He raised his sword to swing it again.

“Sir!” she cried. “I’m no devil! I’m a faerie and a friend!”

Hearing her words, he dropped his sword with a clatter and fell to his knees. He reached out gnarled hands, his blind eyes rolling, seeking her. She set aside the knife and stepped forward, placing her palms flat against his in the greeting that had become custom in wartimes when devils had been wont to masquerade as faeries. Their fingers had ever given away their disguise, having either too many joints or too few, and this meeting of hands was proof of kinship—or the lack of it. Though all faeries still used it, few remembered its grim origin. Something told Magpie this one did.

“Blessings . . . ,” the old warrior whispered, then closed his hands tight over Magpie’s. She tried to ease her fingers away but his grip was surprisingly strong.

Alarmed, she wrenched free and drew back from him. “Old uncle,” she said warily. “All these faeries who lie here dead—was it you who slew them?”

He answered in a hoarse voice, “Neh, ’twas Skuldraig murdered them all. They never learn to leave him lie.”

“Skuldraig? Who—?”

He cut her off. “ ’Tis of no consequence now. The devil is returned!”

“Which devil, uncle?”

“The worst of them all . . . the hungry one,” he said with a violent shudder.

“The hungry one?” Magpie demanded. “What is he?”

“I couldn’t stop him . . . ,” he whispered, a look of horror on his face.

“Stop him from what?”

“He should have killed me too,” he went on.

“Killed? Whom did he kill?”

“He laughed at me . . . ,” the old faerie whispered, seeming to sink in on himself. “He left me alive. I outlived my master,” he choked. “I failed.”

“Who’s your—?” Magpie started to ask, but the answer seized her with icy fingers and she turned back to the door with the symbol engraved on it. “The Vritra,” she whispered. A numbness came over her mind. “It’s not possible,” she said. “It’s not possible.”

The Vritra was a Djinn, one of the seven fire elementals who had leapt through the blackness of the beginning to light the forge fires of creation. They had wrought the world, every stick and stone of it, each lightning bolt and firefly, aurora and sunrise, firedrake and fox, onyx and oryx, lemon tree and poison frog, and every frizz of Spanish moss. They had even made the faeries.

And four thousand years ago they had disappeared without a trace.

With one sweep of his great arm, so the legend said, the Magruwen had knocked his temple at Issrin Ev down the mountainside and vanished, and within days the other six had gone from their own temples as well, never to be seen again. If there was a reason, it was lost in the swirling dusts of the past. Generations of faeries had lived and died since then and the Djinn were all but forgotten. Some said they’d never existed at all and others believed they’d returned to the blackness whence they came. But Magpie and her parents and her grandmother Sparrow believed something else, and here was the proof they were right.