Page 47 of The Guardians of Dreamdark (Windwitch #1)

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 dreamed, 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 dreamed it.

The Magruwen closed his eyes, and Talon held very still, hoping the Djinn wouldn’t have to touch his forehead as Magpie had, but he felt only a slight prickle on the back of his neck, and then the Djinn blinked his eyes open again. “Lad,” he said. “Have you tried this yet?”

“Neh, I only dreamt it last night.”

“It is a very complex spell.”

Magpie cut in, “I never even heard of a spell that fuses twelve glyphs! The most I ever saw was seven, and even that was only the one time.”

“Truly?” asked Talon, shamefaced. “I didn’t know...I reckon it won’t work.”

“It will work,” said the Magruwen. “It is extraordinary. You dreamt it, did you?”

“Aye, after I tasted that cordial.”

“Indeed.”

“The cordial was made by a faerie, too, Lord Magruwen,” said Magpie. “You see, we are more than butterflies.”

“I begin to see.”

“And the faerie who made it fell to the Blackbringer just days ago, as did Talon’s father, who’s the chief of the Rather-sting, and his cousins, and many other faeries and creatures, too.”

“I warned you about this foe.”

“What good is a warning? I want help catching him! Can’t you see now that there might be something in the world worth saving? Even Fade thinks so, even after what happened to him!”

The Magruwen sighed heavily, and long plumes of black smoke curled from his fiery horns. “Perhaps,” he admitted at last. “But it may be too late.”

“It can’t be, Lord, it just can’t be!” Magpie cried. “Isn’t there some way to make peace with him?”

“Peace? Nay, he is a force of hate. Even at his best he was fickle and tempestuous. Now? He is wrath. He is fury.”

“What did you do to him?”

“We were divided. Three of the Djinn were for ending him. The other three wanted mercy, something that could be undone one day if ever...if ever this world failed. The Vritra was for mercy, and it has been his own undoing. Mine was the deciding vote. I chose...mercy. Though now it’s clear death would have been more merciful by far, to him and to the world.

“We met in secret. I reached up into the sky and cut down a swath of night, and we plucked out all the stars one by one until absolute blackness was all that remained.”

“The heavens with the stars ripped out!” said Magpie. “That was what he called himself!”

The Magruwen nodded. “Out of the fabric of night we fashioned a skin. We let him discover where we were hiding, and we lay in wait for him, and when he came sweeping down to earth we closed it around him and sealed it shut, and there he was trapped, within a skin of darkness, his terrible power contained.”

“But—” began Magpie. “He has other powers now. And that tongue—”

“Aye. He wasn’t always so. He was only a shadow without voice or strength.

But rage is a colossal force, and what the Astaroth lacked in dreams he made up in sheer, wicked will.

He disappeared for centuries and then, when the whole world was the battlefield of the devil wars and the race of faeries was young and strong and the tide of the war seemed to have turned at last, he returned.

He hunted the battlefields, devouring the wounded, faerie and devil both, and he grew stronger.

That hideous tongue he cleaved from a dying devil and kept for himself.

He gave himself a new name. He was the Blackbringer, and every living thing he touched turned to shadow. ”

“Until the champions caught him and you sealed him in his bottle.”

“Aye. And now, again, he is returned.”

“What does he want?”

“To free himself and destroy the Tapestry.”

“Could he?”

“The Astaroth is the greatest force that ever was. The Tapestry is weak now. Even without him it has nearly fallen apart, and without you, little bird, it would have.”

Talon’s head turned sharply in Magpie’s direction, his eyebrows arching high in surprise.

Magpie asked, “But what about the skin? Could he get out of it?”

“He will never get out of it.”

“Neh? How can you be certain?”

“Of this I can be certain. Only I can release him. And I never will.”

“Oh...So that’s why he’s come here, then. Not to kill you, at least not until he gets you to release him.” She paused, thinking. “And the pomegranate, neh? That must have something to do with it.”

The Magruwen flared for a wild instant, then caught himself and sank back into a low burn. “Pomegranate?” he repeated.