he stammered. “I remember that night in Capricorn’s village .. I remember all about it, and you had only a single sheet of paper then!”

That night in Capricorn’s village. Meggie’s heart always began to thud when she thought of it: the night when she had read the Shadow into appearing, and then hadn’t been able to make him kill Capricorn until Mo did it for her.

“Orpheus wrote the words, he said so himself! He just didn’t read them aloud – but they’re here on this paper! Of course my actual name isn’t there or it wouldn’t work.” Farid was speaking faster and faster. “Orpheus says that’s the secret of it: If you want to change the story you must only use words that are already in the book, if possible.”

“He said that?” Meggie’s heart missed a beat, as if it had stumbled over Farid’s information. You must only use words that are already in the book, if possible . . Was that why she’d never been able to read anything out of Resa’s stories – because she’d used words that weren’t in Inkheart? Or was it just because she didn’t know enough about writing?

36

“Yes. Orpheus thinks he’s so clever because of the way he can read aloud.” Farid spat out the man’s name like a plum pit. “But if you ask me, he’s not half as good at it as you or your father.”

Maybe not, thought Meggie, but he read Dustfinger back. And he wrote the words for it himself.

Neither Mo nor I could have done that. She took from Farid the piece of paper with the passage that Orpheus had written. The handwriting was difficult to decipher, but it was beautiful – very individual and curiously ornate. “When exactly did Dustfinger disappear?”

Farid shrugged. “I don’t know,” he muttered, abashed. Of course – she had forgotten that he couldn’t read.

Meggie traced the first sentence with her finger. Dustfinger returned on a day fragrant with the scent of berries and mushrooms.

Thoughtfully, she lowered the piece of paper. “It’s no good,” she said. “We don’t even have the book. How can it work without the book?”

“But Orpheus didn’t use the book, either! Dustfinger took it away from him before he read the words on that paper!” Farid pushed his chair back and came to stand beside her. Feeling him so close made Meggie uneasy; she didn’t try to figure out why. “But that can’t be so!” she murmured.

Dustfinger had gone, though.

A few handwritten sentences had opened the door between the words on the page for him – the door that Mo had tried to batter down so unsuccessfully. And it was not Fenoglio, the author of the book, who had written those sentences, but a stranger – a stranger with a curious name.

Orpheus.

Meggie knew more than most people about what waited beyond the words. She herself had already opened doors, had lured living, breathing creatures out of faded, yellowing pages – and she had been there when her father read this boy out of an Arabian fairy tale, the boy of flesh and blood now standing beside her. However, this Orpheus seemed to know far, far more than she did, even more than Mo – Farid still called him Silvertongue – and suddenly Meggie was afraid of the words on that grubby piece of paper. She put it down on her desk as if it had burned her fingers.

“Please! Do please at least try!” Farid’s voice sounded almost pleading. “Suppose Orpheus has already read Basta back after all? Dustfinger has to learn that they’re in league with each other.

He thinks he’s safe from Basta in his own world!”

Meggie was still staring at the words written by Orpheus.

They sounded beautiful, enchantingly beautiful. Meggie felt her tongue longing to taste them.

She very nearly began reading them aloud. Horrified, she clapped her hand to her mouth.

Orpheus.

Of course she knew the name, and the story that surrounded it like a tangle of flowers and thorns. Elinor had given her a book with a beautiful poem about him in it.

Orpheus with his lute made trees And the mountaintops that freeze, Bow themselves when he 37

 

did sing: To his music plants and flowers Ever sprung; as sun and showers There had made a lasting spring. Everything that heard him play, Even the billows of the sea, Hung their heads, and then lay by. In sweet music is such art, Killing care and grief of heart Fall asleep, or hearing die.

She looked at Farid with a question in her eyes. “How old is he?” “Orpheus?” Farid shrugged.

“Twenty, twenty-five, how should I know? Difficult to say. His face is like a child’s.”

So young. But the words on the paper didn’t sound like a young man’s words. They sounded as if they knew a great many things.

“Please!” Farid was still looking at her. “You will try, won’t you?” Meggie looked out of the window. She couldn’t help thinking of the empty fairies’ nests, the glass men who had vanished, and something Dustfinger had said to her long ago: Sometimes, when you went to the well to wash early in the morning, those tiny fairies would be whirring above the water, hardly bigger than the dragonflies you have here, and blue as violets .. they weren’t very friendly, but by night they shone like glow-worms.

“All right,” she said, and it was almost as if someone else were answering Farid. “All right, I’ll try.

But your feet must get better first. The world my mother talks about isn’t a place where you’d want to be lame.”

“Nonsense, my feet are fine!” Farid walked up and down on the soft carpet as if to prove it. “You can try right away as far as I’m concerned!”

But Meggie shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. “I must learn to read it fluently first. That’s not going to be easy, given his handwriting – and it’s smeared in several places, so I’ll probably copy it out. This man Orpheus wasn’t lying. He did write something about you, but I’m not quite sure that it will do. And if I try it,” she went on, trying to sound very casual, “if I try it, then I want to come with you.”

“What?”

“Yes, why not?” Meggie couldn’t keep her voice from showing how hurt she felt by his horrified look.

Farid did not reply.

Didn’t he understand that she wanted to see it for herself? She wanted to see everything that Dustfinger and her mother had told her about, Dustfinger in a voice soft with longing: the fairies swarming above the grass, trees so high that you thought they would catch the clouds in their branches, the Wayless Wood, the strolling players, the Laughing Prince’s castle, the silver towers of the Castle of Night, the Ombra market, the fire that danced for him, the whispering pool where the water-nymphs’ faces looked up at you . .

No, Farid didn’t understand. He had probably never felt that yearning for a completely different world, any more than he felt the homesickness that had broken Dustfinger’s heart. Farid wanted just one thing: He wanted to find Dustfinger, warn him of Basta’s knife, and be back with him again. He was Dustfinger’s shadow. That was the part he wanted to play, never mind what story they were in.

“Forget it! You can’t come, too.” Without looking at Meggie he limped back to the chair she had given him, sat down, and pulled off the bandages that Resa had so carefully put on his toes.

38

“People can’t read themselves into a book. Even Orpheus can’t! He told Dustfinger so himself: He’s tried it several times, he said, and it just won’t work.”

“Oh no?” Meggie tried to sound more sure of herself than she felt. “You said yourself that I read better than he does. So perhaps I can make it work!” Even if I can’t write as well as he does, she added to herself.

Farid cast her an uneasy glance as he put the bandages in his trouser pocket. “But it’s dangerous there,” he said. “Particularly for a g –” He didn’t finish the word. Instead he began inspecting his bloodstained toes intently.

Idiot. Meggie’s anger tasted bitter on her tongue. Who did he think she was? She probably knew more about the world she’d be reading him into than he did. “I know it’s dangerous,” she said, piqued. “Either I go with you or I don’t read aloud from this sheet of paper. You must make up your mind. And now you’d better leave me alone. I have to think.”

Farid cast a final glance at the piece of paper with Orpheus’s words on it before he went to the door. “When will you try?” he asked before he went back out into the corridor. “Tomorrow?”

“Perhaps,” was all Meggie would say.

Then she closed the door behind him and was alone with the words that Orpheus had written.

39

Chapter 6 – The Inn of the Strolling Players

 

“Thank you,” said Lucy, opening the box and taking out a match. “WATCH, EVERYONE!”

she cried, her voice echoing round the White Flats. “WATCH! THIS IS GOODBYE TO BAD

MEMORIES!”

– Philip Ridley, Dakota of the White Flats

It took Dustfinger two whole days to get through the Wayless Wood. He met very few people on the way: a few charcoal burners blackened with soot, a ragged poacher with two rabbits slung over his shoulder and hunger written large on his face, and a group of the prince’s game wardens, armed to the teeth, probably on the trail of some poor devil who had shot a deer to feed his children. None of them saw Dustfinger. He knew how to pass unseen, and only on the second night, when he heard a pack of wolves howling in the nearby hills, did he dare to summon fire. Fire. So different in this world and the other one. How good it would be to hear its crackling voice again at last, and to be able to answer. Dustfinger collected some of the dry wood lying around among the trees, with wax-flowers and thyme rambling over it. He carefully unwrapped the fire-elves’ stolen honey from the leaves that kept it moist and supple and put a tiny morsel in his mouth. How scared he had been the first time he tasted the honey! Scared that his precious booty would burn his tongue forever and he would lose his voice. But that fear had proved groundless. The honey did burn your mouth like red-hot coals, but the pain passed away

– and if you bore it long enough, then afterward you could speak to fire, even with a mere human tongue. The effect of a tiny piece lasted for five or six months, sometimes almost a year. Just a soft whisper in the language of the flames, a snap of your fingers, and sparks would leap crackling from dry wood, damp wood, even stone.

At first the fire licked up from the twigs more reluctantly than it had in the old days – as if it couldn’t really believe he was back. But then it began to whisper and welcomed him more and more exuberantly, until he had to rein in those wildly leaping flames, imitating the sound of their crackling until the fire sank lower, like a wildcat that will crouch down and purr if you stroke its fur carefully enough.

While the fire devoured the wood and its light kept the wolves away, Dustfinger found himself thinking of the boy again. He couldn’t count the many nights when he’d had to tell Farid how fire spoke, for the boy knew only mute and sullen flames. “Heavens above,” he muttered to himself as he warmed his fingers over the glowing embers, “you’re still missing him!” He was glad that the marten at least was still with the boy, to keep him company as he faced the ghosts he saw everywhere.

Yes, Dustfinger did miss Farid. But there were others whom he had been missing for ten long years, missing them so much that his heart was still sore with longing. It was with those people 40

 

crowding his mind that he strode out, more impatiently with every passing hour, as he approached the outskirts of the forest and what lay beyond it – the world of humans. It was not just his longing for fairies, little glass men, and water-nymphs that had tormented him in the other world, nor his desire to be back in the silence under the trees. There weren’t many human beings he had missed, but he had missed those few all the more fiercely. He had tried so hard to forget them since the day he came, half-starved, to Silvertongue’s door, and Silvertongue had explained that there could be no way back for him. It was then he had realized that he must choose. Forget them, Dustfinger – how often he had told himself that! – forget them, or the loss of them all will drive you mad. But his heart simply did not obey. Memories, so sweet and so bitter . .

they had both nourished and devoured him for so many years. Until a time came when they began to fade, turning faint and blurred, only an ache to be quickly pushed away because it went to your heart. For what was the use of remembering all you had lost?

Better not remember now, either, Dustfinger told himself as the trees around him became younger and the canopy of leaves above grew lighter. Ten years – it’s a long time, and many may be lost and gone by now.

Charcoal-burners’ huts appeared among the trees more and more often now, but Dustfinger did not let the soot-blackened men see him. Outside the forest, people spoke of them slightingly, for the charcoal-burners lived deeper in the forest than most dared to go. Craftsmen, peasants, traders, princes: They all needed charcoal, but they didn’t like to see the men who burned it for them in their own towns and villages. Dustfinger liked the charcoal-burners, who knew almost as much about the forest as he did, although they made enemies of the trees daily. He had sat by their fires often enough, listening to their stories, but after all these years there were other stories he wanted to hear, tales of what had been going on outside the forest, and there was only one place to hear those: in one of the inns that stood along the road. Dustfinger had one particular inn in mind. It lay on the northern outskirts of the forest, where the road appeared among the trees and began to wind uphill, past a few isolated farms, until it reached the city gate of Ombra, the capital city of Lombrica, the Laughing Prince’s realm.

The inns on the road outside Ombra had always been places where the strolling players called the Motley Folk met. They offered their skills there to rich merchants, tradesmen, and craftsmen, for weddings and funerals, for festivities to celebrate a traveler’s safe return or the birth of a child. They would provide music, earthy jokes, and conjuring tricks for just a few coins, taking the audience’s minds off their troubles large and small. And if Dustfinger wanted to find out what had been happening in all the years he was away, then the Motley Folk were the people to ask. The players were the newspapers of this world. No one knew what went on in it better than these travelers who were never at home anywhere.

Who knows? , thought Dustfinger as he walked down the road, with the autumn sun, by now low in the sky, on his face. If I’m lucky I may even meet old acquaintances.

The road was muddy and full of puddles. Cartwheels had made deep ruts in it, and the hoofprints left by oxen and horses were full of rainwater. At this time of year it sometimes rained for days on end, as it had yesterday, when he had been glad to be under the trees where the leaves caught the rain before it drenched him to the skin. The night had been cold, all the same, and his clothes were clammy even though he had slept beside his fire. He was glad that the sky was clear today, apart from a few shreds of cloud drifting over the hills.

41

Luckily, he had found a few coins in his old clothes. He hoped they would be enough for a bowl of soup. Dustfinger had brought nothing with him from the other world. What would he do here with the printed paper they used for money in that world? Only gold, silver, and ringing copper counted in this one, with the local prince’s head on the coins if possible. As soon as his money was gone he’d have to look for a marketplace where he could perform, in Ombra or elsewhere.

The inn that was his destination hadn’t changed much in the last few years, either for better or for worse. It was as shabby as ever, with a few windows that were hardly more than holes in the gray stone walls. In the world where he had been living until three days ago, it was unlikely that any guests at all would have crossed such a grubby threshold. But here the inn was the last shelter available before you entered the forest, the last chance of a hot meal and a place to sleep that wasn’t damp with dew or rain .. and you got a few lice and bugs thrown in for free, thought Dustfinger as he pushed open the door.

It was so dark in the room inside that his eyes took a little while to adjust to the dim light. The other world had spoiled him with all its lights, with the brightness that made even night into day there. It had accustomed him to seeing everything clearly, to thinking of light as something you could switch on and off, available whenever you wanted. But now his eyes must cope again with a world of twilight and shadows, of long nights as black as charred wood, and houses from which the sunlight was often shut out, because its heat was unwelcome.

All the light inside the inn came from the few sunbeams falling through the holes that were the windows. Dust motes danced in them like a swarm of tiny fairies. A fire was burning in the hearth under a battered black cauldron. The smell rising from it was not particularly appetizing, even to Dustfinger’s empty stomach, but that didn’t surprise him. This inn had never had a landlord who knew the first thing about cooking. A little girl hardly more than ten years old was standing beside the cauldron, stirring whatever was simmering in it with a stick. Some thirty guests were sitting on rough-hewn benches in the dark, smoking, talking quietly, and drinking.

Dustfinger strolled over to an empty place and sat down. He surreptitiously looked around for a face that might seem familiar, for a pair of the Motley trousers that only the players wore. He immediately saw a lute-player by the window, negotiating with a much better dressed man than the musician himself, probably a rich merchant. No poor peasant could afford to hire an entertainer, of course. If a farmer wanted music at his wedding he must play the fiddle himself.

He couldn’t have afforded even the two pipers who were also sitting by the window. At the table next to them, a group of actors were arguing in loud voices, probably about who got the best part in a new play. One still wore the mask behind which he hid when they acted in the towns’

marketplaces. He looked strange sitting there among the others, but then all the Motley Folk were strange – with or without masks, whether they sang or danced, performed broad farces on a wooden stage or breathed fire. The same was true of their companions traveling physicians, bonesetters, stonecutters, miracle healers. The players brought them customers.

Old faces, young faces, happy and unhappy faces, there were all of those in the smoke-filled room, but none of them seemed familiar to Dustfinger. He, too, sensed he was being scrutinized, but he was used to it. His scarred face attracted glances everywhere, and the clothes he wore did the rest – a fire-eater’s costume, black as soot, red as the flames that he played with, but that others feared. For a moment he felt curiously strange amid all this once-familiar activity, as if the other world still clung to him and could be clearly seen: all the years, the endless years since Silvertongue plucked him out of his own story and stole his life without intending to, as you might crush a snail-shell in passing.

42

“Hey, who have we here?”

A hand fell heavily on his shoulder, and a man leaned over him and stared at his face. His hair was gray, his face round and beardless, and he was so unsteady on his feet that for a moment Dustfinger thought he was drunk. “Why, if I don’t know that face!” cried the man incredulously, grasping Dustfinger’s shoulder hard, as if to make sure it was really flesh and blood. “So where’ve you sprung from, my old fire-eating friend? Straight from the realm of the dead? What happened? Did the fairies bring you back to life? They always were besotted with you, those little blue imps.”

A few men turned to look at them, but there was so much noise in the dark, stuffy room that not many people noticed what was going on.

“CloudDancer!” Dustfinger straightened up and embraced the other man. “How are you?” “Ah, and there was I thinking you’d forgotten me!” CloudDancer gave a broad grin, baring large, yellow teeth.

Oh no, Dustfinger had not forgotten him – although he had tried to, as he had tried to forget the others he had missed. CloudDancer, the best tightrope-walker who ever strolled around the rooftops. Dustfinger had recognized him at once, in spite of his now gray hair and the left leg that was skewed at such a curiously stiff angle.

“Come along, we must drink to this. You don’t meet a dead friend again every day.” He impatiently drew Dustfinger over to a bench under one of the windows. A little sunlight fell through it from outside. Then he signaled to the girl who was still stirring the cauldron and ordered two goblets of wine. The little creature stared at Dustfinger’s scars for a moment, fascinated, and then scurried over to the counter. A fat man stood behind it, watching his guests with dull eyes.

“You’re looking good!” remarked CloudDancer. “Well fed, not a gray hair on your head, hardly a hole in your clothes. You even still have all your teeth, by the look of it. Where’ve you been?

Maybe I should set out for the same place myself– seems like a man can live pretty well there.”

“Forget it. It’s better here.” Dustfinger pushed back the hair from his forehead and looked around. “That’s enough about me. How have you been yourself? You can afford wine, but your hair is gray, and your left leg .. ”

“Ah, yes, my leg.” The girl brought their wine. As CloudDancer searched his purse for the right money, she stared at Dustfinger again with such curiosity that he rubbed his fingertips together and whispered a few fire-words. Reaching out his forefinger, he smiled at her and blew gently on the fingertip. A tiny flame, too weak to light a fire but just bright enough to be reflected in the little girl’s eyes, flickered on his nail and spat out sparks of gold on the dirty table. The child stood there enchanted, until Dustfinger blew out the flame and dipped his finger in the goblet of wine that CloudDancer pushed over to him.

“So you still like playing with fire,” said CloudDancer, as the girl cast an anxious glance at the fat landlord and hurried back to the cauldron. “My own games are over now, sad to say.” “What happened?”

“I fell off the rope, I don’t dance in the clouds anymore. A market trader threw a cabbage at me –

I expect I was distracting his customers’ attention. At least I was lucky enough to land on a cloth-43

 

merchant’s stall. That way I broke my leg and a couple of ribs, but not my neck.”

Dustfinger looked at him thoughtfully. “Then how do you make a living now that you can’t walk the tightrope?”

CloudDancer shrugged. “Believe it or not, I can still go about on foot. I can even ride with this leg of mine – if there’s a horse available. I earn my living as a messenger, although I still like to be with the strolling players, listening to their stories and sitting by the fire with them. But it’s words that nourish me now, even though I can’t read. Threatening letters, begging letters, love letters, sales contracts, wills – I deliver anything that can be written on a piece of parchment or paper. And I can be relied upon to carry a spoken message, too, when it’s been whispered into my ear in confidence. I make quite a good living, although I’m not the fastest messenger money can hire. But everyone who gives me a letter to deliver knows that it really will reach the person it’s meant for. And a guarantee of that is hard to find.”

Dustfinger believed him. For a few gold pieces you can read the prince’s own letters, that was what they used to say even in his own time. You just had to know someone who was good at forging broken seals. “How about our other friends?” Dustfinger looked at the pipers by the window. “What are they doing?”

CloudDancer took a sip of wine and made a face. “Ugh! I should have asked for honey in this.

The others, well” – he rubbed his stiff leg – “some are dead, some have just disappeared like you.

Look over there, behind the farmer staring so gloomily into his tankard,” he said, jerking his head at the counter. “There’s our old friend Sootbird, with a laugh fixed on his face like a tattoo, the worst fire-eater for miles around, although he still tries to copy you and wonders why fire would rather dance for you than him.”

“He’ll never find out.” Dustfinger glanced surreptitiously at the other fire-eater. As far as he remembered, Sootbird could juggle burning torches well enough, but fire didn’t dance for him.

He was like a hopeless lover rejected again and again by the girl of his choice. Long ago, feeling sorry for the man’s futile efforts, Dustfinger had given him some fire-elves’ honey, but even with its aid Sootbird hadn’t understood what the flames were telling him.

“I’ve heard that he works with powders bought from alchemists now,” CloudDancer whispered across the table, “and that’s an expensive pastime, if you ask me. The fire bites him so often that his hands and arms are quite red from it. But he doesn’t let it get at his face. Before he performs he smears it with grease until it shines like bacon fat.” “Does he still drink after every show?”

“After the show, before the show, but he’s still a good-looking fellow, don’t you think?”

Yes, so he was, with his friendly, ever-smiling face. Sootbird was one of those entertainers who lived on the glances of others, on laughter and applause, on knowing that people will stop to look at them. Even now he was entertaining the others who were leaning against the counter with him. Dustfinger turned his back; he didn’t want to see the old mixture of admiration and envy in the other man’s eyes. Sootbird was not one of those he had missed. “You mustn’t think times are any easier now for the Motley Folk,” said CloudDancer across the table, low-voiced. “Since Cosimo’s death the Laughing Prince doesn’t let the likes of us into the markets except on feast days, and as for going up to the castle itself, that’s only when his grandson demands entertainers loudly enough. Not a very nice little boy – he’s already ordering his servants around and threatening them with whipping and the pillory. Still, he loves the Motley Folk.”

44

“Cosimo the Fair is dead?” Dustfinger nearly choked on the sour wine.

“Yes.” CloudDancer leaned over the table, as if it wasn’t right to speak of death and misfortune in too loud a voice. “He rode away scarcely a year ago, beautiful as an angel, to prove his princely courage and finish off the fire-raisers who were haunting the forest then. You may remember their leader, Capricorn?” Dustfinger had to smile. “Oh yes. I remember him,” he said quietly.

“He disappeared about the same time you did, but his gang carried on the same as ever. Firefox became their new leader. There wasn’t a village nor a farm this side of the forest that was safe from them. So Cosimo rode away to put an end to their evil deeds. He smoked out the whole band, but he didn’t come home himself. Since then, his father, who used to like eating so much that his breakfast alone could have fed three whole villages, has become known as the Prince of Sighs, too. For the Laughing Prince does nothing but sigh these days.”

Dustfinger held his fingers in the dust motes dancing above him in the sun. “The Prince of Sighs!”

he murmured. “Well, well. And what about His Noble Highness on the other side of the forest?”

“The Adderhead?” CloudDancer looked around uneasily. “Hmm, well, I’m afraid he’s not dead yet. Still thinks himself lord of the whole world. When his game wardens find a peasant in the forest with a rabbit he has the man blinded; he enslaves folk who don’t pay their taxes and makes them dig the ground for silver until they’re coughing up blood. The gallows outside his castle are always in use, and he likes to see a pair of Motley trousers dangling there best of all.

Still, few speak ill of him, because he has more spies than this inn has bedbugs, and he pays them well. But you can’t bribe Death,” added CloudDancer softly, “and the Adderhead is growing old.

It’s said that he’s afraid of the White Women these days, and terrified of dying, so terrified that he falls to his knees by night and howls like a beaten dog. And they say his cooks have to make him calves’ blood pudding every morning, because that’s supposed to keep a man young, and he keeps a hanged man’s finger bone under his pillow to protect him from the White Women. He’s married four times in the last seven years. His wives get younger and younger, but still none of them has given him what he wants most dearly.” “So the Adderhead has no son yet?”

CloudDancer shook his head. “No, but all the same his grandson will rule us some day, because the old fox married one of his daughters off to Cosimo the Fair – Violante, known to everyone as Her Ugliness – and she had a son by Cosimo before he went away to die. They say her father made her acceptable to the Laughing Prince by giving her a valuable manuscript to take for her dowry – and the best illuminator at his court into the bargain. Yes, the Laughing Prince was once as keen on written papers as on good food, but now his precious books are moldering away!

Nothing interests him anymore, least of all his subjects. There are rumors that it’s all gone exactly as the Adderhead planned, and that he himself made sure his son-in-law would never return from Capricorn’s fortress, so that his grandson could succeed to the throne.”

“The rumors are probably true.” Dustfinger looked at the crowd in the stuffy room. Strolling peddlers, physicians, journeymen, craftsmen, players with darned sleeves. One man had an unhappy-looking brownie sitting on the floor beside him. Many looked as if they didn’t know how they were going to pay for the wine they were drinking. There were few happy faces to be seen here, few faces free of care, sickness, and resentment. Well, what had he expected? Had he hoped that misfortune would have stolen away while he was gone? No. He had wanted to come back – that was all he’d hoped for in ten long years – not back to paradise, he’d just wanted to come home. Doesn’t a fish want to be back in the water, even if there’s a perch lying in wait for it? A drunk staggered against the table and almost spilled the wine. Dustfinger reached for the 45

 

jug. “And what about Capricorn’s men? Firefox and the rest? Are they all dead?” “In your dreams!” CloudDancer laughed bitterly. “All the fire-raisers who escaped Cosimo’s attack were welcomed to the Castle of Night with open arms. The Adderhead made Firefox his herald, and these days the Piper, Capricorn’s old minstrel, sings his dark songs in the Castle of Silver Towers.

He wears silk and velvet, and his pockets are full of gold.”

“The Piper’s still around?” Dustfinger passed his hand over his face. “Heavens, have you no good news at all to tell me? Something to make me glad to be home again?”

CloudDancer laughed, so loudly that Sootbird turned and glanced at him. “The best news is that you’re back!” he said. “We’ve missed you, Master of the Fire! They say the fairies sigh as they dance by night, since you left us so faithlessly, and the Black Prince tells his bear stories about you before falling asleep.” “So the Prince is still around, too? Good.” Relieved, Dustfinger took a sip of the wine, although it really did taste vile. He hadn’t dared to ask about the Prince, for fear he might hear something like Cosimo’s sad story.

“Oh, he’s doing fine!” CloudDancer raised his voice as two peddlers at the next table began to quarrel. “Still the same black as pitch, quick with his tongue and even quicker with his knife, never seen without his bear.”

Dustfinger smiled. Yes, this was good news indeed. The Black Prince: bear-tamer, knife-thrower, probably still fretting angrily at the way of the world. Dustfinger had known him since they were both homeless, orphaned children. At the age of eleven they’d stood side by side in the pillory over on the far side of the forest, where they were born, and they’d still smelled of rotten vegetables two days later. They had both been born in Argenta, the Silver Land, the realm of the Adderhead. CloudDancer looked at his face. “Well?” he asked. “When are you finally going to ask the question you’ve been wanting to ask since I clapped you on the shoulder? Go on! Before I’m too drunk to answer you.”

Dustfinger had to smile; he couldn’t help it. CloudDancer had always known how to see into other people’s hearts, though you might not have thought so from his face. “Very well. What shall I .. how is she?”

“At last!” CloudDancer smiled with such self-satisfaction that two gaps in his teeth showed.

“Well, first, she’s still very beautiful. Lives in a house now, doesn’t sing and dance anymore, doesn’t wear brightly colored skirts, pins up her hair like a farmer’s wife. She tends a plot of land up on the hill behind the castle, growing herbs for the physicians. Even Nettle buys from her. She lives on that, sometimes well, sometimes not so well, bringing up her children.”

Dustfinger tried to look indifferent, but CloudDancer’s smile told him that he wasn’t succeeding.

“What about that spice merchant who was always after her?”

“What about him? He left years ago; he’s probably living in some big house by the sea, growing richer with every sack of pepper his ships bring in.”

“Then she didn’t marry him?” “No. She chose another man.”

“Another man?” Once again Dustfinger tried to sound indifferent, and once again he failed.

CloudDancer enjoyed keeping him in suspense for a while, and then went on. “Yes, another man. He soon died, poor fellow, but she has a child by him, a boy.”

Dustfinger said nothing, listening to his own thudding heart. His stupid heart. “What about the 46

 

girls?”

“Oh, the girls. Yes, them – I wonder who their father can have been?” CloudDancer was smiling again, like a little boy who has pulled off a mischievous trick. “Brianna’s as lovely as her mother already. Although she’s inherited your red hair.” “And Rosanna, the younger?” Her hair was dark, like her mother’s.

The smile on CloudDancer’s face disappeared as if Dustfinger had wiped it away. “The child has been dead a long time,” he said softly. “There was a fever, two winters after you went away.

Many died of it. Even Nettle couldn’t help them.”

Dustfinger drew bright, damp lines on the table with his forefinger, which was sticky from the wine. Dead. Much might be lost in the space often years. For a moment he tried desperately to remember her face, such a little face, but it blurred, as if he had spent too long over the attempt to forget it.

Amid all the noise, CloudDancer sat with him in silence for a long time. Then at last he rose, ponderously; it wasn’t easy to get up from the low bench with his stiff leg. “I must be off, my friend,” he said. “I still have three letters to deliver, two of them up there in Ombra. I want to be at the city gate before dark, or the guards will have their little joke again and refuse to let me in.”

Dustfinger was still drawing lines on the dark wood of the table. Two winters after you went away – the words stung like nettles in his head. “Where are the others camping at the moment?”

“Just outside the city wall of Ombra. Our prince’s beloved grandson celebrates his birthday soon.

Every entertainer and minstrel is welcome at the castle on that day.”

Dustfinger nodded without raising his head. “I’ll see. Maybe I’ll go along, too.” He abruptly rose from the hard bench. The girl by the hearth looked at them. His younger daughter would have been about her age now if the fever hadn’t carried her off. Together with CloudDancer, he made his way past the crowded benches and chairs to the door. It was still fine outside, a sunny autumn day, clad in bright foliage like a strolling player.

“Come to Ombra with me!” CloudDancer laid a hand on his shoulder. “My horse will carry two, and we can always find a place to sleep there.”

But Dustfinger shook his head.

“Later,” he said, looking down the muddy road. “It’s time I paid a visit.”

47

Chapter 7 – Meggie’s Decision

 

The idea hovered and shivered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.

– Philip Pullman, Northern Lights

Mo came home just as they were all sitting down to breakfast, and Resa kissed him as if he’d been away for weeks.

Meggie hugged him harder than usual, too, relieved that he had come back safe and sound, but she avoided looking him straight in the eye. Mo knew her too well. He would have spotted her guilty conscience at once. And Meggie’s conscience was very guilty.

The reason was the sheet of paper hidden among her schoolbooks up in her room, closely written in her own hand, although the words were by someone else. Meggie had spent hours copying out what Orpheus had written. Every time she got something wrong she had begun again from the beginning, for fear that a single mistake could spoil everything. She had added just three words – where the passage mentioned a boy, in the sentences left unread by Orpheus, Meggie had added “and the girl.” Three nondescript, perfectly ordinary words, so ordinary that it was overwhelmingly likely that they occurred somewhere in the pages of Inkheart. She couldn’t check, however, because the only copy of the book she would have needed to do that was now in Basta’s hands. Basta .. the mere sound of his name reminded Meggie of black days and black nights. Black with fear.

Mo had brought her a present to make peace between them, as he always did when they had quarreled: a small notebook bound by himself, just the right size for her jacket pocket, with a marbled paper cover. Mo knew how much Meggie liked marbled patterns; she had been only nine when he had taught her how to color them for herself. Guilt went to her heart when he put the notebook down by her plate, and for a moment she wanted to tell him everything, just as she had always done. But a glance from Farid prevented her. That glance said, “No, Meggie, he won’t let you go there – ever.” So she kept quiet, kissed Mo, whispered, “Thank you,” and said no more, quickly bending her head, her tongue heavy with the words she hadn’t spoken.

Luckily, no one noticed her sad expression. The others were still anxious about Farid’s news of Basta. Elinor had gone to the police, on Mo’s advice, but her visit to them had done nothing to improve her mood.

“Just as I told you,” she said crossly, working away at the cheese with her knife as if it were the cause of all this trouble. “Those fools didn’t believe a word I said. A couple of sheep in uniform would have listened better. You know I don’t like dogs, but maybe I ought to get some after a 48

 

couple of huge black brutes to tear Basta apart the moment he comes through my garden gate.

A Dobsterman dog, yes. A Dobsterman or two. Isn’t a Dobsterman the dog that eats people?”

“You mean a Doberman.” Mo winked across the table at Meggie.

It broke her heart. There he was winking at her, his deceitful daughter who was planning to go right away, to a place where he probably couldn’t follow her. Perhaps her mother would understand, but Mo? No, not Mo. Never.

Meggie bit her lip so hard that it hurt, while Elinor, still in a state of agitation, went on. “And I could hire a bodyguard. You can do that, can’t you? One with a pistol – no, not just a pistol, armed to the teeth: knives, rifles, everything, and so big that Basta’s black heart would stop at the mere sight of him! How does that sound?” Meggie saw Mo suppress a smile with difficulty.

“How does it sound? As if you’d been reading too many thrillers, Elinor.” “Well, I have read a lot of thrillers,” she said, injured. “They’re very informative if you don’t usually mix much with criminals. What’s more, I can’t forget seeing Basta’s knife at your throat.” “Nor can I, believe me.”

Meggie saw his hand go to his throat as if, just for a moment, he felt the sharp blade against his skin again. “All the same, I think you’re worrying unnecessarily. I had plenty of time to think it all over on the drive back, and I don’t believe Basta will come all the way here just to get revenge. Revenge for what? For being saved from Capricorn’s Shadow and by us? No. He’ll have had this Orpheus read him back by now. Back into the book. Basta never liked our world half as much as Capricorn did. Some things about it made him very nervous.” He spread jam on top of his bread and cheese. Elinor watched this, as usual, with horror, and Mo, also as usual, ignored her disapproving glance.

“So what about those threats he shouted after the boy?”

“Well, he was angry that he’d gotten away, wasn’t he? I don’t have to tell you the kind of things Basta says when he’s angry. I’m only surprised he was actually clever enough to find out that Dustfinger had the book. And I’d like to know where he found this man Orpheus, too. He seems to be better than me at reading aloud.”

“Nonsense!” Elinor’s voice sounded cross but relieved, too. “The only one who may be as good at it as you are is your daughter.”

Mo smiled at Meggie and put another slice of cheese on top of the jam. “Thanks, very flattering.

But, however that may be, our knife-happy friend Basta has gone! And I hope he’s taken the wretched book with him and put an end to that story forever. There’ll be no more need for Elinor to jump when she hears something rustling in the garden at night, and Darius won’t have to dream of Basta’s knife – which means that the news Farid has brought is in fact very good news! I hope you’ve all thanked him warmly!”

Farid smiled shyly as Mo raised his coffee cup to him, but Meggie saw the anxiety in his black eyes. If Mo was right, then by now Basta was in the same place as Dustfinger. And they all thought Mo was right. You could see the relief in Darius’s and Elinor’s faces, and Resa put her arms around Mo’s neck and smiled as if everything was fine again.

Elinor began asking Mo questions about the books he had so shockingly abandoned to answer Meggie’s phone call. And Darius was trying to tell Resa about the new system of classification he had thought up for Elinor’s library. But Farid looked at his empty plate. Against the background of its white china, he was probably seeing Basta’s knife at Dustfinger’s neck.

49

Basta. The name stuck in Meggie’s throat like a pebble. She kept thinking the same thing: If Mo was right, Basta was now where she soon hoped to be herself. In the Inkworld.

She was going to try it that very night, she would try to use her own voice and Orpheus’s words to make her way through the thicket of written letters, into the Wayless Wood. Farid had pleaded with her to wait no longer. He was beside himself with anxiety for Dustfinger, and Mo’s remarks had certainly done nothing to change that. “Please, Meggie!” He had begged her again and again. “Please read it!”

Meggie looked across the table at Mo. He was whispering something to Resa, and she laughed.

You heard her voice only when she laughed. Mo put his arm around her, and his eyes sought Meggie. When her bed was empty tomorrow morning he wouldn’t look as carefree as he did now. Would he be angry or merely sad? Resa laughed when, for her and Elinor’s benefit, he mimicked the horror of the collector whose books he had abandoned so disgracefully when Meggie had phoned, and Meggie had to laugh, too, when he imitated the poor man’s voice. The collector had obviously been very fat and breathless.

Elinor was the only one who didn’t laugh. “I don’t think that’s funny, Mortimer,” she said sharply. “Personally, I’d probably have shot you if you’d simply gone off leaving my poor books behind, all sick and dirty.”

“Yes, I expect you would.” Mo gave Meggie a conspiratorial look, as he always did when Elinor lectured him or his daughter on the way to treat books or the rules of her library.

Oh Mo, if only you knew, thought Meggie, if only you knew. . She felt as if he would read her secret in her face any minute now. Abruptly, she pushed back her chair, muttered, “I’m not hungry,”

and went off to Elinor’s library. Where else?

Whenever she wanted to escape her own thoughts, she went to books for help. She was sure to find something to keep her mind occupied until evening finally came and they all went to bed, suspecting nothing.

Looking at Elinor’s library, you couldn’t tell that scarcely more than a year ago it had contained nothing but a red rooster hanging dead in front of empty shelves, while Elinor’s finest books burned on the lawn outside. The jar that Elinor had filled with some of their pale ashes still stood beside her bed.

Meggie ran her forefinger over the backs of the books. They were ranged side by side on the shelves again now, like piano keys. Some shelves were still empty, but Elinor and Darius were always out and about, visiting second-hand bookshops and auctions, to replace those lost treasures with new and equally wonderful books. Orpheus .. where was the story of Orpheus?

Meggie was on her way over to the shelf where the Greeks and Romans whispered their ancient stories when the library door opened behind her, and Mo came in.

“Resa says you have the sheet of paper that Farid brought with him in your room. Can I see it?”

He was trying to sound as casual as if he were just asking about the weather, but he’d never been any good at pretending. Mo couldn’t pretend, any more than he could tell lies.

“Why?” Meggie leaned against Elinor’s books as if they would strengthen her backbone. “Why?

Because I’m curious, remember? And what’s more,” he added, looking at the backs of the books, 50

 

as if he could find the right words there, “and what’s more, I think it would be better to burn that sheet of paper.” “Burn it?” Meggie looked at him incredulously. “But why?”

“I know it sounds as if I’m seeing ghosts,” he said, taking a book off the shelf, opening it, and leafing absentmindedly through it, “but that piece of paper, Meggie .. I feel it’s like an open door, a door that we’d be well advised to close once and for all. Before Farid tries disappearing into that damn story, too.” “What if he does?” Meggie couldn’t help the cool note that crept into her voice. As if she were talking to a stranger. “Why can’t you understand? He only wants to find Dustfinger! To warn him about Basra.”

Mo closed the book he had taken off the shelf and put it back in its place. “So he says. But suppose Dustfinger didn’t actually want to take him along, suppose he left him behind on purpose? Would that surprise you?”

No. No, it wouldn’t. Meggie said nothing. It was so quiet among the books, so terribly quiet among all those words.

“I know, Meggie,” said Mo at last, in a low voice. “I know you think the world that book describes is much more exciting than this one. I understand the feeling. I’ve often imagined being right inside one of my favourite books. But we both know that once imagination turns to reality things feel quite different. You think the Inkworld is a magical place, a world of wonders – but believe me, your mother has told me a lot about it that you wouldn’t like at all. It’s a cruel, dangerous place, full of darkness and violence, ruled by brute force, Meggie, not by justice.”

He looked at her, searching her face for the understanding he had always found there before but did not find now. “Farid comes from a world like that,” said Meggie. “And he didn’t choose to get into this story of ours. You brought him here.”

She regretted her words the moment they were out. Mo turned away as if she had struck him.

“Yes. You’re right, of course,” he said, going back to the door. “And I don’t want to quarrel with you again. But I don’t want that paper lying around your room, either. Give it back to Farid. Or else, who knows, there could be a giant sitting on your bed tomorrow morning.” He was trying to make her laugh, of course. He couldn’t bear the two of them to be on bad terms again. He looked so depressed. And so tired.

“You know perfectly well nothing like that can happen,” said Meggie. “Why do you always worry so much? Things don’t just come out of the words on the page unless you call them. You should know that better than anyone!”

His hand was still on the door handle.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, no doubt you’re right. But do you know what? Sometimes I’d like to put a padlock on all the books in this world. And as for that very special book . . I’d be glad, now, if Capricorn really had burned the last copy back there in his village. That book brings bad luck, Meggie, nothing but bad luck, even if you won’t believe me.”

Then he closed the library door after him.

Meggie stood there motionless until his footsteps had died away. She went over to one of the windows looking out on to the garden, but when Mo finally came down the path leading to his workshop he didn’t look back at the house. Resa was with him. She had put her arm around his shoulders, and her other hand was tracing words, but Meggie couldn’t make them out. Were 51

 

they talking about her?

It was sometimes an odd feeling suddenly to have not just a father but two parents who talked to each other when she wasn’t with them. Mo went into his workshop alone, and Resa strolled back to the house. She waved to Meggie when she saw her standing at the window, and Meggie waved back. An odd feeling ..

Meggie sat among Elinor’s books for some time longer, looking first at one, then at another, searching for passages to drown out her own thoughts. But the letters on the pages remained just letters, forming neither pictures nor words, and finally Meggie went out into the garden, lay down on the grass, and looked at the workshop. She could see Mo at work through its windows.

I can’t do it, she thought, as the wind blew leaves off the trees and whirled them away like brightly painted toys. No. I can’t! They’ll all be so worried, and Mo will never, ever say a word to me again.

Meggie thought all those things, she thought them over and over again. And at the same time she knew, deep down inside her, that she had made up her mind long ago.

52

Chapter 8 – The Minstrel Woman

 

The minstrel must go on his way,

As he has done so long,

And so a note of sad farewell

Lingers around his song.

Ah, will I e’er come back again?

My dear, alas, who knows?

The heavy hand of death is laid

On many a budding rose.

– E. von Monsterberg, quoted from Musikanten, Gaukler und Vaganten

 

It was just getting light when Dustfinger reached the farm that CloudDancer had described to him. It lay on a south-facing slope, surrounded by olive trees. The soil, said CloudDancer, was poor and stony there, but it suited the herbs that Roxane grew. The house stood alone, with no village nearby to protect it. There was only a wall, hardly chest-high, and a wooden gate. You could see the rooftops of Ombra in the distance, the castle towers rising high above the houses, and the road winding toward the city gate – so near, and yet too far to be a refuge if highwaymen or soldiers coming home from war thought it a good idea to loot this lonely farm, where only a woman and two children lived.

Perhaps at least she has a farmhand, thought Dustfinger as he stood behind some bushes of broom. Their branches hid him, but he had a good view of the house.

It was small, like most farmhouses – not as poor as many of them but not much better, either.

The whole house would have fitted a dozen times over and more into one of the great halls where Roxane had once danced. Even the Adderhead used to invite her to his castle, poorly as he thought of the Motley Folk, for in those days everyone had wanted to hear her sing. Rich traders, the miller down by the river, the spice merchant who had sent her presents for more than a year

. . so many men had wanted to marry her, had given her jewelry and costly dresses, offered her fine apartments in their houses, and every one of those apartments was certainly larger than the little house where she lived now. But Roxane had stayed with the Motley Folk.

She had never been one of those women among the strolling players who would sell their voices and their bodies to a lord and master for a little security, a settled home. .

However, the day had come when she, too, had tired of traveling and had wanted a home for herself and her children. For no law protected those who lived on the road, and that meant the 53

 

Motley Folk as well as robbers and highwaymen. If you stole from a player you need not fear any punishment, if you did violence to one of their women you could safely go back to your comfortable home, and even if you killed a traveler you need not fear the hangman. All his widow could do in revenge was strike the killer’s shadow as the sun cast it on the city wall, only his shadow, and she had to pay for her husband’s funeral, too. The Motley Folk were fair game.

People called them the Devil’s decoys, they liked to be entertained by them, listened to their songs and stories, watched their clever tricks – and barred their doors and gates to them when evening came. The players had to camp outside towns and villages, outside the protection of the walls, always on the move, envied for their freedom, yet despised because they served many masters for money and bread. Not many strolling players ever left the road – the road and the lonely paths. But that was obviously what Roxane had done. There was a stable beside the house, a barn, and a bakehouse, and between them a yard with a well in the middle of it. There was a garden, fenced off to keep chickens and goats from uprooting the young plants, and a dozen narrow fields on the slope beyond. Some had been harvested, while in others the herbs stood high, bushy, and heavy with their own seed. The fragrance borne across to Dustfinger on the wind made the morning air both sweet and bitter.

Roxane was kneeling in the farthest field, among plants of flax, comfrey, and wild mallow. She seemed to have been at work for a long time already, although the morning mist still hung in the nearby trees. A boy of perhaps seven or eight kneeled beside her. Roxane was talking to him and laughing. How often Dustfinger had summoned up her face in his memory, every part of it: her mouth, her eyes, her high forehead. It had been more difficult with every passing year, and with every year the picture had dimmed, desperately as he had tried to remember more clearly. Time had blurred her face and covered it with dust.

Dustfinger took a step forward – and two steps back. He had thought of turning back three times already, of stealing away again as silently as he had come, but he had stayed. A wind blew through the broom bushes, catching him in the back as if to give him fresh heart, and Dustfinger plucked up his courage, pushed the branches aside, and walked toward the house and the fields.

The boy saw him first, and a goose rose from the tall grass by the stable and came toward him, cackling and beating her wings. Peasants were not allowed to keep dogs, that was a privilege reserved for princes, but a goose was a reliable guard, too – and just as alarming. But Dustfinger knew how to avoid the gaping beak and stroked the excited bird’s white neck until she folded her wings like a freshly ironed dress and waddled peacefully away, back to her place in the grass.

Roxane had risen to her feet. She wiped the earth off her hands onto her dress and looked at him, just looked. She had indeed pinned up her hair like a farmer’s wife, but it was obviously as long as ever and still as black, apart from a few gray strands. Her dress was as brown as the earth where she had been kneeling, no longer brightly colored like the skirts she used to wear.

But her face was still as familiar to Dustfinger as the sight of the sky, more familiar than his own reflection.

The boy picked up the rake lying on the ground beside him. He clutched it with a grimly determined air, as if he were used to protecting his mother from strangers. Clever lad, thought Dustfinger, never trust anyone, certainly not a scar-faced man like me suddenly emerging from the bushes.

What was he going to say when she asked him where he’d been?

54

Roxane whispered something to the boy, who reluctantly lowered the rake. Suspicion still lingered in his eyes.

Ten years.

He’d often been gone a long time – in the forest, in the towns on the coast, among the isolated villages lying in the hills around – like a fox that visited farmyards only when its stomach rumbled. “Your heart’s a vagabond,” Roxane always said. Sometimes he’d had to search for her when she had moved on with the others. They lived together in the forest for a while, in an abandoned charcoal-burner’s hut, and then in a tent with other strolling players. They even managed to hold out within the solid walls of Ombra all one winter. He was always the one who wanted to move on, and when their first daughter was born and Roxane wanted to stay put more often – in some reasonably familiar place, with the other women among the strolling players, close to the shelter of walls – he would go off alone. But he always came back to her and the children, much to the annoyance of all the rich men who flocked around her wanting to make an honest woman of her.

What had she thought when he stayed away for a whole ten years? Had she, like CloudDancer, thought him dead? Or did she believe he had simply left without a word, without saying good-bye?

He could not find the answer in Roxane’s face. He saw bewilderment there, anger, perhaps love, too. Perhaps. She whispered something to the boy, took his hand, and made him walk beside her.

She went slowly, as if she must prevent her feet from going faster. He longed to run to her, leaving one of those years behind him at every step, but he had used up all his courage.

He stood there as if rooted to the spot, looking at her as she came toward him after all those years, all the years for which he had no explanation .. except one that she wouldn’t believe.

Only a few paces still separated them when Roxane stopped. She put her arm around the boy’s shoulder, but he pushed it away. Of course. He didn’t want his mother’s arm reminding him how young he still was. How proudly she thrust out her chin. That was the first thing he had noticed about Roxane – her pride. He couldn’t help smiling, but he bowed his head so that she couldn’t see the smile.

“Obviously, no living creature can withstand you to this day. My goose has always driven everyone else off.” When Roxane spoke there was nothing special about her voice, none of the strength and beauty it had when she sang.

“Well, nothing’s changed there,” he said. “In all these years.” And suddenly, as he looked at her, he finally, truly knew that he had come home. It was so strong a sensation that he felt weak at the knees. How happy he was to see her again, how dreadfully, terribly happy! Ask me, he thought. Ask me where I’ve been. Although he didn’t know how he would explain.

But she only said, “You seem to have been well off, wherever you’ve been.”

“It only looks like that,” he replied. “I didn’t stay there of my own freewill.”

Roxane examined his face as if she had forgotten what it looked like and stroked the boy’s hair.

It was as black as hers, but his eyes were the eyes of another. They looked at him coldly.

Dustfinger rubbed his hands together and whispered fire-words to his fingers until sparks fell 55

 

from them like rain. Where they landed on the stony ground flowers sprang up, red flowers, each petal a tongue of flame. The boy stared at them with mingled delight and fear. In the end he crouched down beside them and put his hand out to the fiery flowers.

“Careful!” warned Dustfinger, but it was already too late. The boy, taken by surprise, put his burned fingertips in his mouth. “So the fire still obeys you,” said Roxane, and for the first time he detected something like a smile in her eyes. “You look hungry. Come with me.” And without another word she walked toward the house. The boy was still staring at the fiery flowers.

“I’ve heard you grow herbs for the healers.” Dustfinger stood indecisively in the doorway. “Yes, even Nettle buys from me.”

Nettle, small as a moss-woman, always surly, sparing of her words as a beggar with his tongue cut out. But there wasn’t a better healer in this world.

“Does she still live in the old bear’s cave on the outskirts of the forest?” Hesitantly, Dustfinger walked through the doorway. It was so low that he had to duck his head. The smell of freshly baked bread rose to his nostrils. Roxane placed a loaf on the table, brought cheese, oil, olives.

“Yes, but she isn’t often there. She’s getting more eccentric all the time, she roams the forest talking to the trees and to herself, looking for plants still unknown to her. Sometimes you don’t see her for weeks, so people come to me more and more often these days. Nettle has taught me things these last few years.” She didn’t look at him as she said that. “She’s shown me how to grow herbs in my fields that usually thrive only in the forest. Butterfly clover, jinglebell leaf, and the red anemones where the fire-elves get their honey.”

“I didn’t know those anemones could be used for healing, too.” “They can’t. I planted them because they reminded me of someone.” This time she did look at him.

Dustfinger put out his hand to one of the bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling and rubbed the dry flowers between his fingers: lavender, where vipers hide, and helpful if they bite you. “I expect they grow here only because you sing for them,” he said. “Didn’t folk always say: When Roxane sings, the stones burst into flower?”

Roxane cut some bread, poured oil into a bowl. “I sing only for the stones these days,” she said.

“And for my son.” She handed him the bread. “Here, eat this. I baked it only yesterday.” Then, turning her back to him, she went over to the fire. Dustfinger watched her surreptitiously as he dipped a piece of bread into the oil. Two sacks of straw and a couple of blankets on the bed, a bench, a chair, a table, pitchers, baskets, bottles and bowls, bundles of dried herbs under the ceiling, crammed close together the way they used to hang in Nettle’s cave, and a chest that looked strangely fine in this otherwise sparsely furnished room. Dustfinger still remembered the cloth merchant who had given it to Roxane. It was a heavy load for his servants to carry, and it had been full to the brim with silken dresses embroidered with pearls, the sleeves edged with lace. Were they still there in the chest? Unworn, useless for working in the fields?

“I went to Nettle when Rosanna first fell ill.” Roxane did not turn to him as she spoke. “I didn’t know anything, not even how to draw the fever out of her. Nettle showed me all she knew, but nothing helped our daughter. So I rode to see the Barn Owl with her, while her fever rose higher and higher. I took her into the forest, to the fairies, but they didn’t help me, either. They might have done it for you – but you weren’t there.”

56

Dustfinger saw her pass the back of her hand over her eyes. “CloudDancer told me.” He knew these were not the right words, but he could find no better.

Roxane just nodded and passed her hand over her eyes again. “Some say that you can see the people you love even after death,” she said quietly. “They say the dead visit you by night, or at least in your dreams; your longing for them calls them back, if only for a little while. . Rosanna didn’t come. I went to women who said they could speak to the dead. I burned herbs whose fragrance was supposed to summon her, and I lay awake long nights hoping that she would come back, at least once. But it was all lies. There’s no way back. Or have you been there? Did you find one?”

“In the realm of the dead? No.” Dustfinger shook his head with a sad smile. “No, I didn’t go quite so far. But believe me, if I had, then even from there I’d have sought some way to get back to you. . ”

How long she looked at him! No one else had ever looked at him like that. And once again he tried to find words, the words that could explain where he had been, but there were none.

“When Rosanna died,” Roxane’s tongue seemed to shrink from the word, as if it could kill her daughter a second time, “when she died and I held her in my arms, I swore something to myself: I swore that never, never again would I be so helpless when death tried to take away someone I love. I’ve learned a great deal since then. Perhaps today I could cure her. Or perhaps not.” She looked at him again, and when he returned her glance he did not try to hide his pain, as he usually would. “Where did you bury her?”

“Behind the house, where she always used to play.”

He turned to the open door, wanting at least to see the earth under which she lay, but Roxane held him back. “Where have you been?” she whispered, laying her forehead against his chest.

He stroked her hair, stroked the fine gray strands like silken cobwebs running through the sooty black, and buried his face in it. She still mixed a little bitter orange into the water when she washed her hair. Its perfume brought back so many memories that he felt dizzy. “Far away,” he said. “I’ve been very, very far away.” Then he just stood there holding her tightly, unable to believe that she was really there again, not just a figment of his dreams, not just a memory, blurred and vague, but a woman of flesh and blood with fragrant hair . . and she was not sending him away.

How long they simply stood there like that, he didn’t know. “What about our older girl? How is Brianna?” he asked at last. “She’s been living up at the castle for four years now. She serves Violante, the prince’s daughter-in-law, known to everyone as Her Ugliness.” She came out of his arms, smoothed her pinned-up hair, and reached for his hands. “Brianna sings for Violante, looks after her spoiled little son, and reads to her,” she said. “Violante adores books, but her eyesight is bad, so she can’t easily read them for herself – let alone that she must do it in secret because the prince thinks poorly of women who read.” “But Brianna can read?”

“Yes, and I’ve taught my son to read, too.” “What’s his name?”

“Jehan. After his father.” Roxane went over to the table and touched the flowers standing on it.

“Did I know him?”

57

“No. He left me this farm – and a son. The fire-raisers set light to our barn, he ran in to save the livestock, and the fire consumed him. Isn’t it strange – that you can love two men and fire protects one of them but kills the other?” She was silent for some time before she spoke again.

“Firefox was leader of the arsonists then. They were almost worse than under Capricorn. Basta and Capricorn disappeared at the same time as you, did you know?” “Yes, so I’ve heard,” he murmured, unable to take his eyes off her. How lovely she was. How beautiful. It almost hurt to look at her. When she came toward him again every movement reminded him of the day he had first seen her dance.

“The fairies did very well,” she said quietly, stroking his face.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone had simply painted those scars on your face with a silver pencil.”

“A lie, but a kind one,” he said just as softly. No one knew better than Roxane where the scars came from. They would neither of them forget the day when the Adderhead had commanded her to dance and sing before him. Capricorn had been there, too, with Basta and all the other fire-raisers, and Basta had stared at Roxane like a tomcat eyeing a tasty bird. He had pursued her day after day, promising her gold and jewels, threatening and flattering her, and when she rejected him again and again, alone and in company, Basta made inquiries to discover the identity of the man she preferred to him. He lay in wait for Dustfinger on his way to Roxane, with two other men, who held him down while Basta cut his face.

“You didn’t marry again after your husband died?” You fool, he thought, are you jealous of a dead man?

“No, the only man on this farm is Jehan.”

The boy appeared in the doorway as suddenly as if he had been listening behind it, just waiting for his name to be spoken. Without a word he made his way past Dustfinger and sat down on the bench.

“The flowers are even bigger now,” he said.

“Did you burn your fingers on them?”

“Only a little.”

Roxane pushed a jug of cold water over to him. “Here, dip them in that. And if it doesn’t help I’ll break an egg for you. There’s nothing better for burns than a little egg white.”

Jehan obediently put his fingers in the jug, still looking at Dustfinger. “Doesn’t he ever burn himself?” he asked his mother. Roxane had to smile. “No, never. Fire loves him. It licks his fingers, it kisses him.”

Jehan looked at Dustfinger as if his mother had said that fairy and not human blood ran in his veins.

“Careful, she’s teasing you!” said Dustfinger. “Of course it bites me, too.”

“Those scars on your face – they weren’t made by fire?”

“No.” Dustfinger helped himself to more bread. “This woman, Violante,” he said. “CloudDancer 58

 

told me the Adderhead is her father. Does she hate the strolling players as much as he does?”

“No.” Roxane ran her fingers through Jehan’s black hair. “If Violante hates anyone, it’s her father himself. She was seven when he sent her here. She was married to Cosimo when she was twelve, and six years later she was a widow. Now there she sits in her father-in-law’s castle, trying to care for his subjects, as he has long neglected to do in his mourning for his son.

Violante feels for the weak. Beggars, cripples, widows with hungry children, peasants who can’t pay their taxes – they all go to her, but Violante is a woman. Any power she has is only because everyone’s afraid of her father, even on this side of the forest.”

“Brianna likes it at the castle.” Jehan wiped his wet fingers on his trousers and looked at their reddened tips with concern. Roxane dipped his fingers back in the cold water. “Yes, I’m afraid so,” she said. “Our daughter likes to wear Violante’s castoff clothes, sleep in a soft four-poster bed, and have the fine folk at court pay her compliments. But I don’t care for it, and she knows I don’t.”

“The Ugly Lady sends for me, too, sometimes!” There was no mistaking the pride in Jehan’s voice. “To play with her son. Jacopo pesters her and Brianna when they’re reading, and no one else will play with him because he always starts screaming when you have a fight with him ..

and when he loses he shouts that he’s going to have your head chopped off!”

“You let him play with a prince’s brat?” Dustfinger cast Roxane an anxious glance. “Whatever their age, princes are never friends to anyone. Have you forgotten that? And the same is true of their daughters, especially if the Adderhead is their father.” Roxane made her way past him in silence. “You don’t have to remind me what princes are like,” she said. “Your daughter is fifteen years old now; it’s a long time since she took any advice from me. But who knows, maybe she’ll listen to her father, even if she hasn’t seen him for ten years. Next Sunday the Laughing Prince is holding festivities to celebrate his grandson’s birthday. A good fire-eater is sure to be welcome at the castle, since Sootbird is the only one they’ve had to entertain them all these years.” She stopped in the open doorway. “Come along, Jehan,” she said, “your fingers don’t look too bad, and there’s plenty of work still to do.” The boy obeyed without protest. At the door he cast a last, curious look at Dustfinger, then ran off– and Dustfinger was left alone in the little house. He looked at the pots and pans near the fire, the wooden bowls, the spinning wheel in the corner, and the chest that spoke of Roxane’s past. Yes, it was a simple house, not much bigger than a charcoal-burner’s hut, but it was a home – something that Roxane had always wanted. She had never liked to have only the sky above her by night. . even if he made the fire grow flowers for her, flowers to watch over her sleep.

59

Chapter 9 – Meggie Reads

 

“Don’t ask where the rest of this book is!” It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. “All books continue in the beyond …”

– Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

When all was quiet in Elinor’s house, and the garden was bright in the moonlight, Meggie put on the dress that Resa had made for her. Several months ago, she had asked her mother what kind of clothes women wore in the Inkworld. “Which women?” Resa had inquired. “Farmers’ wives?

Strolling players? Princes’ daughters? Maidservants?”

“What did you wear?” Meggie asked, and Resa had gone into the nearest town with Darius and bought some dress material there: plain, coarsely woven red fabric. Then she had asked Elinor to bring the old sewing machine up from the cellar. “That’s the sort of dress I wore when I was living in Capricorn’s fortress as a maid,” her hands had said, putting the finished dress over Meggie’s head. “It would have been too fine for a peasant woman, but it was just about good enough for a rich man’s servant, and Mortola was very keen that we shouldn’t be much worse dressed than the prince’s maids – even if we only served a gang of fire-raisers.”

Meggie stood in front of her wardrobe mirror and examined herself in the dull glass. She looked strange to herself. And she’d be a stranger in the Inkworld, too; a dress alone couldn’t alter that.

A stranger, just as Dustfinger was here, she thought – and she remembered the unhappiness in his eyes. Nonsense, she told herself crossly, pushing back her smooth hair. I’m not planning to spend ten years there.

The sleeves of the dress were already a little too short, and it was stretched tight over her breasts, too. “Good heavens, Meggie!” Elinor had exclaimed when she realized, for the first time, that they weren’t as flat as the cover of a book anymore. “Well, I imagine your Pippi Longstocking days are over now!”

They hadn’t found anything suitable for Farid to wear, not in the attic or in the trunks of clothes down in the cellar that smelled of mothballs and cigar smoke, but he didn’t seem to mind. “Who cares? If it works we’ll start out in the forest,” he said. “No one will be interested in my jeans there, and as soon as we come to a village or town I’ll steal myself something to wear!”

Everything always seemed so simple to him. He couldn’t understand that Meggie felt guilty because of Mo and Resa any more than he understood her anxiety to find the right clothes. When she confessed that she could hardly look Mo and her mother in the eye after deciding to go with him, he had just asked “Why?” looking at her blankly. “You’re thirteen! Surely they’d be marrying you off to someone quite soon anyway?” “Marrying me off?” Meggie had felt the blood 60

 

rise to her face. But how could she talk about such things to a boy out of a story in the Thousand and One Nights, where all women were servants or slave girls – or lived in a harem? “Anyway,”

added Farid, kindly ignoring the fact that she was still blushing, “you’re not intending to stay very long, are you?” No, she wasn’t. She wanted to taste and smell and feel the Inkworld, see fairies and princes – and then come home again to Mo and Resa, Elinor and Darius. There was just one problem: The words Orpheus had written might take her into Dustfinger’s story, but they couldn’t bring her back. Only one person could write her back again – Fenoglio, the inventor of the world she wanted to visit, the creator of glass men and blue-skinned fairies, of Dustfinger and Basta, too. Yes, only Fenoglio could help her to return. Every time Meggie thought of that, her courage drained away and she felt like canceling the whole plan, striking out those three little words she had added to what Orpheus had written: ” . . and the girl. ”

Suppose she couldn’t find Fenoglio, suppose he wasn’t even in his own story anymore? Oh, come on! He must still be there, she told herself whenever that thought made her heart beat faster. He can’t simply write himself back, not without someone to read what he’s written aloud! But suppose Fenoglio had found another reader there, someone like Orpheus or Darius? The gift didn’t seem to be unique, as she and Mo had once thought.

No, he’s still there! I’m sure he is! , thought Meggie for the hundredth time, reading her good-bye letter to Mo and Resa once more. She herself didn’t know why she had chosen to write it on the letterhead that she and Mo had designed together. That was hardly going to mollify him.

Dearest Mo, dear Resa. Meggie knew the words by heart.

Please don’t worry. Farid has to find Dustfinger to warn him about Basta, and I’m going, too. I won’t stay long, I just want to see the Wayless Wood, the Laughing Prince, and Cosimo the Fair, and perhaps the Black Prince and CloudDancer. I want to see the fairies again, and the glass men – and Fenoglio. He’ll write me back here. You know he can do it, so don’t worry. Capricorn isn’t in the Inkworld anymore, after all.

See you soon, lots of love and kisses, Meggie.

PS. I’ll bring you back a book, Mo. Apparently, there are wonderful books there, handwritten books full of pictures, like the ones in Elinor’s glass cases. Only even better. Please don’t be angry.

She had torn up this letter and rewritten it three times, but that had made matters no better.

Because she knew that there were no words that could stop Mo from being angry with her and Resa from weeping with anxiety – the way she did the day Meggie came home from school two hours later than usual. She put the letter on her pillow – they couldn’t miss seeing it there – and went over to the mirror again. Meggie, she thought, what are you doing? What do you think you’re doing? But her reflection did not reply.

When she let Farid into her room just after midnight he was surprised to see her dress. “I don’t have shoes to go with it,” she said. “But luckily it’s quite long, and I don’t think my boots show much, do they?”

Farid just nodded. “It looks lovely,” he murmured awkwardly. Meggie locked the door after letting him in, and took the key out of the lock so that it could be unlocked again from outside.

Elinor had a second key, and though she probably wouldn’t be able to find it at first, Darius would know where it was. Meggie glanced at the letter on her pillow once more. .

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Over his shoulder, Farid had the backpack she had found in Elinor’s attic. “Oh, he’s welcome to it,” Elinor had said when Meggie asked her. “It once belonged to an uncle of mine. I hated him!

The boy can put that smelly marten in it. I like the idea!” The marten! Meggie’s heart missed a beat.

Farid didn’t know why Dustfinger had left Gwin behind, and Meggie hadn’t told him, although she knew the reason only too well. She herself, after all, had told Dustfinger what part the marten was to play in his story. He was to die a dreadful, violent death because of Gwin – if what Fenoglio had written came true. But Farid just shook his head sadly when she asked him about the marten. “He’s gone,” said the boy. “I tied him up in the garden, because the bookworm woman kept on at me about her birds, but he gnawed through the rope. I’ve looked for him everywhere, but I just can’t find him!” Clever Gwin.

“He’ll have to stay here,” said Meggie. “Orpheus didn’t write anything about him, and Resa will look after him. She likes him.” Farid nodded and glanced unhappily at the window, but he didn’t contradict her.

The Wayless Wood – that was where Orpheus’s words would take them. Farid knew where Dustfinger had meant to go after arriving in the forest: to Ombra, where the Laughing Prince’s castle stood. And that was where Meggie hoped to find Fenoglio, too. He had often told her about Ombra when they were both Capricorn’s prisoners. One night, when neither of them could sleep because Capricorn’s men were shooting at stray cats outside again, Fenoglio had whispered to Meggie, “If I could choose to see one place in the Inkworld, then it would be Ombra. After all, the Laughing Prince is a great lover of books, which can hardly be said of his adversary the Adder head. Yes, life must surely be good for a writer in Ombra. A room in an attic somewhere, perhaps in the alley where the cobblers and saddlers work – their trades don’t smell too bad – and a glass man to sharpen my quills, a few fairies over my bed, and I could look down into the alley through my window and see all life pass by. . ”

“What are you taking with you?” Farid’s voice startled Meggie out of her thoughts. “You know we’re not supposed to bring too much.”

“Of course I know.” Did he think that just because she was a girl she needed a dozen dresses? All she was going to carry was the old leather bag that had always gone with her and Mo on their travels when she was little. It would remind her of Mo, and she hoped that in the Inkworld it would be as inconspicuous as her dress. But the things she’d stuffed into it would certainly attract attention if anyone saw them: a hairbrush made of plastic, modern like the buttons on the cardigan she had packed; also a couple of pencils, a penknife, a photograph of her parents, and one of Elinor. She had thought hard about what book to take. Going without one would have seemed to her like setting off naked, but it mustn’t be a heavy book, so it had to be a paperback.

“Books in beach clothes,” Mo called them, “badly dressed for most occasions but useful when you’re on vacation.” Elinor didn’t have a single paperback on her shelves, but Meggie herself owned a few. In the end she had decided on one that Resa had given her, a collection of stories set near the lake that lay close to Elinor’s house. That way she would be taking a little bit of home with her – for Elinor’s house was her home now, more than anywhere else had ever been.

And who knew, maybe Fenoglio would be able to use the words in it to write her back again, back into her own story. .

Farid had gone to the window. It was open, and a cool wind was blowing into the room, moving the curtains that Resa had made. Meggie shivered in her new dress. The nights were still very 62

 

mild, but what would the season be in the Inkworld?

Perhaps it was winter there. .

“I ought to say good-bye to him, at least,” murmured Farid. “Gwin!” he called softly into the night air, clicking his tongue. Meggie quickly pulled him away from the window. “Don’t do that!” she snapped. “Do you want to wake up everyone? I’ve already told you, Gwin will be fine here. He’s probably found a female marten by now. There are a few around the place. Elinor’s always afraid they’ll eat the nightingale that sings outside her window in the evening.”

Farid looked very unhappy, but he stepped back from the window. “Why are you leaving it open?” he asked. “Suppose Basta .. ” He didn’t finish his sentence.

“Elinor’s alarm system works even if there’s an open window,” was all Meggie said, while she put the notebook Mo had given her in her bag. There was a reason why she didn’t want to close the window. One night in a hotel by the sea, not far from Capricorn’s village, she had persuaded Mo to read her a poem. A poem about a moon-bird asleep in a peppermint wind. Next morning the bird was fluttering against the window of their hotel bedroom, and Meggie couldn’t forget how its little head kept colliding with the glass again and again. Her window must stay open.

“We’d better sit close to each other on the sofa,” she said. “And sling your backpack over your back.”

Farid obeyed. He sat down on the sofa as hesitantly as he had on her chair. It was an old, velvet, button-backed sofa with tassels, its pale green upholstery very worn. “You need somewhere comfortable to sit and read,” Elinor had said when she asked Darius to put it in Meggie’s room.

What would Elinor say when she found that Meggie had gone? Would she understand?

She’ll probably swear a lot, thought Meggie, kneeling beside her schoolbag. And then she’ll say,

“Damn it, why didn’t the silly girl take me, too?” That would be Elinor all over. Meggie suddenly wanted to see her again, but she tried not to think of any of them anymore – not Elinor or Resa or Mo. Particularly not Mo, for she might have only too clear an idea of what he’d look like when he found her letter . . No, stop it, she told herself.

She quickly reached into her schoolbag and took out her geography book. The sheet of paper that Farid had brought with him was in there, beside her own copy of it, but Meggie took out only the copy in her own handwriting. Farid moved aside as she sat down next to him, and for a moment Meggie thought she saw something like fear in his eyes.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Have you changed your mind?”

But he shook his head. “No. It’s just . . it hasn’t ever happened to you, has it?”

“What?” For the first time Meggie noticed that he had a beard coming. It looked odd on his young face.

“Well, what – what happened to Darius.”

Ah, that was it. He was afraid of arriving in Dustfinger’s world with a twisted face, or a stiff leg, or mute like Resa.

“No, of course not!” Meggie couldn’t help the note of injury that crept into her voice. Although –

63

could she really be sure that Fenoglio had arrived unharmed on the other side? Fenoglio, the Steadfast Tin Soldier . . she had never seen people again after sending them away into the letters on the page. She’d seen only those who came out of the pages. Never mind. Don’t think so much, Meggie. Read, or you may lose courage before you even feel the first word on your tongue…

Farid cleared his throat, as if he, and not Meggie, must start reading.

So what was she waiting for? Did she expect Mo to knock on her door and wonder why she had locked it? All had been quiet next door for some time. Her parents were asleep. Don’t think of them, Meggie! Don’t think of Mo or Resa or Elinor, just think of the words – and the place where you want them to take you. A place of marvels and adventures.

Meggie looked at the letters on the page, black and carefully shaped. She tried the taste of the first few syllables on her tongue, tried to picture the world of which the words whispered, the trees, the birds, the strange sky. . Then she began to read. Her heart was thudding almost as violently as it had on the night she had been meant to use her voice to kill. Yet this time she had to do so much less. She had only to open a door, nothing but a door between the words, just large enough for her and Farid to pass through. .

A fresh fragrance rose to her nostrils, the scent of thousands and thousands of leaves. Then everything disappeared: her desk, the lamp beside her, the open window. The last thing that Meggie saw was Gwin, sitting on the windowsill, snuffling and looking at them.

64

Chapter 10 – The Inkworld

 

Thus sharply did the terrified three learn the difference between an island of make-believe and the same island come true.

– J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

It was bright. Sunlight filtered through countless leaves.

Shadows danced on a nearby pool, and a swarm of tiny red elves was whirring above the dark water.

I can do it! That was Meggie’s first thought when she sensed that the letters on the page really had let her through and she wasn’t in Elinor’s house anymore, but somewhere very, very different. I can do it. I can read myself into a story. She really had slipped through the words, as she’d so often done in her mind.

But this time she wouldn’t have to slip into the skin of a character in the story – no, this time she would be in the story herself, part of it. Her very own self. Meggie. Not even that man Orpheus had done it. He had read Dustfinger home, but he couldn’t read himself into the book, right into it. No one but Meggie had ever done it before, not Orpheus, not Darius, not Mo.

Mo.

Meggie looked around almost as if she hoped he might be standing behind her, as usual when they were in a strange place. But only Farid was there, looking around as incredulously as she was. Elinor’s house was far, far away. Her parents were gone. And there was no way back.

Quite suddenly, Meggie felt fear rise in her like black, brackish water. She felt lost, terribly lost, felt it in every part of her. She didn’t belong here! What had she done?

She stared at the paper in her hand, so useless now, the bait she had swallowed. Fenoglio’s story had caught her. The sense of triumph that had carried her away just now was gone as if it had never been. Fear had extinguished it, fear that she had made a terrible mistake and it could never be put right. Meggie tried desperately to find some other feeling in her heart, but there was nothing, not even curiosity about the world now surrounding her. I want to go back! That was all she could think.

But Farid turned to her and smiled.

“Look at those trees, Meggie!” he said. “They really do grow right up to the sky. Look at them!”

He ran his fingers over his face, felt his nose and mouth, looked down at himself, and on realizing 65

 

that he was obviously entirely unharmed began leaping around like a grasshopper. He made his way over the tree roots that wound through the moss that grew thick and soft between them, jumped from root to root – and then turned around and around, laughing, arms outstretched, until he was dizzy and staggered back against the nearest tree. Still laughing, he leaned against its trunk, which was so vast that five grown men with their arms stretched out could hardly have encompassed it, and looked up into the tangle of twigs and branches.

“You did it, Meggie!” he cried. “You did it! Hear that, Cheeseface?” he shouted at the trees.

“She can do it, using your words. She can do what you’ve tried thousands of times! She can do it, and you can’t!” He laughed again, as gleefully as a small child. Until he noticed that Meggie was perfectly silent.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, indicating her mouth in alarm. “You haven’t. . ?”

Lost her voice, like her mother? Had she? Her tongue felt heavy, but the words came out. “No.

No, I’m all right.”

Farid smiled with relief. His carefree mood soothed Meggie’s fears, and for the first time she really looked around her. They were in a valley, a broad, densely wooded valley among hills with trees standing so close together on their slopes that the crowns grew into one another.

Chestnut and oak on the hillsides, ash and poplar farther down, mingling their leaves with the silvery foliage of willows. The Wayless Wood deserved its name. It seemed to have no end and no beginning, like a green sea where you could drown as easily as in the wet and salty waves of its sister the ocean.

“Isn’t this incredible? Isn’t it amazingly wonderful?” Farid laughed so exuberantly that an animal of some kind, invisible among the leaves, snarled angrily down at them. “Dustfinger told me about it, but it’s even better than he said. How can there be so many different kinds of leaves?

And just look at all the flowers and berries! We won’t starve here!” Farid picked a berry, round and blue-black, sniffed it, and put it in his mouth. “I once knew an old man,” he said, wiping the juice from his lips, “who used to tell stories at night by the fire. Stories about paradise. This is just how he described it: carpets of moss, pools of cool water, flowers and sweet berries everywhere, trees growing up to the sky, and the voices of their leaves speaking to the wind above you. Can you hear them?”

Yes, Meggie could. And she could see elves, swarms of them, tiny creatures with red skins. Resa had told her about them. They were swirling like midges above a pool of water, only a few steps away, which reflected the leaves of the trees. It was surrounded by bushes that bore red flowers, and the water was covered with their faded petals.

Meggie couldn’t see any blue fairies, but she did see butterflies, bees, birds, spiders’ webs still silvery with dew although the sun was high in the sky, lizards, rabbits .. There was a rustling and a rushing all around them, a crackling and a scratching and a pulsing; there was a hissing and a cooing and a chirping. This world seemed to be bursting with life, and yet it seemed quiet as well, wonderfully quiet, as if time didn’t exist, as if there were no beginning or end to the present moment.

“Do you think he came here, too?” Farid looked around wistfully, as if hoping that Dustfinger would appear among the trees at any moment. “Yes, of course. Orpheus must have read him to 66

 

this very place, don’t you think? He told me about that pool, and the red elves, and the tree over there with the pale bark where you can find their nests. ‘And then you must follow a stream,’ he said, ‘a stream going north. For in the south lies Argenta where the Adderhead rules, and you’ll be hanged from a gallows there quicker than you can say your name.’ But I’d better take a look from up there!” Quick as a squirrel, he climbed a sapling, and before Meggie knew it he had caught hold of a woody vine and was hauling himself up to the top of a gigantic tree.

“What are you doing?” she called after him. “You can always see more from farther up!”

Farid was hardly visible among the branches now. Meggie folded up the sheet of paper with Orpheus’s words on it and put it in her bag. She didn’t want to see the letters anymore; they seemed to her like poisonous beetles, like Alice in Wonderland’s bottle saying, “Drink me!” Her fingers touched the notebook with its marbled paper cover, and suddenly she had tears in her eyes. “When you come to a charcoal-burner’s hut, Dustfinger said, then you know you’re out of the Wayless Wood.” Farid’s voice came down to her like the sound of a strange bird. “I remember every word he said. If I want them to, words stick in my memory like flies sticking to resin. I don’t need paper to put them on, not me! You just have to find the charcoal-burners and the black patches they leave on the forest floor, he said, and then you know the world of humans isn’t far off. Follow the stream that springs from the water-nymphs’ pool. It will lead you straight to Lombrica and the Laughing Prince’s realm. Soon you’ll see his castle on the eastern slope of a hill, high above a river. It’s gray as a wasp’s nest, and the city is all around it, with a marketplace where you can breathe fire right up to the sky. . ”

Meggie was kneeling among the flowers – violets and purple bellflowers – most of them fading now, but they were still fragrant and smelled so sweet that she felt dizzy. A wasp was zooming around among them – or did it just look like a wasp? How much had Fenoglio copied from his own world and how much had he made up? It all seemed so familiar and yet so strange.

“Isn’t it lucky he told me about everything in such detail?” Meggie saw Farid’s bare feet. He was swinging through the leaves at a dizzy height. “Dustfinger often couldn’t sleep at night. He was afraid of his dreams. I used to wake him up when they were bad, and then we sat by the fire and I asked him questions. I do that very well. I’m brilliant at asking questions. You bet I am!”

Meggie couldn’t help smiling at the pride in his voice. She looked up at the canopy of foliage and saw that the leaves were turning color, as they had been in Elinor’s garden, too. Did the two worlds keep time with each other? And had they always kept time, or did their stories become inextricably linked only on the day when Mo brought Capricorn, Basta, and Dustfinger from one into the other? She would never find out the answer, for who could know?

There was a rustling under one of the bushes, a thorny shrub, heavy with dark berries. Wolves and bears, cats with dappled fur – Resa had told her about them, too. Involuntarily, Meggie stepped back, but her dress caught on some tall thistles white with their own downy seed heads.

“Farid?” she called, angry with herself when she heard the fear in her voice. “Farid!”

But he didn’t seem to hear her. He was still chattering away to himself high among the branches, carefree as a bird in the sunshine, while she, Meggie, was down here among the shadows.

Shadows that moved, had eyes, growled .. Was that a snake? She freed her dress with such a violent tug that it tore, and stumbled farther back until she came up against the rough trunk of an oak tree. The snake slid past quickly, as if the sight of Meggie had made it mortally afraid, too, but there was still something moving under the bush, and finally a head pushed out from the 67

 

prickly twigs. It was furry and round-nosed, and it had tiny horns between its ears.

“No!” whispered Meggie. “Oh no!”

Gwin stared at her almost reproachfully, as if he thought it was her fault that his fur was full of fine prickles.

Farid’s voice above her was more distinct now. Obviously, he was finally coming down from his lookout post. “No hut, no castle, nothing in sight!” he called. “It’ll be a few days before we get out of this forest, but that’s how Dustfinger wanted it. He wanted to take his time coming back to the world of humans. I think he was almost more homesick for the trees and fairies than for other people. Well, I don’t know about you – and the trees are beautiful, very beautiful – but personally I’d like to see the castle, too, and the other strolling players, and the men-at-arms.”

He jumped down on the grass, hopped on one leg through the carpet of blue flowers – and let out a cry of delight when he saw the marten. “Gwin! Oh, I knew you’d heard me! Come here, you son of a devil and a snake! Won’t Dustfinger be surprised to see we’ve brought him his old friend after all!”

Oh, won’t he just! thought Meggie. Fear will take his breath away – he’ll go weak at the knees.

The marten jumped onto Farid’s knee as the boy crouched down in the grass, and affectionately licked his chin. He would have bitten anyone else, even Dustfinger, but with Farid he acted like a young kitten.

“Shoo him away, Farid!” Meggie’s voice sounded sharper than she had intended. “Shoo him away?” Farid laughed. “What are you talking about? Hear that, Gwin? What have you done to offend her? Left a dead mouse on one of her precious books?”

“Shoo him away, I said! He’ll be all right on his own, you know he will. Please!” she added, seeing his horrified expression as he looked at her.

Farid straightened up, the marten in his arms. His face was more hostile than she had ever seen it before. Gwin jumped up on his shoulder and stared at Meggie as if he had understood every word she said. Very well, then, she’d just have to tell Farid – but how?

“Didn’t Dustfinger tell you?”

“Tell me what?” He looked at her as if he’d like to hit her. Above them, the wind blew through the leaf canopy like a menacing whisper.

“If you don’t shoo Gwin away,” said Meggie, although each word was difficult to utter, “then Dustfinger will. And he’ll chase you away, too.” The marten was still staring at her.

“Why would he do a thing like that? You don’t like him, that’s what it is. You never liked Dustfinger, and you don’t like Gwin, either.”

“That’s not true! You don’t understand!” Meggie’s voice was loud and shrill. “He’s going to die because of Gwin! Dustfinger dies, that’s how Fenoglio wrote the story! Perhaps it’s been changed, perhaps this is a new story we’re in and everything in the book is just a pile of dead words, but all the same .. ” Meggie hadn’t the heart to go on. Far id stood there shaking his head again and again, as if her words were like needles digging into it, hurting him.

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“He’s going to die?” His voice was barely audible. “He dies in the book?”

How lost he looked standing there with the marten still perched on his shoulder! He looked at the trees around them with horror, as if they were all intent on killing Dustfinger. “But but if I’d known that,” he stammered, “I’d have torn up Cheeseface’s wretched piece of paper! I’d never have let him read Dustfinger back!”

Meggie just looked at him. What could she say? “Who kills him? Basta?”

Two squirrels were chasing around overhead. They had white spots as if someone had shaken a paintbrush over them. The marten wanted to go after them, but Farid seized his tail and held it tight.

“One of Capricorn’s men. That’s all Fenoglio wrote!” “But they’re all dead!”

“We don’t know that.” Meggie would have been only too glad to comfort him, but she didn’t know how. “Suppose they’re still alive in this world? And even if they aren’t – Mo and Darius didn’t read all of them out. Some are still sure to be here. Dustfinger tries to save Gwin from them, and they kill him. That’s what it says in the book, and Dustfinger knows it. That’s why he left the marten behind.”

“Yes, so he did.” Farid looked around as if seeking some solution, a way he could send the marten back again. Gwin nuzzled his cheek with his nose, and Meggie saw the tears in Farid’s eyes. “Wait here!” he said, and he turned abruptly and went off with the marten. He had gone only a few paces before the forest swallowed him up like a frog swallowing a fly, and Meggie stood there on her own among the flowers. Some of them grew in Elinor’s garden, too, but this wasn’t Elinor’s garden. This wasn’t even the same world. And this time she couldn’t just close the book and be back again: back in her own room, on the sofa that smelled of Elinor. The world beyond the words on the page was wide – hadn’t she always known it? – wide enough for her to be lost there forever. Only one person could write her out of it again – an old man – and Meggie didn’t even know where he lived in this world he had created. She didn’t even know if he was still alive. Could this world live if its creator was dead? Why not? Books don’t stop existing just because their authors have died, do they?

What have I done? thought Meggie as she stood there waiting for Farid to come back. Oh Mo, what have I done? Can’t you fetch me back again?

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Chapter 11 – Gone

I woke up and knew he was gone. Straightaway I knew he was gone. When you love somebody you know these things.

– David Almond, Skellig

 

Mo knew at once that Meggie was gone. He knew it the moment he knocked on her door and only silence replied.

Resa was down in the kitchen with Elinor, laying the table for breakfast. The clink of the plates made its way upstairs to him, but he hardly heard it, he just stood there outside the closed door, listening to his own heart. It was beating far too loudly, far too fast. “Meggie?” He pressed down the handle, but the door was locked. Meggie never locked her door, never.

His heart beat even faster, as if to choke him. The silence behind the door sounded terribly familiar. Just such a silence had met his ears once before, when he had called Resa’s name again and again. He had waited ten years for an answer.

Not again, please God, not again. Not Meggie.

It seemed as if he heard the book whispering on the other side of the door: Fenoglio’s accursed story. He thought he heard the pages rustling, greedy as pale teeth.

“Mortimer?” Elinor was standing behind him. “The eggs are getting cold. Where are you and Meggie? Oh heavens!” She looked at his face with concern and reached for his hand. “What’s the matter with you? You’re pale as death.”

“Do you have a spare key for Meggie’s door, Elinor?”

She understood at once. Just like Mo, she guessed what had happened behind that locked door, presumably last night when they were all asleep. She pressed his hand. Then she turned without a word and hurried downstairs. But Mo just stood there leaning against the locked door, heard Elinor call Darius and begin to search for the key, cursing, and he stared at the books standing side by side on her shelves all down the long corridor. Resa came running upstairs, pale-faced.

Her hands fluttered like frightened birds as she asked him what had happened. What was he to say?

“Can’t you imagine? Haven’t you told her about the place often enough?” He tried the handle again, as if that could change anything. Meggie had covered the whole door with quotations.

They looked to him now like magic spells written on the white paint in a childish hand. Take me to another world! Go on! I know you can do it. My father has shown me how. Odd that your heart didn’t simply stop when it hurt so much. But his heart hadn’t stopped ten years ago, either, when the words on the page swallowed up Resa.

Elinor pushed him aside. She was holding the key in her trembling fingers, and she impatiently put it in the lock. Crossly, she called Meggie’s name, as if she, too, hadn’t guessed long ago that nothing but silence waited behind that door: the same silence as on the night that had taught Mo to fear his own voice.

He was the last to enter the empty room, and he did so hesitantly. There was a letter on Meggie’s 70

 

pillow. Dearest Mo . . He didn’t read on; he didn’t want to see the words that would only pierce him to the heart. As Resa picked up the letter he looked around the room – his eyes searching for another sheet of paper, the one the boy had brought with him – but it was nowhere to be found.

Well, of course not, you fool, he told himself. She’s taken it with her; after all, she must have been holding it while she read.

Only years later would he discover from Meggie that the original sheet of paper with Orpheus’s writing on it had been there in her room all the time, hidden between the pages of a book –

where else? Her geography book. Suppose he had found it? Would he have been able to follow Meggie? No, probably not. The story had another path in store for him, a darker and more difficult path.

“Perhaps she’s only gone off with the boy! Girls of her age do that kind of thing. Not that I know much about it, but .. ” Elinor’s voice reached him as if from very far away. In answer, Resa handed her the letter that had been waiting on the pillow.

Gone. Meggie was gone.

He had no daughter anymore.

Would she come back, like her mother? Fished out of the sea of words again by some other voice? If so, when? In ten years’ time, like Resa? She’d be grown-up by then. Would he even recognize her? Everything was blurred before his eyes: Meggie’s school things on the desk in front of the window, her clothes, carefully hanging over the back of the chair as if she really meant to come back, her soft toys beside the bed, their furry faces kissed threadbare, although it was a long time since Meggie had needed them to help her get to sleep. Resa began crying without a sound, one hand pressed to her mute mouth. Mo wanted to comfort her, but how could he with such despair in his own heart?

He turned, pushed aside Darius, who was standing there in the open doorway with a sad, owl-like gaze, and went to his study, where those damned notebooks were still stacked among his own papers. He swept them off the desk one by one, as if he could silence the words that way –

all the accursed words that had bewitched his child, luring her away like the Pied Piper in the story, to a place where he had already been unable to follow Resa. Mo felt as if he were dreaming the same nightmare all over again, but this time he didn’t even have a book whose pages he could have searched for Meggie.

Later, he couldn’t say how he had gotten through the rest of that day without going crazy. All he remembered was wandering for hours through Elinor’s garden, as if he might find Meggie somewhere there among the old trees where she liked to sit and read. When darkness fell and he set out to look for Resa, he found her in Meggie’s room. She was sitting on the empty bed, staring at three tiny creatures circling just below the ceiling, as if they were looking for the door they had come through. Meggie had left the window open, but they didn’t fly out, perhaps because the strange, black night frightened them.

“Fire-elves,” said Resa’s hands when he sat down beside her. “If they settle on your skin you must shake them off, or they’ll burn you.”

Fire-elves. Mo remembered reading about them in the book. Something always came back in return. There seemed to be just that one book in the whole world.

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“Why three of them?” he asked. “One for Meggie, one for the boy .. ”

“I think the marten went, too,” said Resa’s hands.

Mo almost laughed out loud. Poor Dustfinger, he obviously couldn’t shake off his bad luck – but Mo could feel no sympathy for him. Not this time. Without Dustfinger the words on the sheet of paper would never have been written, and he would still have a daughter.

“Do you think at least she’ll like it there?” he asked, laying his head in Resa’s lap. “After all, you liked it, didn’t you? Or, at any rate, you told her so.”

“I’m sorry,” said her hands. “So very sorry.”

But he held her fingers tight. “What are you talking about?” he said softly. “I was the one who brought the damned book into the house, remember?” And then they were both silent. In silence, they watched the poor, lost elves. At some point they did fly through the window, and into the strange night. As their tiny red bodies disappeared into the blackness like sparks going out, Mo wondered whether Meggie was wandering through an equally black night at this moment. The thought pursued him into his dark dreams.

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Chapter 12 – Uninvited Guests

 

“You people with hearts,” he said once, “have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful.”

– L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

 

On the day when Meggie disappeared, silence moved back into Elinor’s house, but not the silence of the old days when only her books lived there with her. The silence that now filled the rooms and corridors tasted of sorrow. Resa wept a great deal, and Mortimer said nothing, as if paper and ink had swallowed up not just his daughter, but all the words in the world with her.

He spent a lot of time in his workshop, ate little, hardly slept – and on the third day Darius, looking very anxious, went to Elinor and told her that Silvertongue was packing up all his tools.

When Elinor entered his workshop, out of breath because Darius had been tugging her along behind him so fast, Mortimer was throwing the stamps he used for gold leaf into a crate, pell-mell – tools that he normally handled as carefully as if they were made of glass.

“What the devil are you doing?” inquired Elinor.

“What does it look like?” he replied and began clearing away his sewing frame. “I’m going to find another profession. I never want to touch a book again, curse them all. Other people can listen to the stories they tell and mend the clothes they wear. I want nothing more to do with them.”

When Elinor went to fetch Resa to help her, Resa just shook her head.

“Well, I can understand why those two are useless just now,” commented Elinor, as she and Darius sat at breakfast by themselves yet again. “How could Meggie do a thing like that to them?

What was her idea – did she want to break her poor parents’ hearts? Or prove once and for all that books are dangerous?” Darius had no answer but silence. He had been the same all these last few sad days.

“For heaven’s sake, all of you silent as the grave!” Elinor snapped at him. “We must do something to get the silly creature back. Anything. Good God, it can’t be as difficult as all that! After all, there are no fewer than two Silvertongues under this roof!”

Darius looked at her in alarm and choked on his tea. He had left his gift unused for so long that no doubt it seemed like a dream to him, and he didn’t want to be reminded of it. “All right, all right, you don’t have to read aloud,” Elinor assured him impatiently. Good God, that owlish gaze of horror! She could have shaken him. “Mortimer can do it! But what should he read? Think, Darius! If we want to fetch her back, should it be something about the Inkworld or about our 73

 

own world? Oh, I’m all confused. Perhaps we can write something like: Once upon a time there was a grumpy middle-aged woman called Elinor who loved nothing but her books, until one day her niece moved in with her, along with the niece’s husband and daughter. Elinor liked that, but one day the daughter set off on a very, very stupid journey, and Elinor swore that she would give all her books away if only the child would come home. She packed them up in big crates, and as she was putting the last book in, Meggie walked through the doorway. . Heavens above, don’t stare at me in that sympathetic way!” she snapped at Darius. “I’m trying to do something, at least! And you yourself keep saying: ‘Mortimer is a master, it takes him only a couple of sentences!’”

Darius adjusted his glasses. “Yes, only a couple of sentences,” he said in his gentle, uncertain voice. “But they must be sentences describing a whole world, Elinor. The words must make music. They must be so closely interwoven that the voice doesn’t fall through.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake!” Elinor said brusquely – although she knew he was right. Mortimer had once tried to explain it to her in almost the same way: the mystery of why not every story would come to life. But she didn’t want to hear about that, not now. Damn you, Elinor, she thought bitterly, damn you three times over for all those evenings you spent with the silly child imagining what it would be like to live in that other world, among fairies, brownies, and glass men. There had been many such evenings, very many, and Mortimer had often put his head around the door and asked, sarcastically, if they couldn’t discuss something other than Wayless Woods and blue-skinned fairies just for once.

Well, at least Meggie knows all she needs to know about that world, thought Elinor, wiping the tears from her eyes. She realizes she must be careful of the Adderhead and his men-at-arms, and she mustn’t go too far into the forest or she’ll probably be eaten, torn to pieces, or trodden underfoot. And she’d be well advised not to look up when she passes a gallows. She knows she must bow when a prince rides by, and that she can still wear her hair loose because she’s only a girl…

Damn it, here came the tears again! Elinor was mopping the corners of her eyes with the hem of her blouse when someone rang the front doorbell.

Many years later, she was still angry with herself for the stupidity that didn’t warn her to look through the spy hole in the door before opening it. Of course she had thought it was Resa or Mortimer outside. Of course. Stupid Elinor. Stupid, stupid Elinor. She had realized her mistake only when she opened the door, and there stood the stranger in front of her.

He was not very tall and rather too well fed, with pale skin and equally pale fair hair. The eyes behind his rimless glasses looked slightly surprised, almost innocent like a child’s. He opened his mouth to speak as Elinor put her head around the door, but she cut him short.

“What are you doing here?” she barked. “This is private property. Didn’t you see the sign down by the road?”

He had come in a car; the impudent fool had simply brought it up her drive! Elinor saw it, a dusty, dark blue vehicle, standing beside her own station wagon. She thought she saw a huge dog on the passenger seat. That was the last straw!

“Yes, of course I did!” The stranger’s smile was so innocent that it suited his childish face. “Why, no one could miss seeing the sign, and I really do apologize, Signora Loredan, for my sudden and unannounced arrival.”

Heavens above – it took Elinor’s breath away. The moonfaced man’s voice was almost as 74

 

beautiful as Mortimer’s, deep and velvety like a cushion. Coming from that round face with its childlike eyes, it was so incongruous that you felt almost as if the stranger had swallowed its real owner and taken over his voice.

“Never mind the apologies!” said Elinor abruptly, once she had gotten over her surprise. “Just get out.” And so saying, she was about to close the door again, but the stranger only smiled (a smile that no longer looked quite so innocent) and jammed his shoe between the door and the frame. A dusty brown shoe.

“Do forgive me, Signora Loredan,” he said softly, “but I’ve come about a book. A truly unique book. I have heard, of course, that you have a remarkable library, but I can assure you that you don’t yet have this book in your collection.”

With an almost reverent expression on his face, he put a hand under his pale, creased linen jacket. Elinor recognized the book at once. Of course. It was the only book that made her heart beat faster not because it was a particularly fine edition or because she longed to read it. No. At the sight of that book Elinor’s heart beat faster for only one reason: because she feared it like a ferocious animal.

“Where did you get that from?” She answered her question herself, but unfortunately a little too late. Suddenly, very suddenly, the memory of the boy’s story came back to her. “Orpheus!” she whispered – and she wanted to shout, loud enough for Mortimer to hear her in his workshop, but before a sound could come out of her mouth someone slipped out of the cover of the rhododendron bushes by the front door, quick as a lizard, and put his hand over her mouth.

“Well, my lady bookworm,” a man’s voice purred in her ear. Elinor had so often heard that voice in her dreams, and every time she found herself fighting for breath at the sound of it! Even in broad daylight the effect was just as bad. Basta pushed her roughly back into the house. Of course, he had a knife in his hand; Elinor could as easily imagine Basta without a nose as without a knife. Orpheus turned and waved to the strange car. A man built like a wardrobe got out, strolled around the car at a leisurely pace, and opened the back door. An old woman stuck out her legs and reached for his arm.

Mortola. The Magpie.

Another regular visitor to Elinor’s nightmares.

The old woman’s legs were thickly bandaged under her dark stockings, and she leaned on a stick as she walked toward Elinor’s house on the wardrobe-man’s arm. She hobbled into the hall with a grimly determined expression, as if she were taking possession of the whole house, and the look she gave Elinor was so openly hostile that its recipient felt weak at the knees, hard as she tried to hide her fear. A thousand dreadful memories came back to her – memories of a cage stinking of raw meat, a square lit by the beams of glaring car headlights, and fear, dreadful fear…

Basta closed the door of the house behind Mortola. He hadn’t changed: the same thin face, the same way of narrowing his eyes, and there was an amulet dangling around his neck to ward off the bad luck that Basta thought lurked under every ladder, behind every bush.

“Where are the others?” Mortola demanded while the wardrobe-man looked around him with a foolish expression. The sight of all those books seemed to fill him with boundless astonishment.

He was probably wondering what on earth anyone would do with so many.

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“The others? I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Elinor thought her voice sounded remarkably steady for a woman half dead with terror.

Mortola’s small, round chin jutted aggressively. “You know perfectly well. I’m talking about Silvertongue and his witch of a daughter, and that maidservant, the one he calls his wife. Shall I get Basta to set fire to a few of your books, or will you call the three of them for us of your own accord?”

Basta? Basta’s afraid of fire, Elinor wanted to reply, but she refrained. It wasn’t difficult to hold a lighted match to a book. Even Basta, who feared fire so much, would probably be capable of that small action, and the wardrobe-man didn’t look bright enough to be afraid of anything. I just have to keep stalling, thought Elinor. After all, they don’t know about the workshop in the garden, or about Darius, either.

“Elinor?” she heard Darius call at that very moment. Before she could reply, Basta’s hand was over her mouth again. She heard Darius come down the corridor with his usual rapid tread.

“Elinor?” he called again. Then the footsteps stopped as abruptly as his voice.

“Surprise, surprise!” purred Basta. “Aren’t you glad to see us, Stumbletongue? A couple of old friends come to pay you a visit!” Basta’s left hand was bandaged, Elinor noticed when he took his fingers away from her mouth, and she remembered the hissing creature that Farid said had slipped through the words in Dustfinger’s place. What a pity it didn’t eat more of our knife happy friend, she thought.

“Basta!” Darius’s voice was little more than a whisper.

“That’s right, Basta! I’d have been here much sooner, believe you me, but they put me in jail for a while on account of something that happened years ago. No sooner was Capricorn gone than all the people who’d been too scared to open their mouths suddenly felt very brave. Well, never mind. You could say they did me a favor, because who do you think they put in my cell one fine day? I never could get him to tell me his real name, so let’s call him by the name he’s given himself: Orpheus!” He slapped the man so hard on the back that he stumbled forward. “Yes, our good friend Orpheus!” Basta put an arm around his shoulders. “The Devil did me a real favor when he made Orpheus, of all people, my cellmate – or perhaps our story is so keen to have us back that it sent him? Well, one way or another, we had a good time, didn’t we?”

Orpheus did not look at him. He straightened his jacket in embarrassment and inspected Elinor’s bookshelves.

“Hey, just look at him!” Basta dug his elbow roughly into Orpheus’s ribs. “You wouldn’t believe how often I’ve told him there’s nothing to be ashamed of in going to jail, particularly when your prisons here are so much more comfortable than our dungeons at home. Come on, tell them how I found out about your invaluable gifts. How I caught you one night reading yourself that stupid dog out of the book! Reading himself a dog! Lord knows, I could think of better ideas.”

Basta laughed nastily, and Orpheus straightened his tie with nervous fingers. “Cerberus is still in the car,” he told Mortola. “He doesn’t like it there at all. We ought to bring him in!” The wardrobe-man turned to the door. He obviously had a soft spot for animals, but Mortola stopped him with an impatient gesture.

“The dog stays where it is. I can’t stand that creature!” Frowning, she looked around Elinor’s 76

 

hall. “Well, I expected your house to be bigger than this,” she said, with assumed disappointment. “I thought you were rich.”

“So she is!” Basta flung his arm so roughly around Orpheus’s neck that his glasses slipped down his nose. “But she spends all her money on books. What would she pay us for the book we took from Dustfinger, do you think?” He pinched Orpheus’s round cheeks. “Yes, our friend here made good juicy bait for the fire-eater. He may look like a bullfrog, but even Silvertongue can’t make the words obey him so well, let alone Darius. Ask Dustfinger – Orpheus sent him home as if nothing could be easier! Not that the fire-eater will –”

“Hold your tongue, Basta!” Mortola interrupted him abruptly. “You’ve always liked the sound of your own voice. Well?” She impatiently tapped her stick on the marble tiles that were Elinor’s pride and joy. “Where are they? Where are the others? I shan’t ask again!”

Come on, Elinor told herself, lie to them. Lie yourself blue in the face! Quick! But she hadn’t even opened her mouth when she heard the key in the lock. Oh no! No, Mortimer! she prayed silently.

Stay where you are! Go back to the workshop with Resa, shut yourselves up there, but please, please don’t come in just now!

Of course her prayers made not the slightest difference. Mortimer opened the door, came in with his arm around Resa’s shoulders – and stopped abruptly at the sight of Orpheus. Before he had entirely grasped what was going on, the man built like a wardrobe had closed the door behind him in obedience to a signal from Mortola.

“Hello there, Silvertongue!” said Basta in a menacingly soft voice, as he snapped his knife open in front of Mortimer’s face. “And isn’t this our lovely mute Resa? Excellent! Two birds with one stone. All we need now is the little witch.”

Elinor saw Mortimer close his eyes for a moment, as if hoping that Basta and Mortola would have disappeared when he opened them again. But, naturally, no such thing happened.

“Call her!” ordered Mortola, as she stared at Mortimer with such hatred in her eyes that Elinor felt afraid.

“Who?” he asked, without taking his eyes off Basta.

“Don’t pretend to be more stupid than you are!” Mortola said crossly. “Or do you want me to let Basta cut the same pattern on your wife’s face as he did on the fire-eater’s?”

Basta ran his thumb lovingly over the gleaming blade.

“If by ‘little witch’ you mean my daughter,” replied Mortimer huskily, “she isn’t here.”

“Oh no?” Mortola hobbled toward him. “Be careful what you say. My legs are aching after that endless drive to get here, so I’m not feeling particularly patient.”

“She isn’t here,” Mortimer repeated. “Meggie has gone away, with the boy you took the book from. He asked her to take him to Dustfinger, she did it – and she went with him.”

Mortola narrowed her eyes incredulously. “Nonsense!” she exclaimed. “How could she have done it without the book?” But Elinor saw the doubt in her face.

Mortimer shrugged. “The boy had a handwritten sheet of paper with him – the one that sent 77

 

Dustfinger back, apparently.” “That’s impossible!” Orpheus looked at him in astonishment. “Are you seriously saying your daughter read herself into the story, using my words?”

“Oh, so you’re this Orpheus, are you?” Mortimer returned his glance, not in a very friendly way.

“Then you’re responsible for the loss of my daughter.”

Orpheus straightened his glasses and gave Mortimer an equally hostile look. Then, abruptly, he turned to Mortola. “Is this man Silvertongue?” he demanded. “He’s lying! I’m sure of it! He’s lying! No one can read themselves into a story. He can’t, his daughter can’t, no one can. I’ve tried it myself, hundreds of times. It doesn’t work!”

“Yes,” said Mortimer wearily. “That’s just what I thought, too. Until four days ago.”

Mortola stared at him. Then she signaled to Basta. “Shut them up in the cellar!” she ordered.

“And then look for the girl. Search the whole house.”

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