“Aye, and maybe we dream such things each night and don’t remember them. Think of what’s lost! Bellatrix said dreams are how everything begins, and I dreamed I let the darkness overtake me and then, inside, I held up a light—”

“No light can withstand that darkness. It will fade like everything else.”

“There are lights there, though,” she said. “I’ve been there. I was inside him for an instant—”

The Magruwen flickered, surprised.

“And I saw dying lights everywhere. Sure you could fashion something. Stars—stars burn bright in the emptiness each night, neh?” A thought struck Magpie then. “Wait. When you made the Blackbringer’s skin, you said you plucked out all the stars?”

The Magruwen said nothing.

“Well, what did you do with them?” Magpie asked.

But even as she asked, she knew. Traceries spiraled across her vision, gleaming and glorious, as she caught a glimpse of the Tapestry with her inner eyes, without the Djinn’s help. In that instant she saw the threads the Djinn had spun in secret so very long ago, gathered in hiding while the Astaroth raged against the Tapestry. Here it was, not just the skin of night, but also the receptacle for the stars the Djinn had plucked from it like berries.

“The pomegranate!” she cried. “That’s what it is! That’s where you hid the stars!”

Before Magpie’s eyes and Talon’s, the Djinn suddenly flared again, as he had when Magpie had first mentioned the pomegranate, but now he didn’t catch himself, and the deep blue fire of his core surged and overtook him. The heat, like a woodstove door blowing open, knocked the faeries backward from their perch and into the deep smoke.

Lying on their backs with treasure poking into them while the smoke swirled madly just over their heads, Talon whispered to Magpie, “I wish you’d quit surprising him like that. He’s going to torch us one of these times.”

“Don’t I know. First Fade almost snorted me into ash and now him. I wish he’d put on a skin.”

They rolled over onto their bellies and crawled through a spill of jewels. “Look,” said Talon, holding up the edge of a piece of tattered fabric. It was much heavier than his own skin but he knew it for what it was. “There’s why he isn’t wearing a skin.”

“Ach, that thing must be mad ancient.”

“Aye, I reckon. Bet it has dragon scale woven in it, by the weight of it, to make it fireproof.”

“Come on.”

They rose and scampered under the smoke to a place where a stack of helmets rose like a tower with its peak lost in clouds. They climbed it cautiously, holding their breath through the choking layer of smoke, and peered out to see that the Magruwen had gathered himself back in. He was waiting for them. “There are . . . lights . . . within him?” he asked.