Blackbringer

Blackbringer by Laini Taylor Read Free Book Online

Book: Blackbringer by Laini Taylor Read Free Book Online
Authors: Laini Taylor
and prop trunks full of swords and crowns, and past the empty devil’s bottle, to her little bunk tucked high in the back. She boosted herself up with her wings and drew closed her patchwork curtain, spelling up a light that would flicker out as soon as her mind relaxed in sleep.
    She nestled in under the quilt her grandmother had made for her and pulled a big book into her lap, unspelling the protective magicks she kept on it and hefting it open to a page marked with a green quill. On the page she had written the cryptic words of the devil who had killed the Vritra: The fire that burns its bellows can only fall to ash. What poetry in a traitor’s death! She uncorked her ink and wrote below it:
    Tomorrow we’ll arrive in Dreamdark to search
for the Magruwen. The crows are mad shivered
by the thought of him but my shivers are busy
elsewhere, worrying about that snag, wondering
where in the world he is and doing what. And
there’s something else. Like ever, I can’t fumble
up words to describe it, but the pulse—it’s been as
strong as I ever felt it, all around me like I could
reach my hands into it, and I’ve even fancied I
could see it. Sure, it’s just when I’m waking so
anyone would say it was the tail of a dream,
but I could swear. It’s like curls of light at the
edges of my vision that fade away when I try
to see them, like fireworks into ghosts of smoke.
How I wish there was someone I could talk to
about it!
    The book was her journal and almanac. It was crammed with maps so old their creases had worn white, with brittle leaves and colored feathers and twine-tied packets labeled in strange alphabets, with threads from magic carpets and beaded dreadlocks clipped from the beards of hobgoblins. She flipped to the first page and traced the slanted writing inscribed there.
    Our Magpie,
    There is a hole in the pocket of the world and the magic is slipping through it. So much has gone beyond retrieval. Memories have gone slack. Young minstrels disdain to learn the old songs and the notes pass away with the last old ears to hear them. So much has been forgotten.
    Faeries are living upon threadbare magic and they scarcely know it. It falls to us to preserve what remains in this fading age. May this book come to teem with the spells and songs you will collect in it. The first volume of many. Good luck and happy hunting!
    Your loving parents,
Kite & Robin
    When they’d written that, Magpie thought, they’d probably envisioned their little daughter jotting down the tea potions and dust magic of old faerie biddies before they passed to the Moonlit Gardens. At most maybe spying on Ifrit witch doctors and rescuing artifacts from the plunder monkeys of Serendip. And Magpie had gathered tea potions and such. In her book were no fewer than nineteen dust spells, including one that made its victims ravenously hungry for goat’s milk.
    But whatever else her parents might have imagined, Magpie knew it hadn’t been their only sprout stalking devils across human-infested lands. Not that it should have come as a surprise. Ever since she was wee she’d clamored to hear the legends of Bellatrix, the huntress-princess of Dreamdark. She’d loved to play at tracking and had been surprisingly good at it. Eight years ago, when she came upon her first rooster tracks on a moon-silvered beach, it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world to follow them.
    She’d caught that first devil by trapping it in sunlight with only its bottle to escape into or perish in the light. It had been thrilling and even a little easy. Snags were dumb as weevils—no match for a faerie! Not until now had she guessed there could be another sort out there, an unimaginable devil to whom, she had a grim suspicion, the magic of this fallen age would seem but sprout’s play.
    Weary and worried, she lay down her head and fell asleep with her cheek upon her parents’ words. She’d thought she would dream of devils, of darkness and

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