Blackbringer Read online

  Magpie stared at the moon—she’d never seen so vast a moon—and at its dancing reflection in the river. Her wits sang a muddled warning and it took her several moments of staring to recall that, gloomy as it was, it had been day yet at the castle. And what of the storm? No rain hung in the air here. The grass beneath her feet was dry, and silver-blue in the moonlight. . . .

  It came to her where she was, and she drew her hands from out of Snoshti’s paws and backed away, staring at the imp with wide, startled eyes. For this silver land could be none other than the Moonlit Gardens.

  “Snoshti . . . ,”she whispered, “am I dead?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  In the dungeon of Rathersting Castle, Batch Hangnail sat hunched in a corner with his big toes tucked into his nostrils for safekeeping. He hummed to himself and bided his time. Tattooed faces peered in at him from time to time through the little window in the door to his cell, and he pretended to take no notice of them. They brought him food and he ate it with his napkin at his neck as if he were a guest.

  He seemed utterly unperturbed to find himself in a dungeon.

  As soon as the guards left him alone, Batch stood, stretched, and ambled to the door. From his satchel he took the key he’d found in the mud at the bottom of the Magruwen’s well, and he slid it into the lock. It fit. It turned. The door swung open.

  Such was the gift of serendipity, and a lifetime of such miracles had left Batch jaded by them. He simply closed the door behind himself and locked it again, then slunk away, singing under his breath.

  “Where ye going? Where ye been?

  Nighttime’s dark but morning’s grim.

  Hurry where ye’re headed,

  forget all that ye’ve seen.

  The past is inescapable, the future’s just a dream. . . .”

  He made his way through the subterranean passages, his nose and instincts leading him along the least traveled of them. He met no one. He climbed stairs, turned and turned again and, like a rat in a maze, he found his way.

  Batch always found what he was looking for.

  And he always found what he wasn’t looking for too. Those were the charms of a scavenger’s life, the unlooked-for pretties. This time it was a little pedal vehicle with side-by-side seats and a neat red-and-white-striped awning to keep off the rain. It hadn’t been driven since the chief’s old mum had passed to the Moonlit Gardens decades past, and no one even remembered there was a little door hidden in the yew’s roots that let it out into the world.

  Humming, Batch pushed open the door and tramped down the weeds that choked and hid it. Then he climbed into the surrey and pedaled out. Once he’d gathered speed, a strange thing happened. Remnants of a floating glyph the biddy had long ago touched to her surrey awakened, and it began to rise gently into the sky.

  Jaded or not, Batch’s eyes gleamed with a wild joy as he threw back his head and said, “Wheeeeee!!!”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “Dead?” repeated Snoshti with a snort. “Ach! As if I’d stand for that! Neh, pet, ye’re not dead. Just visiting.”

  “B-but . . . ,” stammered Magpie. “It’s a one-way journey. Everyone knows that!”

  “Do they, then? Do they know I come and go as I please? And so do all my kind, and so shall you.”

  “But how?”

  “ ’Twas my gift to ye at yer blessing ceremony.”

  “I never knew I had a blessing ceremony.”

  “Neh, for we didn’t tell yer parents. We’d been looking for ye a long time, pet, since before my time, even, waiting for ye to be born. Claws crossed, hoping! We didn’t know if it would work! It’s a lot to trust to stories and dreams, but then along ye came. Even before ye spoke your first word I was fair sure who ye were.”

  Magpie stared at her. The imp’s words were like nonsense tumbling around in her tired mind.

  “Ye know what yer first word was?”

  “My parents said it was mama.”

  “Nor was it! There was another earlier only I heard, and I never told. It was devil. ”

  “Devil?”

  “Aye, just as it was foretold. Then we were sure. We held the blessing after that. Floated ye down Misky Creek on a linden leaf to where the creatures waited. All the gifts we gave, yer animal senses and languages, and more ye’re like to be discovering all yer life, they’re just tokens and tools to help ye bear yer real gift, ye ken, that which was given even before ye were born.”

  Magpie shivered. Foreboding and wonder twined together and she wanted to know, and was afraid to know, what that gift might be. Before she had decided whether to ask, though, Snoshti said, “But that’s not for me to tell. Come along now. This way.”

  She took her hand and guided her gently along the riverbank. Magpie saw a bridge ahead made all of round river rocks, and on the far bank, arrayed like picnickers on blankets, were faeries. “Are they all . . . ?”

  “Aye.”

  They stepped onto the bridge and all eyes on the riverbank turned to them. Magpie hesitated. “What are they all waiting for?” she whispered, suddenly shy.

  “It’s all right, pet, they’re not waiting for ye. They know no more of ye than living faeries do. They’re waiting for their loved ones to come over. We’re all tied to the world so long as our folk are still in it. It can take lifetimes to let all that go and become.”

  “Become? Become what?”

  Snoshti pointed into the sky. Magpie looked, but all she could see was a sparkle of some far thing passing before the moon, and she swayed a little on her feet, staring into the fathomless depths of the sky. She looked back down. They were nearing the end of the bridge and Magpie caught a hint in the air of that snow-sharp fragrance she’d detected in her caravan and on the recipe card. She looked sharply at the imp, only now realizing who had slipped it into her book.

  She stepped off the last stone of the bridge onto the grass of the Moonlit Gardens, where no other living faerie had ever trod. The clusters of picnickers were all watching her and she looked from face to face. She’d never really wondered what faeries would look like in the afterworld, and she saw they looked much the same as they did in life, though muted somehow, like reflections in an old mirror. Their edges were blurred, their substance soft and silvered. And in their eyes, mingled with calm, she saw pity. Snoshti nodded to them in greeting and bundled Magpie along.

  “Why were they looking at me like that?” Magpie asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Pitying, like.”

  “Ach, well, it en’t often a sprout comes across that bridge. Biddies and codgers, that’s who comes. They think ye’re here unnatural early, and that can’t mean any good for ye. They’ll be thinking ye were killed.”

  Magpie stopped walking and looked back over her shoulder at them, struck by a thought. “They’ll have seen Poppy and Maniac then, neh? Can’t I ask them?”

  “Pet . . . ,” Snoshti said, clasping Magpie’s wrist with her paw and keeping her from turning back. “I’ve already asked. They’re not here.”

  Magpie’s insides lurched. “They’re not here?” she demanded. “But . . . they must be! I saw them die!”

  “I’m sorry, I am, but it’s sure . . . and it’s an older mystery than ye know.”

  Magpie stared at the imp, horrified. Not death, she had said of the darkness. Unmaking? They couldn’t have been . . . extinguished . . . but wasn’t that what she felt her own self at the brink of? In a raw voice she whispered, “Then where are they?”

  Still clutching her wrist, Snoshti tugged her along. “I don’t know, pet, but ye’re not the only one who wonders. My mistress has long been wanting to know that same thing. Come now. She’s waiting.”

  Magpie didn’t ask who Snoshti’s mistress was. A wild hope had leapt into her heart and she didn’t want to dash it.

  She followed Snoshti, and it seemed they walked a long way beside the river. She didn’t see another bridge. Above them meadows sloped up to a forest and the forest rolled on from there, on and on in
the moonlight until in the distance it met a line of white mountains.

  Faeries waved from gardens as they passed and Magpie waved back, seeing glints of light from cottage windows tucked among the trees. All the flowers in all the gardens were pale and the foliage was silver, and the faeries too were the color of moonlight, and luminous, as if lit from within. Some were paler than others and more ghostly. When Magpie asked Snoshti why this was, she answered, “They’ve been here longer. They’re closer to their spark,” which really didn’t make things any clearer.

  At length a rumbling sound resolved itself out of the placid shushing of the river and grew steadily louder. A waterfall, Magpie thought, and was glad the river didn’t go on and on forever in sameness. It broadened as it approached the plunge, and mica-glittering rocks began to loom out of the landscape. With Snoshti, Magpie left the meadows behind and approached the edge of a cliff. She felt the vastness of space opening before her as she stepped to the brink to peer over. But as she did, her senses suddenly screamed at her—onslaught!—and she caught Snoshti around the shoulders and yanked her back.

  They tumbled to the ground just as a shape came hurtling up right in front of them, preceded by a snort of fire and spiraling straight up into the sky. The most massive creature Magpie had ever beheld, it shone like crushed gems and left a reek of brimstone in its wake as it coursed toward the moon. Magpie pushed herself to her knees and stared after it. She heard, over the rush of the falls, great bellowing calls sounding and looked down into an immense canyon. Near and far, huge shapes hove into the sky.

  “Dragons!” Magpie gasped, staring up at them. Hundreds there were, gliding and spinning, the coppery fumes of their breath seeming to inscribe fiery glyphs on the night. Magpie had dreamed of dragons. She had dreamed of a time when the heavens had glistened with them as the sea glints with sharks, but she had always woken to a world of empty skies. Seeing them now, awe bloomed within her.

  “And there you are, at last,” said a voice behind her. She turned.

  The faerie who stood there wasn’t dressed in firedrake scales but a simple white tunic, and she wore no knives at her thighs and no gold circlet. Her dark hair hung in a single plait, and though there was a dreaminess around her edges, it was clear that however long she’d been here, life was yet bright in her.

  “Lady,” said Magpie, tears coming to her eyes. “I hoped it would be you.”

  And Bellatrix took Magpie’s hands and helped her to her feet.

  Magpie followed Bellatrix down a narrow stair in the cliff to a cottage carved right into the rock face. From its billowing garden on a ledge of marbled rock she could see the whole canyon spread before her, and she was torn between her fascination with Bellatrix and with the tumult of dragons in the air. Her eyes darted back and forth between them.

  Snoshti bustled out the cottage door with a tray and laid tea things on a bench. She poured three cups and stirred sugar into them, and Magpie thought one was for her, but the imp set them on the ground and whistled for her beetles, who scurried over and began to lap at them like tiny dogs.

  “Do you know when the first dragon came here?” Bellatrix asked her. “It was only five thousand years ago.” She stood looking up at them, her hands clasped behind her, then turned back to Magpie. “I’d been here already twenty thousand years and never thought to see a dragon again. The Magruwen had dreamed them immortal. They were never to come here, but there she was.

  “She was screaming on the far side of the river and wouldn’t cross. It was no wonder she was crazed. She’d been murdered by a human horde and arrived here with her throat full of her own blood. All the faeries, even the seraphim, gathered on the bank, keening. We didn’t know what to do. There was no precedent.

  “When finally I coaxed her across the bridge it gave way under her weight and she was plunged into the water. In panic she spat fire and set the river boiling. It was terrible. . . .” Bellatrix’s voice was ragged with sadness. “Eventually she accepted what could not be changed. She was the only one of her race in all this world.”

  “How lonely she must have been,” said Magpie.

  Bellatrix answered bitterly, “She wasn’t alone long. Once the humans had a taste for it the others came fast. Within a hundred years there was only one dragon left in the living world.”

  “Fade?” Magpie guessed.

  “Aye. Fade . . . He lasted much longer than the others, another thousand years! The Magruwen kept him at his side in Dreamdark, and he was safe. There was little in the forest to subdue a dragon’s appetites, but as long as he lay dormant he had scarce need to feed. Imagine. He was the sire of his race and the last. He must have ached to join his kindred here, to fly again—for in Dreamdark he could do naught but sleep—but he wouldn’t leave his master alone . . . as others had done before him. . . .” Her face clouded with a look of shame and she went on, “And so for the Magruwen’s sake he hid there like some hunted thing and not the king of creatures he was. And he would have gone on with that living death. . . .”

  She gave Magpie a keen, searching look and said, “They share dreams, the dragon and the Djinn King. They had always done and do still. Did you know that?”

  Magpie shook her head.

  “Nay, well, so it is. And the Magruwen saw in Fade’s dreams that the dragon was withering . . . dying the death that grows from within and kills the spirit as well as the skin, and he knew . . . he knew that was worse even than murder. So he let Fade go. He sent him to fly and to feed, knowing he would never come back . . . and he never did. He was murdered like all the others.”

  Magpie thought of the stories she’d heard of the dragon massacres and she had to close her eyes. Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees.

  It had been possible for faeries and imps to hide their existence, but for dragons there was no hiding, and humans had gloried in the slaying, written ballads, epics, as if they were doing great deeds! And sure the eejits believed they were. They thought dragons were predators! The dragons were the first life the Magruwen dreamed—how could they be predators, when they had existed before prey? In fact, they fed on something quite different than meat, though mannies would never guess what golden goose they’d slaughtered.

  Dragons ate ore. They smelted it in their fiery bellies and excreted luminous molten metals, gold, silver, copper, that would harden into veins in the earth. This they had done since the beginning, but it was over now. There would be no new gold made, ever again. Countless humans would lose their lives clawing what was left from the ground, and they would never understand what they had done.

  Magpie knew it wasn’t the last thing they would erase from the earth without thought or understanding. A terrible bitterness swelled in her. “They’re worse than devils!” she said passionately. “If there were bottles enough in the world to capture them all, I would do it!”

  Bellatrix smiled sadly. “In truth I’m glad I didn’t live to see them. But Magpie, there’s a strange twist to this story, and it’s why I’m telling it to you. You see, the day the living world lost Fade, something was born, too. A hope.”

  “Hope for what?” Magpie asked.

  “For a new age. It came down to dreams. That’s how everything begins. If you don’t know it yet, you will. Magpie, if humans hadn’t massacred the dragons, there would have been no way to reach the Magruwen, and we would all have suffered the unweaving until the very end.”

  “The unweaving?” Magpie asked, puzzled. “Lady, what is it? It seems I’m hearing that at every turn.”

  Bellatrix gave her a quizzical smile and said softly, “I am sorry. How strange it must be for you, not knowing. Come, child, sit with me. You look so tired. Drink some tea.”

  Magpie went and sat beside her on the bench.
Her eyes were huge and solemn in the moonlight, looking up at her hero. Bellatrix handed her a cup and reached out to trail her fingertips tentatively over Magpie’s hair.

  “I’m some mess, I fear, Lady,” said Magpie, blushing.

  “Life can do that to you,” said Bellatrix. She asked hesitantly, “May I brush your hair?”

  Surprised, Magpie could only nod and be glad Snoshti had made her wash it a few days ago. She took a gulp of tea while Bellatrix unloosed the pins that held her hair in place and fanned it out over her back, taking care not to jostle her injured wings. Snoshti brought Bellatrix a brush and she began at the ends, gently unworking the tangles.

  “I couldn’t help imagining you as the child I’d have liked to have,” Bellatrix said.

  “Me?” asked Magpie again, shocked that the huntress would have been imagining her. Why, indeed, had she been brought here?

  “Aye, you, Magpie. Fierce, cunning, loyal, sweet.”

  “Thank you, Lady,” Magpie said, growing bashful. Then, thinking of Vesper’s claims, she asked, “You didn’t . . . have any children?”

  “Nay. My life . . . took a turn,” she replied quietly. Magpie wanted to ask her what had happened so long ago, but Bellatrix said, “But this isn’t my story, Magpie. It’s yours.”

  A shiver went through Magpie and she looked at Bellatrix over her shoulder. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I’m coming to it, child,” Bellatrix answered. “For thousands of years after I came here I had contact with the Magruwen. The hedge imps came and went between us, bearing messages. Those years were stretched so thin with longing and remorse, they passed very slowly for me. And the change was happening very slowly, too. If one wasn’t a . . . captive . . . of the past, one might not notice. But I was, and did. From faeries crossing the river I saw how far our folk had fallen. Their magic was paler and paler all the time. The old folk who arrived told of young faeries with no gift for their clan’s ancient ways. There was talk of a new species, humans. And the Magruwen was changing. There was a hardness and weariness in his messages. Even before the dragons began to die, it worried me. And after? After Fade was murdered there were no more messages at all. Not even a farewell. The Magruwen destroyed Issrin Ev and my imps couldn’t find him. I heard nothing more of him. It was Fade, later, who told me he slept.” She pulled the brush slowly through Magpie’s hair. “That was when the idea came, a little sparkle of an idea, wild . . . maybe impossible. But like a scavenger imp, I couldn’t get it out of my mind!”