Magpie dropped the porcupine quill in her shock and turned to her friend. “How do you know about that?”

“All the forest knows of it,” she said. “Well, except the faeries. All they’re worrying about is why Queen Vesper keeps to her chamber!”

“But what have you heard?”

“The trees say the age of unweaving has begun.”

“Unweaving? Unweaving what?” asked Magpie.

“I don’t know. They’re saying it’s the faeries’ doom to forget what ought never be forgotten and that this devil hunted in Dreamdark once before.”

“What? I never heard of a snag who . . . but that’s the point, neh? That’s our doom.” She said it bitterly, then asked, “Did they at least have a name for it, Poppy?”

Poppy looked flustered as she nodded. “Aye, they called it something, but you might not believe it. . . .”

“Poppy, what?”

She let out a nervous laugh. “It sounds so silly. It’s the bogeyman, Magpie. They’re saying it’s the Blackbringer!”

Magpie let out a short laugh too. The Blackbringer? The name inspired no shiver. It had been dragged through too many nurseries, worn thin by the empty threats of countless faerie mothers and grannies. The Blackbringer was the thing that would get you if you were naughty, that was waiting to grab up sprouts who stayed out past dark. The Blackbringer was the dark come to life. . . .

Magpie’s laugh fell hollow. Perhaps it didn’t sound quite so silly. “Well, whatever it is, let’s make this cake. I’ve got to get to the Magruwen.”

With the cake tucked into the starling’s nest as the recipe directed, Magpie carried it across the whole of Dreamdark in her arms. Calypso flew at her side, wings flashing in the sun. Mile after mile they surged over the wide, wild forest, until at last they were cresting the hedge and sailing over the grounds of the human school that Father Linden had described to Poppy.

Magpie spotted the well and they spiraled down to land on its crumbling lip. A draft of deep-buried heat rose from within the earth, cooling as it passed them and merged into the world. “Here we are, feather,” Magpie said with a tremor in her voice. “Onward and downward.” She spelled up a light and dropped down into the pit, Calypso following closely.

After a long, steady downward drift they reached the bottom. The stones of the shaft flared wide into a cavernous space and Magpie could see a few ill-formed paths snaking off and twisting away where the light couldn’t follow. There was a door and, carved on it, the Magruwen’s sigil intertwined with the glyph for dream. The tree had told true. Magpie trembled. To think the king of Djinn was on the other side of a door . . . It was as unreal as if a statue of Bellatrix were suddenly to flick its wings and fly from its pedestal. It was legend meeting life.

Standing on the threshold of a being who had wrought the world, Magpie felt very small, very young, and utterly insignificant. Who was she to presume to awaken a Djinn? But she knew the answer to that. As with each devil she captured, she was the only one trying.