Once, it seemed, her family’s gypsying life had been filled with golden seasons. They would find a ruined temple or a remote faerie clan and they’d set down their caravans and stay awhile, collecting glyphs, digging for relics, settling into the rhythm of the native ways. But nowadays Magpie lived a different kind of life, a hunter’s life, and there was little time for lingering. The devils gave her no rest. It seemed an age since she’d seen her family or made a new friend. In all of it, the crows were her one constant, her kindred. She’d said they were her home, and she’d meant it. This might be Dreamdark, the navel of the world and her own birthplace, but what of that? Magpie pushed all thoughts of friends and treehouses from her mind. She was looking for a devil and Djinn, not a home.

She and the crows followed the river like a road of poured silver. Each curve they rounded on tilting wings brought them nearer to the hidden city of Never Nigh, until finally Calypso led them toward the trees. The branches reached out to gather them in, and just like that, they passed into another world, one as ancient as the Djinns’ first dreams of trees.

Dreamdark.

Here on this very spot in the unimaginably distant past the Djinn had gathered to dream the world. Here the Magruwen’s dragon, Fade, had curled round them while they worked, his serpent shape crushing a great arc in the forest that remained to this day, Fade Hollow, a crescent clearing where nothing grew but blood-red moss. Here, down an avenue of arching branches, lay the fabled city of Never Nigh, where the great faeries of the Dawn Days once had lived. There King Valerian and the ice princess Fidrildi had joined hands on the balcony of Alabaster Palace and said their vows. And there their daughter Bellatrix, the greatest of all, had been born and rocked in a cradle of willow.

Spells were woven tight as a basket around Never Nigh, and as the forest closed around her, Magpie gasped and faltered. It was as if she had swum into a current of light. A pattern of radiance flared all around her, weaving and moving, then flickered away into the far reaches of her vision. She alighted upon a branch to clear her head.

“Mags!” cried Bertram, whisking past with a caravan in tow. “All right there?”

“Fine, feather!” she called back. She blinked and looked around, seeing no more spinning lights but only the dense bower of the forest. It was the spells, she thought. Those luminous patterns she’d glimpsed in the air must be the ancient spells of protection the Djinn had spun round Never Nigh so long ago. Somehow she had seen them. Ever since she’d felt the Vritra’s death with her memory touch, these strange traceries of light had been seeping into her sight, and they seemed to be growing brighter. What new oddity was this, to see what was invisible to other eyes, to see magic?