column of flame. Breath came easier, and they were able to relax their squinting eyes.
“It was he who told you about the Astaroth,” he said.
“Aye,” she admitted. “But he made me think you killed him. But you didn’t, did you? Somehow, he’s the Blackbringer.”
“What makes you think this, faerie?” he asked, sounding more intrigued than angry now.
“He has eyes like yours,” she said. “And he’s not like a snag. And”—she gestured to Talon at her side—“Talon guessed the darkness was a skin, or I don’t reckon I’d have thought of it at all.”
The Magruwen turned to Talon. “What do you know of skins, Rathersting?”
“Er—” he stammered. “Next to nothing—”
“He made one, Lord,” Magpie piped up.
“Indeed.”
“Aye, he’s got it right here. Would you like to see it?”
Talon blushed around his tattoos, and the Djinn nodded.
Talon fumbled the skin out of his pocket and held it up with trembling hands. Its threads took on the orange glow of the Djinn, but the subtle sparkle of many other colors gleamed in its folds. The Magruwen’s eyes moved over it quickly from top to bottom, then bottom to top, and then, after a glance at Talon, top to bottom again. “Who taught you this?” he asked.
“Orchidspike the healer taught me to knit with the needles her foremother had from you, Lord. But I taught myself to spell a skin together.”
“Do other faeries now craft skins?”
Magpie answered, “None I ever heard of.”
He reached out his hand but stopped and curled his fume fingers into a fist, knowing his touch would burn it. “Won’t you put it on?” he asked.
“Oh—aye, sure!” Talon answered, flustered. He shook out the skin and stepped into it, and Magpie had to reach out to steady him as he caught his foot in his haste. He shrugged it on, visioned it awake, and turned falcon in an instant.
The Magruwen exhaled curls of smoke and stared at him. “Remarkable . . . ,” he breathed. “Does it fly?”
Talon spread his wings and lifted himself into the air, where he wheeled among the stalactites for a moment before landing and peeling the head back from his skin. He was grinning. “It’s not as good as flying on real wings,” he said, “but it beats staying on the ground.”
The Magruwen moved in close, his eyes reading Talon’s skin like a page in a book and pausing only briefly at the flaw in the throat. “Barbules from falcon feathers interknit with glyphs for flight and phantom . . . ,” he said. “Very cleverly done. Did you think of using the glyph for floating as well, so you need expend no energy in staying aloft?”
“I thought of that after I started flying in it,” Talon admitted. “It is some work. But I have another idea, Lord Magruwen. . . . I thought of a way of joining the twelve glyphs for flight into one. I thought I’d try that in my next skin.”
At his side, Magpie’s eyes popped wide open, and she turned to look at him in surprise.
“Join all twelve?” asked the Djinn.
“Aye. Do you think that would work?”
“Can you show it to me? Hold it clear in your mind.”
“Oh, aye.” The new pattern was still turning in Talon’s mind, clear as when he’d dreamt it.