“I hope you’re right, little bird,” the Magruwen said gruffly.
“Me too.”
“Blessings fly with you, Magpie Windwitch.” The Djinn inclined his golden head and moved away, back toward the hole that would become his new temple. As he disappeared within, Magpie thought of the great place it had once been and would be again, if she succeeded.
She turned back to the crowd and all those eyes just blinked at her. The faeries gathered here would later recount the Magruwen’s return as a day of exaltation and boast of having witnessed it with their own eyes. They would forget the stunned stupor with which they had regarded their new champion, remembering instead the cheering and celebration that should have occurred.
At present, celebration was the last thing on Magpie’s mind. She flew back toward the crowd, pausing before Poppy’s father to tell him earnestly, “I’m going to bring her back, sir.”
Magpie
He reached out his hands, palms outfaced, and she pressed hers against them. They nodded to each other and Magpie withdrew. To the crows and Talon she said, “At dusk we meet the Blackbringer,” and taking a deep breath, she added, “in the Spiderdowns.”
THIRTY-NINE
Magpie stood in the dying light at the edge of the Spiderdowns. Nothing grew in this poisoned place. The trees had long ago choked on the spiders’ venom and warped into the tortured corpses they were now. Their bare branches twisted into a dense canopy from which hung sheets and clots of sticking web, and the earth beneath was split into ragged cracks.
“The light couldn’t be worse,” Nettle was telling Magpie. “The webs will be nigh invisible. We only ever go in at brightest dawn, when the dew shines and we can see every filament. This is . . .” Her words trailed off.
“Madness?”
“Aye, though sure it would be a greater madness to seek him belowground in the spiders’ lair. Listen, you got to be quick. They’ll drop down on you from above and spin you right up, and their venom kills flesh and curdles blood.”
“The light’s going,” said Magpie. “It’s got to be now.” She glanced over her shoulder to where the full force of Rathersting might was mustered and ready for her signal. The crows clustered together around the Blackbringer’s bottle, as wily and tattered as alley cats.
“Magpie,” Talon said. “Wait. Last night I made something.” He pulled it out of his pocket and when she saw its shimmer she thought it was a skin, but it wasn’t. It was a single long cord of finely woven spidersilk, coiled like a rope. “It’s a tether,” he told her, “to tie round yourself, so you can find your way back out of the dark.”
“Lad!” croaked Calypso and smacked him on the back. “Blessings but that’s a fine thing! I’m shivered to think we might’n’t have thought of it at all, and then what? Thanks to ye!”
“Aye . . .” Magpie spun the end of it between her fingers. It was thin as a whisker. “Will it hold?” she asked.
“Try to cut it.”
“Eh?”
“Go ahead.”
With a frown of skepticism she unsheathed Skuldraig and touched it to the strand, expecting the blade to slice right through. It did not. She tried again harder but it only glanced off. “Jacksmoke!” she said, slashing at it harder and smiling in wonderment. “How’d you do that?”
“Knitted it with glyphs for strength,” he told her.
“You should use those on your next skin too.”
“For true,” he agreed, “for you never know when a lass may try to slit your throat.”
“Ach!”
“Tie it round you. Go on. I’ll be holding the other end, you ken, until you come back out.”
She bowed her head and tied the cord round her waist over Bellatrix’s tunic, and when she looked back up, her smile was gone. “I’ve never had such a shiver,” she told him quietly.
“Nor I.”
They shared a solemn look until Magpie broke it, chasing all anxiety from her eyes and saying abruptly, “Here we go.” She tugged the tether hard to test her knot and said, squaring her shoulders, “Hang on to me, Talon.”
“I will. Blessings, Magpie.”
Then, with the warriors following silently, she turned and walked in among the dead trees. She felt the presence of many spiders lying in lurk. Very many. She hadn’t gone far before one plunged down at her on a silk tether of its own. She dove and had to scramble aside as it nearly landed on top of her. She stabbed at it and it burst like the bagful of venom it was. As its eight spindly legs danced a frenzied death, she stood and prowled on, deeper into the Downs.
The fissures in the dead earth widened, their edges crusted with congealed poison and the bones and wings of dead things. The Blackbringer was down in one of those cracks while spiders boiled up and out to do his bidding.
Dark deepened.
Magpie dodged another spider, and it skittered past her toward the advancing Rathersting. She heard a pop and gush as it was dispatched. Another came and she slew it and watched its fat bag of a body shrivel as its venom drooled out. She shuddered in disgust. It seemed impossible she owed her own wings to these vile things, but so it was, and for that reason the Rathersting suffered them to live, century after century.
But not this night. Looking back, Magpie saw many dark shapes spring down onto the warriors, and a frenzy of slaying ensued. She killed two more herself, felt the sizzle of their poison on her hands and arms, and whirled back toward the black cracks in the ground, her senses reeling wildly, trying to stay alert to everything, all around, as night fell.
A warrior screamed somewhere behind her and the hairs pricked up on her neck. More spiders came boiling up out of the ground and shambled forth. So many! She visioned a hasty spell for light as she leapt and dodged them, trying to keep clear of the sly filaments of web stretched from tree to tree. She heard another faerie cry out.
This would never do! The faeries couldn’t possibly dodge all these spiders and the Blackbringer too once he showed himself, and that was sure to be soon. . . .
He rose.
This time he came as no slow fume. He jetted from the earth in a dark spew, churning through the air and sucking his skin into the shape of a horned beast. It was but a mockery of the Magruwen’s form, a pathetic imitation by a creature with no dreams of his own. He landed crouched, his darkness pooling and shifting. Squinting, Magpie could just detect the dense thatch of traceries alive over the skin of him, tightly woven of many, many glyphs. It was a calculus of magic such as she had never dreamed, a prison wrought of the Djinns’ highest craft.