Talon gaped at the cyclone of fire that had swallowed Magpie. He looked quickly around, crouched, and leapt, catching a stalactite and swinging himself up to a crevice in the cave ceiling where he wedged his feet and squinted down into the eye of the fiery tornado. He saw Magpie suspended within, apparently unconscious with her head thrown back, eyes closed, feet drifting above the smoke as she spun, limp, inside the wide whorl of flames.

“Calypso!” he called, and the crow beat his way over the flames, the stench of singed feathers strong on him. He spotted Magpie and exchanged a look with Talon. They both nodded, then the lad leapt and the crow dove, down into the center of the flames roaring round Magpie’s floating figure. They perched upon the arched lid of a coffer that rose like a small island from the sea of smoke, one on either side of her, to guard her.

Magpie’s eyes were closed, but other eyes had opened. Whether within her or beyond her, she knew not. A door had been flung open in her mind to reveal the thing she had always sensed waiting there, that coiled and patient power, the unseen pulse. The Tapestry.

Here the living lights didn’t shimmy off the edges of her vision. They were all she saw. She lost track of her body and just stared at them, dazzled. Streamers of light shimmered and undulated in a pattern as intricate as the whole history of dreams poured tirelessly into its weave. It was vast, curving over every horizon of this mystical space where Magpie’s mind now joined the Magruwen’s.

He guided her eyes across the mesh of harmonious traceries and came to rest on a bright clot of light where they didn’t interweave so much as snarl and snag. A flaw. Twisted threads, tangles. This was how devils were made. The Djinn was showing her what the Astaroth had done, Magpie thought. Did that mean he was going to help her? But his next words stunned her. “Behold your handiwork, little meddler,” he said.

She gasped. “My—? Neh, I’ve never . . .” Her voice trailed off. But of course she had. Hadn’t Bellatrix told her she could weave it? All these years of feeling the pulse all around her, was this what she’d been doing? She’d been desecrating the Tapestry! She was flooded with horror. “I made snags?” she asked in a tiny, desperate voice.

He said, “Nay, little bird. I don’t know why these hideous knots of yours have wrought no devils, but they haven’t.”

“I haven’t . . . ruined it?” she asked.

“Nay,” he said. “These knots of yours, you could consider them . . . scabs.”

“Scabs?”