Blackbringer (15 page)

“Aye, so they do.”

“What have humans to do with us?” Magpie demanded in a fury.

The Magruwen just looked at her, and then he did the one thing, perhaps, that could have made Magpie’s fury flare beyond the power of her small body to contain it.

He yawned.

Magpie sputtered, reddened. A tingling built to bursting in her fingers, then ten whorls of light surged from them and danced in the air, spinning round the Djinn King before exploding like fireworks against his fiery essence. “Wake up!” Magpie cried. “This is the world! This is important!”

And to her surprise, and his, he did wake up. The sparking of fireworks around him touched off a kindred explosion within, and he was stunned by a surge of vitality. It wavered out of his control and in an instant the spindle of fire standing before Magpie bloomed into a dazzle that knocked her to the ground and blinded her. She slipped beyond her senses and lay still in a world of hot white light and knew no more.

The Magruwen gradually, with effort, gathered himself back in. He was in shock. He felt
new,
as when he had first danced off flint to bring light to the beginning. He reared his head, felt power flow through him, and looked down at the smoke where the faerie had stood. She was gone. He waved his hand and chased back the smoke to reveal where she lay senseless on the cavern floor.

He became aware of a ruckus then, a crow, squawking a riot at him. It landed beside the faerie and the Magruwen waved his hand once more so that the crow fell still, frozen in place with his wings arched protectively over the lass.

The Djinn needed quiet.

What he had just seen was impossible. What he now felt was inexplicable. He looked hard at the faerie. Just a lass, and yet, with his sluggishness banished
—what had she done to him?—
his senses felt cleansed, and there was something familiar in her, some hint, some wisp that sang to him.

He needed to look at the Tapestry.

For millennia he had resisted looking at it. His dreams had been haunted by its unweaving and he couldn’t bear to see it in life, its ragged runs and ruined glyphs, its faded threads. Now he wrenched opened his long-blind inner eyes and waited for his mystical vision to clear.

The Tapestry was the very fabric of existence, woven long ago by seven fire elementals spinning in an eternity of nothing. They spun the threads of living light as a net to catch their dreams and keep them from dissolving into the blackness. Fever-bright they burned, fed unwaveringly by their one ally, the Astaroth, an elemental of the air, the world-shaping wind.

And the Tapestry grew.

It was simple in the beginning, a latticework of light, but the dreamers honed their craft, and the dream grew great. When at last it was ready they grasped its edges and shaped it into a sphere, its seams sewn tight, and within it bloomed a world. When they stitched closed the seams they did so from within. They sealed it around themselves and they knew they could never leave, not without letting the blackness in and annihilating everything the Tapestry sheltered.

They dreamed water and earth and populated them with fanciful creatures. The Magruwen dreamed dragons first and he doted on them, Fade most of all, the truest thing he ever fashioned. The great dragon lay curled round the Djinn while they wove and wove.

They dreamed faeries later and gave to them, as to dragons and to a lesser extent imps, something other creatures didn’t have, a sensitivity to the Tapestry. They couldn’t see it or alter it. Simply, they felt it. It was the pulse and vibration of their world and, like harpists plucking strings, they could make it sing.

This was magic.

What the Magruwen thought he had witnessed when the lass stung him awake—the impossible thing—was a faerie spinning a new glyph into the Tapestry. Not just playing upon it, not plucking a thread, but creating one.

The glowing skeins of the Tapestry began to grow clear in his vision, starting out as traceries, curls, ribbons, and streamers of light and settling into their intricate patterns, moving and living and connecting all things. For a long time he held the crow immobile with one small finger of his mind and studied the Tapestry with the rest of it. It was much as he feared from his nightmares. There were ragged shreds and tatters held together by the thinnest of filaments. With the death of the Vritra many threads had dissolved altogether and the fabric was slack as old skin. Blackness peeked through the threadbare patches, taunting. The Tapestry was falling apart.

And then, among the dimming strings and patterns of the failing weave, the Magruwen’s eyes detected bright points, and he looked closer. He saw new glyphs. From one to the next, skipping over the vast fabric, he followed them. Messy they were and clumsy, brilliant and shining, childlike, impatient, artless, ingenious, and
impossible.
Some small fingers had been plying new threads through the old. Short and tangled though they were, in places these new stitches were all that held great gaps from yawning open.

While he slept, someone had been reweaving the Tapestry.

 

Magpie awakened with a groan, still blind, seeing only white. She smelled sulfur and knew she was still in the Magruwen’s cave. She smelled stale cigar smoke and knew Calypso was near. “Feather?” she said feebly.

“I’m here, ’Pie” came his soothing singsong voice, and she felt his feathertips caress her face.

“What did I do?” she whispered, remembering nothing but the light pouring from her fingertips.

“I don’t know, ’Pie,” the crow whispered back. She heard fear in his voice and struggled to sit up, tried to blink her vision into focus.

“Faerie,” hissed the Magruwen’s voice. “Who are you?”

“Magpie Windwitch, Lord,” she said in a wisp of a voice. She began to see shapes in the whiteness.

“Windwitch? Elemental?”

“I am granddaughter of the West Wind.”

To himself the Magruwen muttered, “That explains nothing.”

“Lord Magruwen,” Magpie said, “I’m sorry I offended you. And I’m sorry faeries have forsaken you. But I beg you, don’t forsake us back. Give us a chance to deserve the world, to become what we can still become.”

“This is not an age of becoming,” he told her. “It is the age of unweaving.”

“Unweaving again! What does it mean?”

“It means the darkness will rush in like a tide and sweep everything back into the endless ocean.”

“But sure we can stop it! With your help.” Her vision was returning and she squinted to look at him.

“It is already too late,” said the Djinn.

Magpie clenched her fists in frustration. “Neh!” she said forcefully, getting to her feet and leaning heavily on Calypso.

As she did so, a gleam caught the Magruwen’s gaze and drew it to her knife hilt. He hissed, “Skuldraig . . .”

“What?” Magpie asked with a sharp intake of breath. She remembered the name. The old faerie who had guarded the Vritra had said it. Skuldraig had killed all those faeries. “Who’s Skuldraig?” she asked.

“Let me see that dagger.”

Puzzled, Magpie unsheathed it and held it out, remembering now the runes she’d noticed on its blade while holding it to the falcon’s—the lad’s—throat. She hadn’t had a moment to look more closely at them since.

The Magruwen studied the knife for a long moment before saying, “This blade was lost, and well lost. Where did you find it?”

“In the Vritra’s dreaming place,” she said. “It was planted in a skeleton’s—”

“Spine,” he finished for her.

“Aye. How did you know?”

“Skuldraig
means ‘backbiter.’ That is its way.”

“But who is he?” Magpie asked. “Sure it can’t be the devil—those skeletons were long dead, and besides, this devil, he leaves nothing behind!”

“Devil? Foolish faerie, Skuldraig is the blade itself! It is cursed to slay any who wield it but the one for whom it was forged.”

“B-but . . . ,” Magpie stammered,
“I
have wielded it!”

The Djinn’s flame eyelids drew together in a vertical blink. “Have you indeed?” he breathed. Magpie nodded. He asked, “And pray, what happened when you did?”

“It . . . it
sang.”

The Magruwen guttered like a wind-licked candle. “It sang for you?” Again he demanded, “Who are you, faerie?”

“Magpie Wind—”

“Nay, but who
are
you? Who made you?”

“What do you mean, Lord?” Magpie asked, pushing away from him on her wings as he flared bright and hot once more.

“You weave the Tapestry, and you wield the champion’s blade and it sings for you when it should slay you? Faerie, you too should be a skeleton with a knife in its back. Why do you live?”

Magpie heard all he said, Tapestry and skeleton and all, but one word caused her to gasp. “Champion?”

“I forged this blade for Bellatrix and no other!” His voice seethed and gusts of heat crackled around him.

Awestruck and shaking, Magpie carefully set the blade on the cavern floor and backed away, Calypso at her side. “I’m sorry, Lord Magruwen,” she said. “I should never have taken it—”

“You mistake me, little bird,” he said. “Pick it up. Skuldraig has suffered you to live. It’s yours, should you risk the use of it again. Many devils has it subdued in its day.”

Magpie picked the knife back up and looked at it, in awe of it and afraid. Bellatrix had held it, aye, but how many spines had known it since? She slid it warily into its sheath. “Lord Magruwen,” she said. “Will it subdue
this
devil?”

“I told you. He is beyond you!”

“The trees are calling him the Blackbringer—”

“Blackbringer! Call him what you choose, he will devour you just the same. Go now, faerie.”

Magpie hung her head unhappily. She wanted to ask him more questions but he was withdrawing deeper into his cave and she sensed she was dismissed. “Thank you, Lord,” she said, bowing deeply before turning to Calypso to go.

She had reached the door when the Djinn said, “Wait.”

Magpie turned back, hopeful.

“You may choose a treasure,” he said.

“Oh.” She couldn’t hide her disappointment. She looked at the glittering trove scattered across the cavern floor. Maybe there was some magical thing among the jewels that could help her, but if she had days she wouldn’t know how to choose! “Thank you, Lord,” she said, taking a halting step toward the treasure. A spiral of light caught her eye then, and as she turned, it seemed to sink and disappear into the sparkling piles. Magpie felt the air pulse and urge her forward. She went where it took her and knelt over a spilled coffer of gold pieces. She dredged through them and came up with a familiar thing grasped in her hands.

She smiled, well pleased. “My Lord?” she asked, holding it up for his approval. It was the acorn he had spit from the cake. “You said there was no thousand years in this nut. There surely won’t be unless I get it in some good ground.”

Those vertical eyes drew together like a serpent’s as the Magruwen blinked. He nodded.

Magpie and Calypso backed out the door and bowed again, calling, “Thank you!” as they left.

 

Long did the Magruwen stare after her, watching with his inner eyes as radiant traceries unfurled in her wake, rampant as vines. The treasure had been a final test. It had always been a test, even in the long-gone days of visitors. Those through whom the Tapestry sang true chose well, much as long ago the healer Grayling had chosen her knitting needles from among the gems and flashier things. Those corrupt of spirit called down false notes from the Tapestry, and they chose ill. The sword Duplicity, for instance, doubled everything it cut, even enemies, so that where one devil stood, once slashed with Duplicity, there stood two. And sorrow to the swords-man who multiplied his foes even as he smote them!

The lass, Magpie, had chosen true. He hadn’t doubted she would. But he hadn’t guessed . . . She had made his test look like a sprout’s game! What she had shown him, drawing that common acorn out of a spill of gold, would vibrate through the Tapestry for ages to come—if the Tapestry survived that long. Even as he watched, her traceries wove and pleached their way through the ancient threads like something living, sending out many roots, curving and coiling inextricably through the warp and weft.

He saw it plain as a picture.

There was
not
a thousand years in the acorn, because in three hundred the massive oak that was to spring from it would be struck by lightning and charged through with mystery. The Djinn squeezed shut his inner eyes, thinking sure he read wrong the new magic the faerie was even now weaving, unaware of it though she might be.

But there it was. Flutes carved of the oak’s heartwood would sing directly to the Tapestry. They would sing like many pure, interlacing voices, working upon the threads in a way no faerie could when visioning glyphs. They would draw down from it such complex magicks as the Magruwen himself had never gifted to faeries, that would humble the power of those of the Dawn Days as greatly as a single sprout’s voice is humbled beside a choir of seraphim.

Such power for faeries . . . The Djinn had an impulse to stop her from planting the nut, to unweave the threads before it was too late, but something stilled his fingers, some hint of familiarity, like a forgotten dream.

In all the dreams of his long slumber, coming one upon the next like waves upon a shore, had he dreamed a new golden age for faeries? Had he dreamed to life this one who would bring it? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t believe it. How could he have forgiven in his dreams the faerie betrayal he had never ceased mourning in his heart?

Watching the mesmerizing dance of new threads in the Tapestry, the Magruwen was sure of only one thing. He wasn’t tired. For the first time in a long, long time, he wasn’t tired at all.