After a long pause Magpie said, “I never knew you were married.”

“No one did. We had eloped. We were married only three days when we met the Blackbringer in battle. After, those of us who remained went back to our home forests with word that the devils were vanquished. I never told anyone I was a widow. They hadn’t even known I was a wife! And, I didn’t want them to try to stop me.”

“Stop you?”

Bellatrix smiled, but her smile was bleak. “It wasn’t my time. I knew that. But all I’d done for two hundred years was hunt devils, and now they were gone, and Kipay was too. There was nothing left for me. I just wanted to find my husband. It was wrong; it was too soon. But I went where no one would find me, and I spoke the ancient words, and . . . came here.”

“And Kipepeo wasn’t here,” Magpie said, and Bellatrix shook her head.

So that was what had become of her. That was how she had slipped out of history. She had come in mourning to the Moonlit Gardens, unnaturally early. Magpie imagined what it must have been like when she realized Kipepeo wasn’t waiting for her at the riverbank, wasn’t anywhere here, and she couldn’t change her mind and go back to find him in the world. She was trapped. “How terrible, Lady . . . ,” she whispered. Her own feeling of helplessness was nothing next to that. At least she could go back and find out what had become of the Blackbringer’s victims.

She looked up at Bellatrix. “I’ll find out what happened to them,” she declared.

“Aye,” Bellatrix said, and it dawned on Magpie that this was the real reason she’d been dreamed into being, so a mourning widow could learn her husband’s fate at last.

She was meant to do this.

She chewed her lip and pondered it as Bellatrix silently braided her hair. She decided finally that it’s not so bad to find out you have a destiny when it’s something you were going to do anyway.

Bellatrix tucked night-blooming blossoms into the intricate seven-strand braid. “There, perfect! Your foxlick, though . . .” She laughed as the tuft freed itself from the braid. “It won’t be tamed!”

“Don’t I know!” said Magpie. She inhaled. “Those flowers . . .” It was the fragrance she had already come to associate with the Moonlit Gardens. “What are they called?”

“Nightspink. They grow everywhere here.”

“They’re so delicate.”

“Aye, delicate!” agreed Bellatrix with a sigh. “What I wouldn’t give for a big brash rose now and then, a scent you can drown in! All this tranquility! Give me a thunderstorm! A stampede, an avalanche, a wild red sunset . . .”

“Sunsets would be something here,” said Magpie, going to the edge and looking out over the dragons’ immense canyon.