“I’ll dream more dreams.”

“Oh, aye, will you then? Feed us to the devil then go make yourself another world to play with? Is that what you dream about? How you’ll make it better next time? What about us?”

“What about you? Live with what you wrought and die from it!”

“What we’ve wrought? Faeries didn’t make devils!”

“Nay. And yet the seals are broken.”

“Humans break the seals!”

“Aye, so they do.”

“What have humans to do with us?” Magpie demanded in a fury.

The Magruwen just looked at her, and then he did the one thing, perhaps, that could have made Magpie’s fury flare beyond the power of her small body to contain it.

He yawned.

Magpie sputtered, reddened. A tingling built to bursting in her fingers, then ten whorls of light surged from them and danced in the air, spinning round the Djinn King before exploding like fireworks against his fiery essence. “Wake up!” Magpie cried. “This is the world! This is important!”

And to her surprise, and his, he did wake up. The sparking of fireworks around him touched off a kindred explosion within, and he was stunned by a surge of vitality. It wavered out of his control and in an instant the spindle of fire standing before Magpie bloomed into a dazzle that knocked her to the ground and blinded her. She slipped beyond her senses and lay still in a world of hot white light and knew no more.

SIXTEEN

The Magruwen gradually, with effort, gathered himself back in. He was in shock. He felt new, as when he had first danced off flint to bring light to the beginning. He reared his head, felt power flow through him, and looked down at the smoke where the faerie had stood. She was gone. He waved his hand and chased back the smoke to reveal where she lay senseless on the cavern floor.

He became aware of a ruckus then, a crow, squawking a riot at him. It landed beside the faerie and the Magruwen waved his hand once more so that the crow fell still, frozen in place with his wings arched protectively over the lass.

The Djinn needed quiet.

What he had just seen was impossible. What he now felt was inexplicable. He looked hard at the faerie. Just a lass, and yet, with his sluggishness banished—what had she done to him?—his senses felt cleansed, and there was something familiar in her, some hint, some wisp that sang to him.

He needed to look at the Tapestry.

For millennia he had resisted looking at it. His dreams had been haunted by its unweaving and he couldn’t bear to see it in life, its ragged runs and ruined glyphs, its faded threads. Now he wrenched opened his long-blind inner eyes and waited for his mystical vision to clear.

The Tapestry was the very fabric of existence, woven long ago by seven fire elementals spinning in an eternity of nothing. They spun the threads of living light as a net to catch their dreams and keep them from dissolving into the blackness. Fever-bright they burned, fed unwaveringly by their one ally, the Astaroth, an elemental of the air, the world-shaping wind.