It was only after many minutes of crow hugs and rocking and soothing that she began to come back from the depth of unfathomable loss and think about what she’d seen. A wind . . . It hadn’t been her grandfather, of that she was sure, but kin nonetheless. The devil had commanded a wind to extinguish the Djinn and the wind had been powerless to resist. The devil had known its secret name. What devil could wield such power? Only the Djinn knew the elementals’ secret names!

The shiver that had gripped Magpie on the fishing boat had long since deepened to dread, and now it deepened into something approaching despair. What had the humans loosed on the world this time?

“The devil is returned. . . .” That was what the old faerie had said. He knew what the beast was! Magpie struggled to her feet and returned to the antechamber where she’d left him.

He was still slumped on his knees, but his haggard face was uplifted in a posture Magpie had seen before, and he was muttering words in Old Tongue.

“Wait!” she screamed, darting toward him.

But she was too late. She reached him just as the light left his clouded eyes and he slumped forward, dead. He had released himself to the Moonlit Gardens, leaving his sad old body behind.

“Neh neh neh . . . ,” she said frantically, trying to shake him awake, knowing it was futile. “Not yet, not yet,” she whispered. But he had gone.

The Moonlit Gardens were the faeries’ next world, a calm silvered land they traveled to on a day of their own choosing—unless some violence chose the day for them—and from which there was no return. This old warrior—for such he surely was, of the legendary Shadowsharp clan who had guarded the Vritra in ancient days—had long outlasted his life. Faeries could live a thousand years, more if they were stubborn, but never this much more. Magpie had thought the Shadowsharp clan long dead. She couldn’t even guess what will had enabled this one to hold on these centuries past his time. He must have been the last of his clan, unwilling to leave his master alone in the world. What a cruel fate then to fail and live on, all those tired, lonely centuries for naught.

This was a new kind of wickedness in a devil, to recognize a fate worse than death and inflict it. But now the old warrior had let go, and so died the last of another great clan. So many bloodlines had ended without heirs—like Bellatrix’s, to the world’s lasting sorrow. Many others might as well have. With the sad state of magic in this age, faeries bore little resemblance to their glorious forebears. Magpie mourned for bygone days more than most of her folk, because she knew better than they what had been lost. Much had been lost, was being lost every day. That loss was the shape of her life: the struggle against it, the hunt, the unending journey, the hollowness of suspecting that ultimately her family’s work was in vain. That they were as ants trying to stop a landslide by catching one pebble at a time.