“What’s all this noise?” he heard someone ask, and looked up into the imp marm’s black eyes as she suddenly appeared.

“Good-imp Snoshti . . . ,” he said, his heart clenching at the thought of giving her the news.

“I had a time finding ye lot, what with the crush out there. All them souls. Blessings! She did it, neh? My lass!” Her furry little creature face was bright with joy that hurt Talon’s heart to see.

“Good-imp—” he started to say, but she cut him off.

“But what’s all this snoolery? Feather!” She tugged at Calypso’s wing. “What’s happened to ye?”

Calypso couldn’t even answer. He pressed his head against the silver bottle and wept.

“It’s Magpie . . . ,” Talon said quietly.

“Eh?” Snoshti’s whiskers twitched. “What of her?”

“The Blackbringer . . . ,” he told her. “He . . . he got her, mistress. She’s in there.”

Snoshti looked at the bottle, then at Talon, then back at the bottle, puzzled. “Lad,” she growled, her face ferocious. Then she chuffed and snorted. It sounded almost like a laugh. “What blither!” she declared. “Magpie’s not in there!”

“Aye, for I saw it myself.”

“Neh, lad! Foolish faerie! And ye birds, who should know her better! Magpie’s not in there!”

Talon looked at her, wide-eyed and confused.

“She’s in the Moonlit Gardens!”

Magpie was dreaming of the Tapestry. She lay on a soft white cushion in a little room in the peak of an impossibly tall spindle of rock. It rose from the floor of the dragon’s canyon like a needle standing on end, and at its very tip Fade had hollowed out this little room just for her. A dreaming place of her own. In it were many high windows—a panorama of moon—and the single deep cushion on which she slept.

She had never known such exhaustion.

When she’d found herself yanked suddenly back into the dark, she’d been too weak to think and far too weak to summon the devilishly complex champion’s glyph. It had failed her utterly. But as she felt her edges begin to melt, another, simpler glyph flickered in her mind. Threshold, moonlight, garden, just like Snoshti had taught her. With an effort that felt like an explosion behind her eyes, she’d visioned it, and everything went black as the moth wings took her.

When she arrived on the riverbank she was already unconscious. She’d sunk to her knees and slumped to the grass and she hadn’t opened her eyes since, not when Fade gathered her up in his paw and carried her through the sky, not when Bellatrix treated the wound on her shoulder, visioning healing glyphs, cleaning off the spatter of spider venom and plucking Gutsuck’s teeth out of her torn flesh. And not now, with Bellatrix by her side singing a ballad in Old Tongue and feeding teaspoons of cool water between her lips.