Until he heard the Magruwen’s words, Talon had not for a moment considered that Magpie might be lost. The absurdity of it! That single second when this thing had happened—it was barely as long as the blink of an eye, and he just couldn’t believe that so small a moment could wreak so terrible a change. A sense of crazed outrage welled up in him, as if a mistake had been made in the arrangement of the moments and he should be able to reach back in time and correct it. It would take so little, just seeing the devil in time or skewering the tongue on his knife as he’d done once before.
But there was not now and never had been magic for reaching back in time. Past moments lay as they fell and nothing would stir them.
Talon collapsed to his knees as his stubborn disbelief was stripped away and with it vanished a feeling he hadn’t even known was growing in him, a new sense that the world was wild with possibility, that the whole of life was not a castle rampart or a single forest, but a mesh of pathways waiting to be forged.
Magpie . . .
The crows were sobbing themselves hoarse and it was the most desolate sound Talon had ever heard.
“What’s all this noise?” he heard someone ask, and looked up into the imp marm’s black eyes as she suddenly appeared.
“Good-imp Snoshti . . . ,” he said, his heart clenching at the thought of giving her the news.
“I had a time finding ye lot, what with the crush out there. All them souls. Blessings! She did it, neh? My lass!” Her furry little creature face was bright with joy that hurt Talon’s heart to see.
“Good-imp—” he started to say, but she cut him off.
“But what’s all this snoolery? Feather!” She tugged at Calypso’s wing. “What’s happened to ye?”
Calypso couldn’t even answer. He pressed his head against the silver bottle and wept.
“It’s Magpie . . . ,” Talon said quietly.
“Eh?” Snoshti’s whiskers twitched. “What of her?”
“The Blackbringer . . . ,” he told her. “He . . . he got her, mistress. She’s in there.”
Snoshti looked at the bottle, then at Talon, then back at the bottle, puzzled. “Lad,” she growled, her face ferocious. Then she chuffed and snorted. It sounded almost like a laugh. “What blither!” she declared. “Magpie’s not in there!”
“Aye, for I saw it myself.”
“Neh, lad! Foolish faerie! And ye birds, who should know her better! Magpie’s not in there!”
Talon looked at her, wide-eyed and confused.
“She’s in the Moonlit Gardens!”
Magpie was dreaming of the Tapestry. She lay on a soft white cushion in a little room in the peak of an impossibly tall spindle of rock. It rose from the floor of the dragon’s canyon like a needle standing on end, and at its very tip Fade had hollowed out this little room just for her. A dreaming place of her own. In it were many high windows—a panorama of moon—and the single deep cushion on which she slept.
She had never known such exhaustion.
When she’d found herself yanked suddenly back into the dark, she’d been too weak to think and far too weak to summon the devilishly complex champion’s glyph. It had failed her utterly. But as she felt her edges begin to melt, another, simpler glyph flickered in her mind. Threshold, moonlight, garden, just like Snoshti had taught her. With an effort that felt like an explosion behind her eyes, she’d visioned it, and everything went black as the moth wings took her.
When she arrived on the riverbank she was already unconscious. She’d sunk to her knees and slumped to the grass and she hadn’t opened her eyes since, not when Fade gathered her up in his paw and carried her through the sky, not when Bellatrix treated the wound on her shoulder, visioning healing glyphs, cleaning off the spatter of spider venom and plucking Gutsuck’s teeth out of her torn flesh. And not now, with Bellatrix by her side singing a ballad in Old Tongue and feeding teaspoons of cool water between her lips.
She was deep in dreams, her inner eyes open and tracing the miraculous patterns of the Tapestry’s weave. Her mind found rest as her body healed. It would be days or weeks before she’d wake.
Hungry for news that Magpie couldn’t give her, Bellatrix had sent Snoshti to Dreamdark to learn what had happened. The lady’s voice sounded peaceful as she sang, but her eyes darted anxiously to the windows, watching the sky shapes for one that might be Fade ferrying the hedge imp back across the canyon to her. But Fade didn’t come, and Bellatrix began to think that in all the desperately slow years she’d passed in this timeless place, these moments were the longest.
Her head was throbbing with anxiety when suddenly Snoshti bustled through the door.
“Good-imp,” said Bellatrix, surprised. “I didn’t see Fade coming. Did he carry you?”
“Neh, Lady, I’ve had a lift from another,” said Snoshti, and Bellatrix saw that her black eyes were sparkling.
“What is it, Snoshti? Have you brought news?”
“Aye. The Blackbringer is captured.”
“Blessings be!”
“And the Magruwen has returned to Issrin Ev.”
Bellatrix fell silent, eyes gleaming as a rush of emotion swept over her face. “He has?” she whispered, and when the imp nodded, she clenched closed her eyes to hold back tears. A single shining drop escaped and slid down her cheek. “Then there is hope,” she said quietly.
“And Lady Bellatrix?” said Snoshti.
Bellatrix opened her eyes. Snoshti stepped aside and through the door came a faerie. The spoon in Bellatrix’s hand clattered to the floor.
The Ithuriel’s champion was an Ifrit prince, tall and beautiful and dark as ebony, with immense white moth wings and black braids crowned with a circlet of silver. In the doorway he stood absolutely still and stared at his bride.
A sound—a laugh, a sob—escaped Bellatrix’s lips, and Kipepeo cried out. They met in the air and clung to each other as the force of their flight spun them up toward the ceiling of the vaulted room. They laughed and sobbed and their wings fanned and held them aloft and spun them as their cheeks pressed, tears mingled, and lips met.
Snoshti beamed and chortled. Circling the spire, Fade peered in through the moon windows and exhaled a cascade of fireworks. And in the vault of the sky the seraphim gathered to watch, and even such souls as they who had gone beyond all earthly concerns were moved by the embrace and began to weep.
Kipepeo wasn’t the only one who came to the Moonlit Gardens that day. The elders of Dreamdark had managed to explain to all the gathered souls what had befallen them and had welcomed any who chose to stay. Some did, but many more chose the Gardens, unable to face a world from which their loved ones had been gone already for thousands of years.