Then the same crows who had only minutes before been mauling her around on the moss commenced to fuss like biddies, clucking, examining the bandage on her shoulder, and arguing over who got to carry her across the woods to see the new temple. Calypso won, and the others griped about it all the way.

With her chin resting on Calypso’s head, flying betwixt treetops and low clouds and feeling an absolute absence of impending doom, Magpie sighed contentedly. When they arced around the edge of the Spine and the face of Issrin came into sight, she sat up straight and stared. It had been only two weeks but new columns had already been erected to brace a new pediment. Carvers stood on scaffolds or hovered on their wings, tapping with their chisels and hammers and etching an abstract pattern of wind and flames into the marble.

The Magruwen came to meet her in the marble dust of the courtyard and guided her through the scaffolding to the ancient halls and corridors within. He had left them largely undamaged when he destroyed the facade and blocked all entry, and faeries were everywhere busy cleaning and polishing. He showed her the reception hall with its obsidian throne and then, down several flights of sweeping stairs and through a massive locked door, his archives. On towering shelves down labyrinthine aisles, every book and scroll his scribes had penned since the Dawn Days was in its place, unplundered and untouched by time. And in the far reaches, in a dark niche beyond the scribes’ carrels, stood the Blackbringer’s bottle.

Just looking at it, every memory of Magpie’s journey seemed to surge through her. The fishing boat, the Vritra’s ashes, her first sight of Dreamdark in the mists of dawn, the terrifying descent down the old well with a cake in her hands, all churning faster and faster, Poppy’s white face vanishing before her eyes, Bellatrix, Fade . . . until the moment she felt the Blackbringer’s tongue wrap around her. She shuddered. Here he was, sealed away, this elegant silverwork giving no hint of the turmoil within.

She had done it.

The Magruwen said, “Much lies ahead if a new age is to be built . . . on forgiveness.”

Magpie blinked. Those had been her own words. Somehow she had persuaded the Djinn King to come back to the world. He wasn’t looking at her but past her, lost in his memories, and Magpie wondered again what terrible secret lay buried in the history of her folk. Of what great treachery were faeries guilty? She almost hoped she would never know, but something told her that one day the dusts of the past would be sifted and secrets long buried would be laid bare. It shivered her.