Calypso and Mingus dragged the Blackbringer’s bottle into the ragged hole in the mountain that had once been the face of Issrin Ev. The other crows followed, with Talon astride Bertram. All dread the Djinn King had once inspired in them was forgotten as they cried out for him.

“Lord Magruwen!” they cawed, their voices muffled by the dust of four thousand years that blanketed the ancient corridors.

They emerged into a great chamber, where Talon’s light spell glittered over a trove of treasure. They swooped around the room, distraught and shrieking for the Djinn.

“Is it done?” he demanded, emerging from a doorway.

“Where is the lass?”

Calypso and Mingus beat down to him, lowering the bottle. “Lord!” cried Calypso. “Ye got to unseal it!”

“What?” he hissed.

Talon leapt off Bertram’s back to the ground. He held Skuldraig in one hand and the shrouded star in the other. He laid them both before the Magruwen and said, “Just before the seal settled on, a devil attacked Magpie, and the Blackbringer reached out and sucked them both in with him! You got to get her out!”

The Magruwen looked at the bottle, and the blade, and the bundle of old skin pulsing with starlight. No expression played over the sculpted planes of his mask, but flames spewed from his eyes and horns. “Nay!” he choked, and seized the bottle, his golden gloves clashing against its silver. But he didn’t pry off the seal that bore his sigil. He only said, “The seal is fixed. The faerie is lost.”

Until he heard the Magruwen’s words, Talon had not for a moment considered that Magpie might be lost. The absurdity of it! That single second when this thing had happened—it was barely as long as the blink of an eye, and he just couldn’t believe that so small a moment could wreak so terrible a change. A sense of crazed outrage welled up in him, as if a mistake had been made in the arrangement of the moments and he should be able to reach back in time and correct it. It would take so little, just seeing the devil in time or skewering the tongue on his knife as he’d done once before.

But there was not now and never had been magic for reaching back in time. Past moments lay as they fell and nothing would stir them.

Talon collapsed to his knees as his stubborn disbelief was stripped away and with it vanished a feeling he hadn’t even known was growing in him, a new sense that the world was wild with possibility, that the whole of life was not a castle rampart or a single forest, but a mesh of pathways waiting to be forged.

Magpie . . .

The crows were sobbing themselves hoarse and it was the most desolate sound Talon had ever heard.