“Ancestress?” repeated Magpie.

The lady said, “Aye, my great foremother, Bellatrix.”

The gents looked at Magpie as if they expected her to collapse into a curtsy at the revelation, but she only squinted and said flatly, “Blither. Bellatrix left no heirs.”

Again the lady laughed her lovely tinkling laugh. “Oh, but she did, as you see.”

One of the gents cut in, “Hasn’t word spread to the world? You can carry the news, gypsy, when you go away. Tell them Lady Vesper, many-greats-granddaughter of the warrior princess, is come to Dreamdark.”

Magpie snorted. “Come from where?” she asked. “And with what for proof?”

The gents, both frocked in frippery to rival the lady’s, their hair fragrant with pomade, gaped at Magpie. One managed to say in a voice choked with shock, “Lady Vesper needn’t defend her claim to a ragamuffin!”

Maniac, who’d come to fetch them to the stage, puffed up at once. “Ragamuffin!” he cried. “Ye don’t call Mags names!”

“Nay, gents, nay, birds,” said the lady with a look of imperturbable sweetness. “Don’t scuffle on my account. I know how it sounds.” She knelt before Magpie and took her hands in her own. “It was a shock to me as well when my grand-dame told me, just before she crossed to the Moonlit Gardens. She showed me where the ladies of our lineage had long hidden Bellatrix’s crown.” She inclined her head, and as the sunlight rippled over the circlet’s surface it had the look of molten gold, and there was something else. A pattern like living glyphs sparkled around it then faded again, like a secret. Magpie blinked. There could be no doubt the crown was forged in a Djinn’s fire. “And her tunic,” continued Vesper, brushing her fingertips over the scales. “These are my greatest treasures, and they belong in Dreamdark, as do I.”

Magpie felt a surprising rush of longing to believe her. She looked at her, so beautiful, so like the warrior princess, and it seemed right that such a lady should exist in this place. She might have stepped from a legend.

There had been a time when the Djinn strode the world in splendor, winking new creatures into being and reaching up to arrange the stars into patterns in the heavens. Faeries had been different then, not only beautiful, but powerful. Magpie’s longing for such times was a deep and wrenching ache, and looking into Lady Vesper’s eyes she felt the ache begin to give way to a bloom of possibility.

One of the gents was speaking. “And besides the crown,” he said, “m’lady has records discovered in the crypts of Chijal Ev showing Bellatrix’s descendants back twenty-five thousand years, and the elders of Dreamdark have studied it—”

Magpie blinked. “Chijal Ev?” she repeated. “The temple of the Iblis?”

“Aye,” said Vesper fondly. “Home of my early life.”

“You grew up at the temple?”

“Aye.”

“And you’re saying Bellatrix lived there after the wars?”

Vesper nodded. “A long quiet life, until she passed to the Gardens.”