Chapter 47 - Roxane

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red.

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

– William Shakespeare, Sonnets, No. 130

Fenoglio waited for Roxane in a room in the castle where petitioners were usually received, ordinary folk who came here to tell Cosimo’s administrators their troubles while a scribe recorded their words on paper (parchment being far too valuable for such purposes). Then they were sent away hoping that their prince would put his mind to their concerns sometime. But under the Laughing Prince that had not been very often, except at Violante’s persuasion, so his subjects had usually settled their quarrels among themselves, with or without violence, depending on their temperament and their influence in the community. It was hoped that Cosimo would change all that soon. .

“What am I doing here?” murmured Fenoglio, looking around the high-ceilinged, narrow room.

He had still been in bed (in much more comfort than at Minerva’s house) when Her Ugliness’s messenger had appeared. Violante sent her apologies, said the man, and since he was better with words than anyone else she knew, she asked him to talk to Roxane on her behalf. That was how the powerful acted – offloading the less pleasant tasks in life onto other people. But on the other hand .. he had always hoped to meet Dustfinger’s wife someday. Was she really as beautiful as his description of her?

With a sigh, he dropped into the armchair generally used by one of Cosimo’s administrators.

Since Cosimo’s return, so many petitioners had flocked to the castle that in the future they were going to be allowed to come and put their cases on only two days of the week. Their prince had weightier matters on his mind just now than the troubles of a farmer whose neighbor had stolen his pig, a cobbler who had bought poor quality leather from a dealer, or a seamstress whose husband beat her every night when he came home drunk. Of course, there was a judge in every town of any size to settle such quarrels, but most of them had a poor reputation. Folk said, on both sides of the Wayless Wood, that you’d get your rights only if you filled the judges’ pockets with gold. So those who had no gold went up to the castle to appeal to their angel-faced prince, without realizing that he had more than enough to do preparing for his war.

When Roxane entered the room she had two children with her: a girl of about five and an older boy, probably Brianna’s brother, Jehan – the lad who had the dubious honor of playing with Jacopo now and then. She frowned as she scrutinized the tapestries on the walls celebrating the Laughing Prince’s exploits in his youth. Unicorns, dragons, White Stags .. Clearly nothing had been safe from his royal spear.

“Why don’t we just go into the garden?” suggested Fenoglio, noticing her expression of disapproval and quickly rising from the princely chair. If anything, she was even more beautiful than his description of her. But after all, he had sought the most wonderful of words for her when he wrote the scene in Inkheart where Dustfinger saw her for the first time. Yet all at once, now that she so suddenly stood before him in the flesh, he felt as lovelorn as a silly boy. Oh, for goodness’ sake, Fenoglio! he reproached himself. You made her up, and now you’re staring at her as if this was the first time in your life you’d ever seen a woman! Worst of all, Roxane seemed to 238

 

notice it.

“Yes, let’s go into the garden! I’ve heard a great deal about it, but I’ve never seen it,” she said with a smile that cast Fenoglio into total confusion. “But first, please tell me why you want to speak to me. Your letter said only that it was about Brianna.”

Why he wanted to speak to her? Huh! He cursed Violante’s jealousy, Cosimo’s faithless heart, and himself, too. “Let’s go into the garden first,” he said. Perhaps it would be easier to tell her what Her Ugliness had instructed him to say in the open air. But of course it was not.

The boy set off in search of Jacopo as soon as they were outside, but the girl stayed with Roxane, clinging to her hand as she went from plant to plant – and Fenoglio found he couldn’t utter a word.

“I know why I was summoned,” said Roxane, just as he was trying for the tenth time to find the right words. “Brianna didn’t tell me herself, she’d never do that. But the maid who takes Cosimo his breakfast every morning often comes to me for advice about her sick mother, and she’s told me that Brianna seldom leaves his room. Not even at night.”

“Yes. Yes, that’s it .. Violante is concerned. And she hopes that you .. ” Oh, damn it, how his voice was faltering! He didn’t know how to go on. This wretched confusion. His story clearly had too many characters in it. How was he to foresee everything they’d think of? It was downright impossible, particularly when a young girl’s heart was involved. No one could expect him to understand anything about that.

Roxane scrutinized his face as if she were still waiting for the end of his sentence. You stupid old fool, surely you’re not going to blush, Fenoglio thought – and felt the blood shoot into his wrinkled face as if to drive age out of it.

“The boy has told me about you,” said Roxane. “Farid. He’s in love with the girl who’s staying with you – Meggie, isn’t that right? When he speaks her name he looks as if he had a pearl in his mouth.”

“Yes, I’m beginning to think that Meggie likes him, too.”

What exactly, wondered Fenoglio uneasily, has the boy been saying about me? Telling her I made her up, and the man she loves, too – only to kill him off again?

The little girl was still clutching Roxane’s hand. With a smile, she put a flower in the child’s long, dark hair. You know something, Fenoglio? he thought. All this is nonsense! What makes you think you invented her? She must always have been here, long before you wrote your story. A woman like her can’t possibly be made of nothing but words! You’ve been wrong all this time! They were here already, all of them: Dustfinger and Capricorn, Basta and Roxane, Minerva, Violante, the Adderhead . . you merely wrote their story, but they didn’t like it, and now they’re writing it for themselves.

The little girl felt the flower with her fingers and smiled.

“Is she Dustfinger’s daughter?” asked Fenoglio.

Roxane looked at him in surprise. “No,” she said. “Our second daughter died long ago. But how do you come to know Dustfinger? He’s never mentioned you to me.” You fool, Fenoglio, you 239

 

stupid fool.

“Oh, I certainly know Dustfinger!” he stammered. “In fact, I know him very well. I often visit the strolling players, you see, when they pitch their tents here outside the city wall. That’s where –

er – where I met him.”

“Really?” Roxane ran her fingers over a plant with feathery leaves. “I didn’t know he’d been back there already.” Her face thoughtful, she moved on to another flower bed. “Wild mallow. I grow it in my own fields. Isn’t it beautiful? So useful, too. . ” She did not look at Fenoglio as she went on.

“Dustfinger has gone. Yet again. All I had was a message to say he’s following men of the Adderhead’s troops who have kidnapped some of the strolling players. Her mother,” she added, putting her arm around the girl, “is one of them. And the Black Prince, a good friend of his.”

They’d captured the Prince, too? Fenoglio tried to hide his alarm. Obviously, matters were even worse than he’d thought and what he was writing down on parchment was still no use.

Roxane felt the seed heads of a lavender bush. Their sweet scent immediately filled the air. “I’m told that you were there when CloudDancer was killed. Did you know his murderer? I heard that it was Basta, one of the fire-raisers from the forest.”

“I’m afraid what you heard was right.” Not a night passed when Fenoglio did not see Basta’s knife flying through the air. It pursued him into all his dreams.

“The boy told Dustfinger that Basta was back. But I hoped he wasn’t telling the truth. I’m anxious” – she spoke so softly that Fenoglio could hardly make out her words – “so anxious that I keep finding myself just standing and staring at the forest, as if he might appear among the trees again at any moment, the way he did on the morning he came back.” She picked a dried lavender head and shook some of the tiny seeds into her hand. “May I take these with me?”

“You can take anything you want,” replied Fenoglio. “Seeds, runners, cuttings, so Violante told me to tell you – anything, if you’ll persuade your daughter to keep Violante herself company in the future and not her husband.”

Roxane looked at the seeds in her hand and then let a few of them fall lightly to the flower bed.

“It won’t work. My daughter hasn’t listened to me for years. She loves the life up here, although she knows that I don’t, and she’s loved Cosimo ever since she first saw him ride out of the castle gate on his wedding day. She was barely seven then, and after that her heart was set on coming here to the castle, even if it meant working as a maid. If Violante hadn’t once heard her singing down in the kitchen she’d probably still be emptying chamber pots, feeding kitchen scraps to the pigs, and sometimes stealing upstairs in secret to feast her eyes on the statues of Cosimo.

Instead, she became like Violante’s little sister . . wore her clothes, looked after her son, sang and danced for her like one of the strolling players, like her own mother. Not with Motley skirts and dirty feet, not sleeping by the roadside and carrying a knife to defend herself against vagrants trying to creep in under her blanket by night, but in silken clothes and with a soft bed to sleep in.

She wears her hair loose, all the same, just as I did, and she loves too much, exactly as I did. No,”

she said, placing the seeds in Fenoglio’s hand. “Tell Violante that much as I would like to help her, I can’t.”

The little girl looked at Fenoglio. Where was her mother now? “Listen,” he told Roxane. Her beauty took his breath away. “Take as many seeds as you like. They’ll grow and thrive in your fields much better than within these gray walls. Dustfinger has gone off with Meggie. I sent her a 240

 

messenger. As soon as the man is back you’ll hear everything he has to tell: where they are now, how long they’ll stay away, everything!”

Roxane took the lavender from him again, picked a handful more, and carefully put them in the bag hanging from her belt. “Thank you,” she said. “But if I don’t hear from Dustfinger soon I shall set off in search of him myself. I’ve stayed here too often just waiting for him to come back safe and sound, and I can’t get it out of my mind that Basta is back!”

“But how will you find him? The last news I heard from Meggie was that they were making for a mill known as the Spelt-Mill. It’s on the far side of the forest in Argenta. That’s dangerous country!”

Roxane smiled at him, like a woman explaining the way of the world to her child. “It will soon be dangerous here, too,” she said. “Do you think the Adderhead won’t have heard by now that Cosimo is having swords forged day and night? Perhaps you should look around for some other place to do your writing, before the fiery arrows come raining down on your desk.”

Roxane’s mount was waiting in the Outer Courtyard of the castle. It was an old black horse, thin and going gray around the muzzle. “I know the Spelt-Mill,” she said, lifting the little girl up on the horse’s back. “I’ll ride past it, and if I don’t find them there I’ll try the Barn Owl’s place. He’s the best physician I know on either side of the forest, and he looked after Dustfinger as a boy.

Perhaps he may have heard news of him.”

Of course, the Barn Owl! How could Fenoglio have forgotten him? If Dustfinger ever had anything like a father, it was this man. He had been one of the physicians who went around with the strolling players from place to place, from market to market. Unfortunately, Fenoglio didn’t know much more about him.

Damn it all, he thought, how can you forget your own stories? And don’t try making your age an excuse.

“If you see Jehan, send him home,” said Roxane, as she swung herself up behind the girl on the horse. “He knows the way.”

“Are you planning to ride through the Way less Wood on that old nag?”

“This old nag will still carry me as far as I want,” she said.

The girl leaned back against Roxane’s breast as she gathered up the reins. “Good-bye,” she said, but Fenoglio held the horse back by the bridle. An idea had come to him, an idea born of desperation, but what else could he do? Wait for the mounted messenger he had sent, until it was too late?

“Roxane,” he said, low-voiced, as he looked up at her, “I have to get a letter to Meggie. I’ve sent a horseman after her to tell me where she is and whether she’s well, but he isn’t back yet, and by the time I’ve sent him off again with the letter . . ( Don’t tell her anything about Basta and Slasher, Fenoglio, it would only upset her unnecessarily! ) .. well, what I’m getting at is .. ( For heaven’s sake, Fenoglio, don’t stare at her like that, stammering like an old dotard! ) .. what I mean is, if you really do ride after Dustfinger, would you take my letter to Meggie with you? You’d probably find her sooner than any messenger I could send now.”

” What kind of a letter? ” an inner voice mocked him. ” A letter telling her that nothing has occurred 241

 

to you? ”

But as usual, he ignored the voice. “It’s a very important letter!” If he could have spoken even more softly he would have done so.

Roxane wrinkled her brow. Even that was a beautiful sight. “The last time you had anything to do with a letter, it cost CloudDancer his life. Still, very well, bring it to me if you like. As I said, I’m not going to wait much longer.”

The castle courtyard seemed strangely empty to Fenoglio when she had gone. Rosenquartz was waiting in his room beside the parchment, which was still blank, looking reproachful. “You know something, Rosenquartz?” Fenoglio said to the glass man, sitting down on his chair again with a sigh. “I think Dustfinger would wring my old neck if he knew how I gazed at his wife. But what does that matter – he’d like to wring my neck, anyway, one reason more or less makes no difference. He doesn’t deserve Roxane, anyway, leaving her alone so often!”

“Someone’s in a truly princely temper again!” remarked Rosenquartz.

“Be quiet!” growled Fenoglio. “This parchment is about to be covered with words. And I just hope you’ve stirred the ink properly!”

“The ink’s not to blame if the parchment is still blank!” retorted the glass man.

Fenoglio didn’t throw the pen at him, although his fingers itched to do so. The words that had passed Rosenquartz’s pale lips were only the truth. How could the glass man help it if the truth was unpleasant?

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Chapter 48 – The Castle by the Sea

 

It was a page he had

Found in the handbook

Of heartbreak.

– Wallace Stevens, “Madame la Fleurie”, Collected Poems

 

It was exactly as Mo had imagined the Castle of Night: mighty towers, round and heavily built, crenellations like black teeth below the silver rooftops. Mo thought he was seeing Fenoglio’s words before his eyes when the exhausted captives staggered through the castle gateway ahead of him. Black words on paper white as milk: The Castle of Night, a dark growth by the sea, every stone of it polished with screams, its walls slippery with tears and blood. Yes, Fenoglio was a good storyteller. Silver rimmed the battlements and gateways and wound over the walls like snail trails. The Adderhead loved that metal; his subjects called it moonspit, perhaps because an alchemist had once spun him a tale that it could keep away the White Women, who hated it because it reflected their pale faces. Or so Fenoglio had written, anyway. Of all places in the Inkworld, this was the last where Mo would have chosen to be. But he wasn’t choosing his own way through this story, that much was certain. It had even given him a new name – the Bluejay.

Sometimes he felt as if the name were really his. As if he had been carrying it around in him like a seed that only now had begun to grow in this world of words.

He was feeling better. The fever was still there, like opaque glass in front of his eyes, but the pain was a tame kitten by comparison with the beast of prey that had still been tearing at him in the cave. He could sit up if he gritted his teeth, he could look around to find Resa. He seldom took his eyes off her, as if, in that way, he could protect her from the glances of the soldiers, their kicks and blows. The sight of her hurt more than his wound. By the time the gates of the Castle of Night closed behind her and the other prisoners, she could barely keep on her feet for exhaustion. She stood still and looked up at the walls surrounding her, like a mouse examining the trap it has fallen into. One of the soldiers pushed her on with the shaft of his spear, and Mo longed to put his hands around the man’s neck and press hard. He tasted the hatred on his tongue and in his heart like a shivering sensation, and cursed his own weakness.

Resa looked at him and tried to smile, but she was too exhausted, and he saw her fear. The soldiers reined in their horses and surrounded the prisoners, as if they could possibly have escaped from those steeply towering walls. The vipers’ heads supporting the roofs and ledges left no one in any doubt who the lord of this castle was. They looked down on the forlorn little troop from everywhere, with forked tongues in their narrow mouths, eyes of red gemstone, silver scales shimmering like fish skin in the moonlight.

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“Put the Bluejay in the tower!” Firefox’s voice was almost lost in the huge expanse of the castle courtyard. “And take the others to the dungeons.” So they were going to be separated. Mo saw Resa, moving painfully on her sore feet, turn to Firefox. One of the mounted men kicked her back so roughly with his boot that she fell to the ground. And Mo felt a dragging sensation in his breast, as if his hatred had given birth to something, something that wanted to kill. A new heart, cold and hard.

A weapon. If only he had a weapon, one of the ugly swords they all wore at their belts, or one of those sharp, shiny knives. There seemed to be nothing more desirable in the world than such a sharp piece of metal – more desirable than all the words Fenoglio could write. They hauled him off the cart. He could hardly keep his footing, but somehow or other he stood upright. Four soldiers surrounded him and seized him, and he imagined himself killing them one by one. While that new, cold heart in his breast beat time.

“Hey, go a bit more carefully with him, will you?” Firefox snapped at them. “You think I brought him this whole damn way just for you fools to kill him now?”

Resa was crying. Mo heard her call his name again and again. He turned, but he couldn’t see her anywhere, he only heard her voice. He called her name, tried to break free, kicked out at the soldiers who were dragging him away toward one of the towers.

“You just try that again!” snarled one of them. “What’s biting you, then? You two will soon be reunited. The Adderhead likes wives to watch an execution.”

“That’s right, he can’t get enough of their weeping and wailing,” mocked another man. “You’ll see, he’ll keep her alive a little longer just for that. And you’ll get a magnificent execution, Bluejay, you mark my words.”

Bluejay. A new name. A new heart. Like ice in his breast, with edges as sharp as a blade.

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Chapter 49 – The Mill

“We rode and rode and nothing happened. Wherever we went, it was calm, peaceful, and beautiful. You could call it a quiet evening in the mountains, I thought, if that hadn’t been so wrong.”

– Astrid Lindgren, The Brothers Lionheart

It took Dustfinger over three days to reach the Spelt-Mill with Meggie and Farid. Three long, gray days during which Meggie hardly spoke a word, although Farid did his best to cheer her up. Most of the time it was raining, a fine drizzle, and soon none of them could remember what it felt like to sleep in dry clothes. Only when, at last, the dark valley where the mill stood opened out before them, did the sun break through the clouds. Low in the sky above the hills, it shed golden light on the river and the shingle roofs. There wasn’t another dwelling to be seen far and wide – only the miller’s house, a few outhouses, and the mill itself, with its great wooden wheel dipping deep into the water. Willows, poplars, and eucalyptus bushes lined the bank of the river on which it stood, together with alders and wild pear trees. There was a cart standing at the foot of the steps leading into the mill. A broad-shouldered man, dusty with flour, was just loading it up with sacks. There was no one else in sight except a boy who, on seeing them approach, ran over to the house. All looked peaceful – peaceful and quiet, apart from the rushing of the water, which drowned out even the chirping of the cicadas.

“You’ll see!” Farid whispered to Meggie. “Fenoglio’s written something. I’m sure he has. Or if not, we’ll just wait until –”

“We’ll do no such thing,” Dustfinger brusquely interrupted him, looking distrustfully around.

“We’ll ask about the letter and then go on. Many people come to this mill, and after what happened on the road the first of the soldiers will soon be putting in an appearance. If it was up to me, we wouldn’t show our faces here until everything had calmed down a bit, but if you must. .”

“Suppose the letter hasn’t come yet?” Meggie looked at him with anxiety in her face. “When I wrote to Fenoglio I told him I’d wait for it here!”

“Yes, and I don’t remember saying you could write to him at all, did I?”

Meggie made no answer, and Dustfinger glanced at the mill again. “I just hope CloudDancer delivered the letter safely, and the old man hasn’t been showing it around. I don’t have to tell you what damage the words on a page can do.”

He looked around for the last time before moving out of the cover of the trees. Then he signaled to Farid and Meggie to follow him and strode toward the buildings. The boy who had run to the house was sitting on the steps outside the door of the mill again, and a few chickens ran away, squawking, as Gwin shot toward them.

“Farid, catch that damn marten!” ordered Dustfinger, as he whistled Jink to his side, but Gwin hissed at Farid. He didn’t bite him (he never bit Farid), but he wasn’t letting himself be caught, either. He slipped through Farid’s legs and bounded after one of the chickens. Cackling, it fluttered up the steps of the mill, but the marten wasn’t to be shaken off that way. He shot past 245

 

the boy, who was still sitting on the steps apparently taking no interest in anything, and disappeared through the open door in pursuit of the chicken. A moment later the cackling stopped abruptly and Meggie glanced anxiously at Dustfinger.

“Oh, wonderful!” he murmured, making Jink jump back into his backpack. “A marten in the flour and a dead chicken, that’s going to make us very popular here! Speak of the devil. .”

The man loading up the cart wiped his floury hands on his trousers and came toward them.

“Excuse me, please!” Dustfinger called to him. “Where’s the miller? I’ll pay for the chicken, of course. But we’re really here to collect something. A letter.”

The man stopped in front of them. He was a full head taller than Dustfinger. “I’m the miller now,”

he said. “My father’s dead. A letter, you say?” He inspected them one by one. His eyes lingered longest on Dustfinger’s face.

“Yes, a letter from Ombra,” replied Dustfinger, glancing up at the mill. “Why isn’t it grinding?

Don’t the farmers bring you their grain anymore, or have you run out of miller’s men?”

The miller shrugged. “Someone brought us damp spelt to grind yesterday. The bran gummed up the millstones. My man spent hours cleaning them. What kind of letter is it? And who’s it to?

Don’t you have a name?”

Dustfinger looked at him thoughtfully. “So is there a letter here?”

“It’s for me,” said Meggie, stepping forward beside him. “Meggie Folchart. That’s my name.”

The miller inspected her at length – her dirty dress, her matted hair – and then he nodded. “Yes, I have it inside,” he said. “I’m only asking because a letter can be dangerous in the wrong hands, can’t it? Go on in, I’ll just load up this last sack.”

“Fill the water bottles,” Dustfinger whispered to Farid, slinging his backpack over the boy’s shoulders. “I’ll catch that damn marten, pay for the chicken, and as soon as Meggie has the letter we’ll be off out of here.” Before Farid could protest, he had disappeared into the mill. With Meggie. The boy passed his arm over his dirty face and watched them go. “Fill the water bottles!”

muttered Farid as he climbed down the bank to the river. “Catch the marten! Does he think I’m his servant?” The mill boy was still sitting on the steps as Farid stood in the cold river, holding their gourds under water. There was something about that boy that he didn’t like. Something in his face. Fear. Yes, that was it. He was afraid. What of? It’s hardly likely to be me, thought Farid, looking around. Something was wrong, he could smell it. He’d always been able to smell it, even back in his other life when he had to stand guard, spy out the land, follow people unseen, go scouting ahead – oh yes, he knew what danger smelled like. He put the water bottles in the backpack with Jink and scratched the sleepy marten’s head.

He didn’t see the body until he was about to wade back to the bank. The dead man was still young, and Farid had a feeling that he’d seen his face before. Hadn’t the man thrown a copper coin into his bowl in Ombra, during the celebrations at the castle? The body was caught in the branches bending low above the water, but the wound in its chest was clearly visible. A knife.

Farid’s heart began to race so suddenly that he could hardly breathe. He looked at the mill. The boy sitting outside it was clutching his own shoulders as if he feared he might fall apart with terror. But the miller had disappeared.

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No sound could be heard from the mill, but that meant nothing. The rushing water would have drowned out everything screams, the clash of swords ..

Come on, Farid, he told himself sharply. Slink up there and find out what’s going on. You’ve done it a hundred times – no, even more often. Ducking low, he waded through the river and climbed up onto the bank behind the mill wheel. His heart was in his mouth as he leaned against the wall of the mill, but that was nothing new, either. A thousand times or more he had slunk up to a building, a window, a closed door, with his heart beating hard. He leaned Dustfinger’s backpack with the sleeping marten in it against the wall.

Gwin. Gwin had run inside the mill. And Dustfinger had gone after him. That wasn’t good. Not good at all. Meggie was with him, too. Farid looked up at the mill. The nearest window was a good way above his head, but luckily the wall was rough textured. “Keep silent as a snake,” he whispered to himself as he hauled himself up. The windowsill was white with flour dust. Holding his breath, Farid peered in. The first thing he saw was a pudgy fellow with a foolish face, probably the miller’s man. Farid had never seen the other man beside him before, but unfortunately he couldn’t say the same of his companion.

Basta. The same thin face, the same vicious smile. Only the clothes were different. Basta was no longer wearing his white shirt and black suit with the flower in his buttonhole. No, Basta now wore the Adderhead’s silvery gray, and he had a sword at his side. With a knife in his belt, too, of course. But he was holding a dead chicken in his left hand.

Only the millstone stood between him and Dustfinger the millstone and Gwin, who was crouching in the middle of the round stone, staring longingly at the chicken as the tip of his tail twitched restlessly up and down. Meggie was standing close to Dustfinger. Was she thinking the same as Farid? Did she remember Fenoglio’s deadly words? Perhaps, for she was trying to entice Gwin over to her, but the marten took no notice.

What am I to do? Farid wondered. What on earth am I to do? Climb in? Nonsense, what use would that be? His silly little knife couldn’t prevail against two swords, and then there’d be the miller and his man to deal with, too. The miller was standing right beside the door. “Well, are these the folk you were waiting for?” he asked Basta. How pleased with himself and his lies he looked.

Farid would have loved to use his knife to peel that sly smile off his lips.

“Yes, they are!” purred Basta. “The little witch and the fire-eater in the bargain. It was well worth the wait. Even though I’ll probably never get that damn flour out of my lungs again.”

Think, Farid. Go on. He looked around, let his eyes wander, as if they could find him a way of escape through the solid masonry. There was another window, but the miller’s man was standing in front of it, and a wooden staircase led to the loft, where they probably stored the grain. They would tip it through the wooden hopper sticking up through the floor of the loft, and then it would fall on the millstone. The hopper! Yes, it rose through the ceiling of the mill like a wooden mouth right above the stone. Suppose he . .

Farid looked up at the mill. Was there another window higher up? Yes, there was, hardly more than a hole in the wall, but he had crawled through narrower openings before. His heart was still in his mouth as he hauled himself farther up the wall. The river flowed fast to his left, and a crow stared at him from a willow as suspiciously as if it were about to give him away to the miller at any moment. Farid was breathing heavily as he forced his shoulders through the narrow aperture in the wall. As he set foot on the wooden floorboards of the loft, they creaked 247

 

treacherously, but the river drowned out that telltale sound. On his stomach, Farid inched over to the hopper and peered down through it. Right below him stood Basta. And Dustfinger must be standing opposite him on the other side of the stone, with Meggie. Farid couldn’t see him, but he could imagine only too well what Dustfinger was thinking of: Fenoglio’s words telling the tale of his death.

“Grab that marten, Slasher!” Basta told the man beside him. “Go on, do it.”

“Do it yourself. You think I want to catch rabies?”

“Come here, Gwin!” That was Dustfinger’s voice. What was he doing? Trying to laugh his own fear in the face, the way he sometimes did when the fire bit his skin? Gwin leaped off the stone.

He would be sitting on Dustfinger’s shoulder, staring at Basta. Stupid Gwin. He didn’t know about the words. .

“Fine new clothes, Basta!” said Dustfinger. “When the servant finds a new master he must wear new clothes, mustn’t he?”

“Servant? Who’s a servant here? Just listen to him. As bold as if he’d never felt my knife! Have you forgotten how you screamed when it cut your face?” Basta set one boot on the millstone.

“Don’t you dare move so much as a finger. Hands up! Go on, up in the air! I know what you can do with fire in this world. One little whisper from you, one snap of your fingers, and my knife goes into the little witch’s breast.”

A snap of the fingers. Yes, get on with it, Farid! He looked around, searching for what he needed, quickly twisted some straw together to make a torch, and began whispering. “Come along!” he lured the fire, clicking his tongue and hissing the way Dustfinger had shown him after he put a little fire-honey in his mouth for the first time. They had practiced every evening behind Roxane’s house, practiced the language of fire, its crackling words .. Farid whispered them all until a tiny flame came licking up out of the straw.

“Ooh dear! See how the little witch is staring at me, Slasher?” asked Basta below him, with pretended terror. “What a pity she needs written words for her witchcraft! But there’s no book anywhere here. Wasn’t it nice of her to write to us in person and tell us where to find you?”

Basta disguised his voice to make it sound shrill and girlish. ” The Adderhead’s men have taken them all away, my parents and the strolling players! Write something for me, Fenoglio! Or something like that. You know, I was really disappointed to hear that your father’s still alive. Oh, don’t look so disbelieving, little witch, I still can’t read and I don’t intend to learn, but there are enough fools around the place who can, even in this world. A scribe ran into our arms right outside the city gates of Ombra. It took a little while for him to decipher your scribble, but we still had a good enough start to get here ahead of you. We were even on the spot in time to kill the old man’s messenger, who was supposed to warn you.”

“You’re even more talkative than you used to be, Basta.” Dustfinger’s voice sounded as if he found this tedious. How well he could hide his fear! Farid always admired him for that, almost more than for his skill with fire.

Slowly, very slowly, Basta drew his knife from his belt. Dustfinger didn’t like knives. He generally kept his in his backpack, and his backpack was leaning against the wall outside. Farid had so often begged him to keep the knife in his belt, but no, he wouldn’t hear of it.

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“Talkative? Well, well.” Basta looked at his reflection in the bright blade of the knife. “No one could say the same of you. But I tell you what! Since we’ve known each other so long, I’ll carry the news of your death to your wife in person! What do you say to that, fire-eater? Do you think Roxane will be glad to see me again?” Caressingly, he ran two fingers along the blade. “And as for you, little witch .. I thought it was really nice of you to entrust your letter to an old tightropewalker. With his stiff leg, he wasn’t half as fast as my knife.”

“CloudDancer? You killed CloudDancer?”

There was no boredom in Dustfinger’s voice now. Stand still, please, whispered Farid. Please, please stand still. He was hastily feeding more straw to the flames.

“Ah, so you didn’t know that yet!” Basta’s voice became soft with contentment. “Yes, there’ll be no more dancing for your old friend. Ask Slasher, he was there.”

“You’re lying!” Meggie’s voice shook. Farid bent cautiously forward. He saw Dustfinger push her roughly behind him, his eyes searching for a way out, but there was none. Sacks full of flour were stacked behind him and Meggie, Slasher was barring their way to their right, on their left was the man with the silly grin, and in front of the window through which Farid had peered stood the miller. But there was straw lying on the floor at their feet, a great deal of straw, and it would burn almost as well as paper.

Basta laughed. With one bound, he leaped up on the millstone and looked down at Dustfinger.

He was standing very close to the outlet of the hopper now. Hurry up, come on, whispered Farid, kindling a second bundle of straw from the first and holding them both above the funnel. He hoped its wood wouldn’t catch fire. He hoped the straw would slide through. He hoped so. His fingers were scorched as he stuffed the burning bundles in, but he took no notice. Dustfinger was in a trap, and Meggie was in it with him. What did a couple of burned fingers matter?

“Yes, poor CloudDancer was far too slow,” purred Basta, as he tossed his knife from one hand to the other. “You’re faster than him, I know, fire-eater, but you won’t get away all the same. And this time I’m not just going to cut your face, this time I’ll slice your skin off in strips from head to foot.”

Now! Farid let the burning straw drop. The hopper swallowed it like a sack of corn and spat it out on Basta’s boots.

“Fire! Where’s that fire coming from?” It was the miller’s voice. His man was bellowing like an ox when it sees the butcher’s hatchet.

Farid’s fingers hurt, his skin was beginning to blister, but the fire was dancing, dancing up Basta’s boots, licking close to his arms. Terrified, he stumbled, fell backward off the millstone, and cracked open his head against the edge of it. Blood flowed. Basta feared fire, feared it more than the bad luck against which his amulets were supposed to protect him.

As for Farid, he raced down the steps to the floor of the mill, pushed aside the miller’s man, who was staring at him as if he were a ghost, ran to Meggie, and pulled her away with him toward the window through which he had first looked. “Jump!” he called to her. “Quick, jump out!” Meggie was trembling. Her hair was full of flour, and she closed her eyes before she jumped, but jump she did.

Farid looked around at Dustfinger. He was talking to the flames, making them sing and grow, 249

 

while the miller and his man beat desperately at the burning straw with empty sacks, but the fire danced on. It was dancing for Dustfinger.

Farid crouched in the open window. “Come on!” he called to Dustfinger. “Hurry up!” Where was Basta?

Dustfinger pushed the miller aside and ran to him through the smoke and flames. Farid swung himself out of the window and clung to the sill outside as he watched the dazed Basta hauling himself up by the millstone. His hand was bloody when he put it to the back of his head. “Get him!” he shouted to Slasher. “Hold the fire-eater fast!”

“Quick!” cried Farid, as his toes tried to find a foothold on the outside of the wall, but Dustfinger stumbled over an empty sack as he ran. Gwin jumped off his shoulder and scurried toward Farid; when Dustfinger got to his feet again Slasher was standing between him and the window, coughing, his sword in his hand.

“Come on!” Farid heard Meggie shouting. She was standing right under the window, her eyes wide with fear, staring up at him. But Farid wriggled his way back into the burning mill.

“What are you doing? Get out!” Dustfinger shouted at him as he struck out with a burning sack at Slasher, whose trousers had caught fire. Slasher swayed as he lashed out with his sword, first at the flames, then at Dustfinger. His sharp blade slit open Dustfinger’s leg just as Farid jumped down into the burning straw again. Dustfinger stumbled back against the wall, pressing his hand to his thigh, while Slasher raised his sword again, half mad with rage and pain.

“No!” Farid’s own voice rang in his ears as he jumped at the man. He bit his shoulder and kicked him until he dropped the sword that he had been pointing at Dustfinger’s chest. Then Farid pushed Slasher into the flames. The man was more than a head taller than Farid himself, but desperation lent him strength. Farid was about to attack Basta, too, as he emerged from the smoke, coughing, but Dustfinger pulled him back and hissed at the flames until they made for Basta like angry vipers. Farid heard Basta scream but did not turn to look. He just stumbled toward the window, with Dustfinger beside him, cursing as he pressed his fingers to his bleeding leg. But he was alive. He was really alive. While the fire was devouring Basta.

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Chapter 50 – The Best of All Nights

“Eat,” said Merlot.

“I couldn’t possibly,” said Despereaux, backing away from the book.

“Why?”

“Um,” said Despereaux, “it would ruin the story.”

– Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux

 

Later, none of them knew how they had gotten away from the j mill. All Farid could remember were images: of Meggie’s face as she stumbled down to the river, of the blood in the water when Dustfinger jumped in, of the smoke they could see still rising into the sky after they had been wading through the cold water for more than an hour. But no one came after them: not Slasher or the miller or his man, and not Basta, either. Only Gwin appeared on the bank at some point.

Stupid Gwin.

It was the middle of the night when Dustfinger clambered out of the water, his face pale with exhaustion. As he let himself drop onto the grass, Farid anxiously listened into the darkness, but all he heard was a loud and steady roar like the breathing of a gigantic animal. “What’s that?” he whispered.

“The sea. Don’t you know what the sea sounds like?”

The sea. Gwin jumped on Farid’s back as he was looking at Dustfinger’s leg, but he shooed the marten away. “Get out!” he snapped. “Go hunting! You’ve done enough harm for one day.”

Then he let Jink out of the backpack, too, and looked for something to bind up the wound.

Meggie wrung out her wet dress and crouched beside them.

“Is it bad?”

“No, I’m fine,” said Dustfinger, but he winced as Farid cleaned the deep gash. “Poor CloudDancer!” he murmured. “He escaped death once, and now the Grim Reaper’s come for him after all. Who knows? Perhaps the White Women don’t like people to slip through their fingers like that.”

“I’m sorry.” Meggie spoke so quietly that Farid could hardly hear her. “I’m so very sorry. It’s all my fault, and he died for nothing. Because where is Fenoglio going to find us now, even if he’s written something for me?”

“Fenoglio.” Dustfinger spoke as if it were the name of some disease.

“Did you feel them, too?” Meggie looked at him. “I thought I could feel his words on my skin. I thought: They’re going to kill Dustfinger, and there’s nothing we can do about it!” “But there was,” said Farid defiantly.

Dustfinger, however, leaned back and looked up at the stars. “Really? We’ll see. Perhaps the old man’s thought up some different fate for me by now. Perhaps death is waiting just around another corner.”

“Let it wait!” was all Farid would say, fishing a bag out of Dustfinger’s backpack. “A little fairy 251

 

dust can never hurt,” he murmured as he trickled the glittering powder into the wound.

Then he pulled his shirt over his head, cut off a strip with his knife, and tied it carefully around Dustfinger’s leg. It wasn’t easy with his burned fingers, but he did his best, although the pain twisted his face.

Dustfinger reached for his hand and looked at it, frowning. “Heavens, your fingers are covered with as many blisters as if fire-elves had been dancing on them,” he commented. “I guess we both need a physician. What a pity Roxane isn’t here.” Sighing, Dustfinger lay down on his back again and looked up at the dark sky. “You know what, Farid?” he said, as if talking to the stars.

“There’s one really strange thing about all this. If Meggie’s father hadn’t plucked me out of my own story, I don’t suppose I’d ever have found such a fabulous watchdog as you.” He winked at Meggie. “Did you see him biting? I’ll bet Slasher thought it was the Black Prince’s bear gnawing his shoulder.”

“Oh, stop it!” Farid didn’t know where to look. Embarrassed, he picked a blade of grass with his bare toes.

“Yes, but Farid is cleverer than the bear,” said Meggie. “Much cleverer.”

“Indeed. Cleverer than me, too,” Dustfinger pointed out. “And as for what he can do with fire, I’m beginning to get seriously worried.”

Farid couldn’t help it; he had to grin. He felt so proud that the blood shot all the way to his ears, but in the dark no one, luckily, would see him blushing.

Dustfinger felt his leg and cautiously rose to his feet. The first step he took made his face contort with pain, but then he limped up and down the riverbank a few times. “There we are,” he said. “A little slower than usual, but it will do. It must.” Then he stopped in front of Farid. “I believe I owe you a debt,” he said. “How am I to repay you? Perhaps I could show you something new? A game with fire that only I can play? How about that?”

Farid held his breath. “What kind of a game is it?” he asked.

“I can’t show you except by the sea,” replied Dustfinger, “but we must go there, anyway, because we both need a physician. And the best physician I know lives by the sea. In the shadow of the Castle of Night.”

They decided to take turns keeping watch. Farid said he would take the first watch, and while Meggie and Dustfinger slept behind him, under the branches of a durmast oak that dipped low to the ground, he sat in the grass and looked up at the sky, where more stars shone than there were fireflies hovering above the river. Farid tried to remember a night, any night, when he had felt as he did now, so entirely at ease with himself, but he couldn’t. This was the best of all nights for him – in spite of all the terrors that lay behind him, in spite of his burned fingers, which still hurt although Dustfinger had put fairy dust on them and the cooling ointment that Roxane had made for him.

He felt so much alive. As alive as the fire.

He had saved Dustfinger. He had been stronger than the words. Everything was all right.

The two martens were squabbling behind him, no doubt over prey of some kind. “Wake me 252

 

when the moon is above that hill,” Dustfinger had said, but when Farid went to him he was sleeping deeply, with such peace in his face that Farid decided to let him sleep on and returned to his place under the stars.

Soon afterward, when he heard steps behind him, it was not Dustfinger but Meggie he saw there.

“I keep waking up,” she said. “I just can’t stop thinking.”

“Wondering how Fenoglio is going to find you now?” She nodded.

She still believed in words so much. Farid believed in other things: in his knife, in courage and cunning. And in friendship. Meggie leaned her head against his shoulder, and they both remained as silent as the stars above them. After a while a wind rose, cold and gusty, salty as seawater, and Meggie sat up and clasped her arms around her knees, shivering.

“This world,” she said. “Do you really like it?”

What a question! Farid never asked himself such things. He was glad to be with Dustfinger again and didn’t mind where that was.

“It’s a cruel world, don’t you think?” Meggie went on. “Mo often told me I forget how cruel it is too easily.”

With his burned fingers, Farid stroked her fair hair. It shone even in the dark. “They’re all cruel,”

he said. “The world I come from, the world you come from, and this one, too. Maybe people don’t see the cruelty in your world right away, it’s better hidden, but it’s there all the same.”

He put his arm around her, sensed her fear, her anxiety, her anger . . It was as if he could hear her heart whispering as clearly as the voice of fire.

“You know a funny thing?” she asked. “Even if I could go back at this moment, I wouldn’t. Now that’s crazy, isn’t it? It’s almost as if I’d always wanted to come here, to somewhere like this. But why? It’s a terrible place!”

“Terrible and beautiful,” said Farid, and kissed her. Kissing her tasted good. Much better than Dustfinger’s fire-honey. Much better than anything he had ever tasted before. “You can’t go back, anyway,” he whispered to her. “As soon as we have your father free, we’ll explain that to him.”

“Explain what?”

“Why, that we’re afraid he’ll have to leave you here. Because you belong with me now, and I’m staying with Dustfinger.”

She laughed and pressed her face to his shoulder in embarrassment. “I’m sure Mo won’t agree to that.”

“Well? So tell him the girls here marry when they’re your age.”

She laughed again, but then her face grew grave. “Perhaps Mo will stay, too,” she said softly.

“Perhaps we’ll all stay .. Resa and Fenoglio, too. And we’ll go and fetch Elinor and Darius as well, and then we’ll all live happily ever after.” The sad note had crept back into her voice. “They can’t hang Mo, Farid!” she whispered. “We’ll save him, won’t we? And my mother and the others. It’s always like that in stories: Bad things happen, but then it all ends happily. And this is a story.”

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“Of course!” said Farid, although with the best will in the world he couldn’t imagine that happy ending. He felt good, though, all the same.

After a while, Meggie dropped off to sleep beside him. And he sat there and kept watch over her

– her and Dustfinger – all night long. It was the best of all nights.

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Chapter 51 – The Right Words

There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple. If the ill spirit have so fair a house, Good things will strive to dwell with it.

– William Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

The groom was a fool and took forever to saddle up the wretched horse. I never invented a character like that, thought Fenoglio. Lucky that I’m in a good mood. For he was indeed in the best of moods. He had been whistling quietly to himself for hours, because he had done it. He had found the solution! Yes, at last the words had flowed onto the parchment as if they’d just been waiting for him to fish them out of the sea of letters. The right words. The only right words.

Now the story could go on and all would end well. He was an enchanter, after all, a conjuror with words, one of the very first quality. No one could hold a candle to him – well, one or two, maybe, but in his own world, not this one. If only this dolt of a groom would hurry up! It was high time he went to Roxane’s house or she would ride away without the letter – and then how was he going to get it to Meggie? For there was still no sign of life from the young hothead he had sent after her. That callow youth had probably gotten lost in the Way less Wood.

He felt for the letter under his cloak. A good thing that words weighed light, light as a feather, even the most important of them. Roxane wouldn’t have a heavy load to carry when she took Meggie the Adderhead’s death warrant. And she would take something else to the principality by the sea with her – the certainty of Cosimo’s victory.

Just so long as Cosimo didn’t set out before Meggie even had a chance to read his words! Cosimo was burning with impatience, longing for the day when he would lead his soldiers to the other side of the forest. ” Because he wants to find out who he is! ” whispered the quiet voice in Fenoglio’s head (or was it in his heart?). ” Because your fine avenging angel is empty, like a box with nothing inside it. A few borrowed memories, a few stone statues – that’s all the poor lad has, and your stories of his heroic deeds. He searches his empty heart in desperation for some echo of them. You ought to have tried to bring back the real Cosimo, after all, straight back from the realm of the dead, but you didn’t dare!” Hush! Fenoglio shook his head in annoyance. Why did these troublesome thoughts keep returning? Everything would be all right once Cosimo sat on the Adderhead’s throne. Then he’d have memories of his own, and he’d gather more of them every day. And soon the emptiness would be forgotten.

His horse was saddled at last. The groom helped him to mount, his mouth twisted in a mocking smile. The fool! Fenoglio knew he didn’t cut a very good figure on a horse, he’d never get used to riding – but so what? These horses were alarming beasts, much too strong for his liking, but a poet living at his prince’s court didn’t travel on foot like a peasant. And he would go much faster on horseback – assuming the animal wanted to go the same way as he did. What a business it was to get the creature moving!

The hooves clattered over the paved courtyard, past the barrels of pitch and iron spikes that Cosimo was having set on the walls. The castle still resounded at night to the hammering of the smiths, and Cosimo’s soldiers slept in the wooden huts along the wall, crammed close together like larvae in an ants’ nest. He had certainly brought a warrior angel into being, but hadn’t angels always been warlike? The fact is, I’m just no good at making up peaceful characters, thought Fenoglio as he trotted across the yard. The good ones either have bad luck like Dustfinger or they 255

 

fall among thieves like the Black Prince. Could he ever have made up a character like Mortimer?

Probably not.

As Fenoglio was riding toward the Outer Gate it swung open, so that for a moment he actually assumed the guards were finally showing a little respect for their prince’s poet. But when he saw how low they bent their heads he realized that it couldn’t possibly be for him.

Cosimo came riding toward him through the wide gateway, on a horse so white that it looked a little unreal. In the dark he looked almost more beautiful than by day, but wasn’t that the case with all angels? Only seven soldiers followed him; he never took more as guards on his nocturnal rides. But someone else rode at his side, too: Brianna, Dustfinger’s daughter, no longer wearing a dress that had belonged to her mistress, poor Violante, as so often in the past, but in one of the gowns that Cosimo had given her. He heaped presents upon her, while he no longer allowed his wife even to leave the castle, or their son, either. But in spite of all these proofs of love, Brianna didn’t look particularly happy. And why should she? What girl would be cheerful if he lover was planning to go to war? The prospect didn’t seem to cloud Cosimo’s mood. Far from it; he looked as light at heart as if the future could bring nothing but good. He went riding every night. He seemed to need very little sleep, and Fenoglio had heard he rode at such a breakneck pace that hardly any of his bodyguards could keep up – like a man who had been told that death had no power over him. What difference did it make, anyway, when he could remember neither his death nor his life?

Day and night, Balbulus was painting the most wonderful pictures to illustrate stories about that lost life. More than a dozen scribes supplied him with the handwritten pages. “My husband still won’t enter the library,” Violante had commented bitterly, last time Fenoglio saw her. “But he fills all the reading desks with books about himself.”

Unfortunately, it was only too clear that the words from which Fenoglio and Meggie had made him did not satisfy Cosimo. There were simply not enough of them. Everything he heard about himself seemed to have to do with another man. Perhaps that was why he loved Dustfinger’s daughter so much: because she had nothing to do with the man he seemed to have been before his death. Fenoglio had to keep writing new and ardent love songs to Brianna for him. He generally stole them from other poets; he had always had a good memory for verse, and Meggie wasn’t here now to catch him in the act of theft. Tears always came to Brianna’s eyes when one of the minstrels, who were now welcomed to the castle again, sang her one of those songs.

“Fenoglio!” Cosimo reined in his horse, and Fenoglio bent his head in the most natural way in the world, as he did only for the young prince. “Where are you going, poet? Everything’s ready for us to march out!” He sounded as impatient as his horse, which was prancing back and forth, and threatened to infect Fenoglio’s horse with its restlessness. “Or would you rather stay here and sharpen your pens for all the songs you’ll have to write about my victory?”

March out? Ready?

Fenoglio looked around in confusion, but Cosimo laughed. “Do you think I’d assemble the troops here in the castle? There are far too many for that. No, they’re encamped down by the river. I’m only waiting for one more company of mercenaries recruited for me in the north. They may arrive tomorrow!”

As soon as that? Fenoglio cast Brianna a quick glance. So that was why she looked so sad.

“Please, Your Grace!” Fenoglio could not conceal the anxiety in his voice. “It’s much too soon!

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Wait a little longer!”

But Cosimo only smiled. “The moon is red, poet! The soothsayers think that’s a good sign. A sign that we mustn’t miss the moment, or all may come to grief.”

What nonsense! Fenoglio bowed his head to keep Cosimo from seeing the annoyance in his face.

Cosimo knew, anyway, that his love of soothsayers and fortune-tellers irritated Fenoglio, who thought them all a set of avaricious frauds. “Let me say it once again, Your Grace!” He had repeated this warning so often that it was beginning to sound flat. “The only thing that will bring you bad luck is setting out too soon!”

But Cosimo merely shook his head indulgently.

“You’re an old man, Fenoglio,” he said. “Your blood flows slowly, but I’m young! What should I wait for? For the Adderhead to recruit mercenaries, too, and barricade himself in the Castle of Night?”

He probably did that long ago, thought Fenoglio. And that’s why you must wait for the words, my words, and for Meggie to read them, the way she read you here. Wait for her voice! “Just one or two weeks more, Your Grace!” he said urgently. “Your peasants must bring in their harvest. What else will they have to live on in winter?”

But Cosimo didn’t want to hear about such things. “That truly is old man’s talk!” he said angrily.

“Where are your fiery words now? They’ll live on the Adderhead’s stores of provisions, on the good fortune of our victory, on the silver from the Castle of Night. I’ll have it distributed in the villages!”

They can’t eat silver, Your Grace, thought Fenoglio, but he did not say so aloud. Instead, he looked up at the sky. Dear God, how high the moon had risen already! But Cosimo still had something on his mind.

“There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask you for some time,” he said, just as Fenoglio was about to take his leave with some stammered excuse. “You’re so friendly with the strolling players. Everyone’s talking about that fire-eater, the one they say can talk to the flames. . ”

Out of the corner of his eye, Fenoglio saw Brianna bend her head.

“You mean Dustfinger?”

“Yes, that’s his name. I know he’s Brianna’s father,” said Cosimo, casting her a loving glance, “but she won’t talk about him. And she says she doesn’t know where he is now. But perhaps you do?”

Cosimo patted his horse’s neck. His face seemed to burn with beauty.

“Why? What do you want of him?”

“Isn’t that obvious? He can talk to fire! They say he can make the flames grow to a great height without burning him.” Fenoglio understood even before Cosimo explained. “You want Dustfinger for your war.” He couldn’t help it, he laughed aloud. “What’s so funny about that?” Cosimo frowned.

Dustfinger the fire-dancer as a weapon. Fenoglio shook his head. “Oh no,” he said. “I know Dustfinger very well” – he saw Brianna give him a look of surprise as he said so – “and he is 257

 

many things but certainly not a warrior. He’d laugh in your face.”

“He had better not.” There was no mistaking the anger in Gosimo’s voice. But Brianna was looking at Fenoglio as if she had a thousand questions on the tip of her tongue. Well, this was no time for them! “Your Highness,” he said hastily, “please excuse me now! One of Minerva’s children is ill, and I promised to get a few herbs from Brianna’s mother for her.”

“Oh, I see. Of course. Yes, of course, ride on, and we’ll talk later.” Cosimo gathered up his reins again. “If the child doesn’t improve let me know, and I’ll send a physician.”

“Thank you,” said Fenoglio, but before he finally went on his way there was one question he himself had to ask. “I’ve heard your wife isn’t well, either?” Balbulus, who at present was the only visitor allowed to see Violante, had told him so.

“Oh, she’s just in a temper.” Cosimo took Brianna’s hand as if to comfort her for the fact that they were talking about his wife. “Violante loses her temper easily. She gets it from her father. She simply will not understand why I won’t let her leave the castle, yet it’s obvious that her father’s informers are everywhere, and who would they try to pump for information first? Violante and Jacopo.” It was hard not to believe every word that those beautiful lips uttered, particularly when they spoke with so much genuine conviction.

“Well, I expect you’re right! But please don’t forget that your wife hates her father.”

“You can hate someone and obey him all the same. Isn’t that so?” Cosimo looked at Fenoglio with that naked expression in his eyes, like the eyes of a very young baby.

“Yes, yes, probably,” he replied uncomfortably. Every time Cosimo looked at him like that, Fenoglio felt as if he had found an empty page in a book, a moth hole in the finely woven carpet of words.

“Your Highness!” he said, bowing his head again, and he finally, if not very elegantly, got his horse to trot out of the gateway.

Brianna had given him a good description of the way to her mother’s farmhouse. He had asked her about it after Roxane’s visit, apparently in all innocence, saying that he was plagued by aching bones. Dustfinger’s daughter was a strange child. She wanted nothing to do with her father and obviously not much with her mother, either. Luckily, she had warned him about the goose, so he was holding the horse’s reins firmly when the cackling bird came toward him.

Roxane was sitting outside her house when he rode into the yard. It was a poor place. Her beauty seemed to fit into it as little as a jewel in a beggar’s hut. Her son was sleeping in the doorway beside her, curled up like a puppy, his head on her lap.

“He wants to come with me,” she said as Fenoglio slid clumsily off the horse. “The little girl cried, too, when I told her I had to go away. But I can’t take them, not to Argenta. The Adderhead’s had children hanged before now. A friend is going to look after the girl for me, and Jehan, and the plants and animals, too.”

She stroked her son’s dark hair, and for a moment Fenoglio didn’t want her to ride away. But what would become of his words then? Who else would find Meggie? Should he ask Cosimo for another horseman who might not come back, either? ” Well, who knows, maybe Roxane won’t come back, ” the insidious voice inside him whispered. ” And then your precious words will be lost.

”

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“Nonsense!” he said angrily, out loud. “I made a copy, of course.”

“What did you say?” Roxane looked at him in surprise.

“Oh, nothing, nothing!” Heavens above, now he was talking to himself. “There’s something else I have to tell you – don’t ride to the mill! A minstrel who sings for Cosimo has brought me news from the Black Prince.”

Roxane pressed her hand to her mouth.

“No, no. It’s not so bad!” Fenoglio quickly reassured her.

“The fact is, Meggie’s father has obviously been taken prisoner by the Adderhead, but to be honest I feared as much. As for Dustfinger and Meggie – well, to be brief, the mill where Meggie was going to wait for my letter seems to have burned down. Apparently, the miller is telling everyone that a marten made fire rain down from the roof, while a wizard with a scarred face spoke to the flames. It seems this wizard had a demon with him in the shape of a dark-skinned boy who saved him when he was wounded and helped him and a girl to escape.”

Roxane looked at him with a thoughtful expression, as if she had to search for the meaning of what he said. “Wounded?”

“Yes, but they escaped! That’s the main thing. Roxane, do you really think you can find them?”

She passed a hand over her forehead. “I’ll try.”

“Don’t worry,” said Fenoglio. “You heard what they’re saying. Dustfinger has a demon protecting him now. In any case, hasn’t he always managed very well on his own?”

“Oh yes, indeed he has!”

Fenoglio cursed every wrinkle on his old face, she was so beautiful. Why didn’t he have Cosimo’s good looks? Although would she like that? She liked Dustfinger, who ought to have been dead by now if the story had gone the way he had once written it. Fenoglio, he told himself, this is going too far. You’re behaving like a jealous lover!

But Roxane was taking no notice of him, anyway. She looked down at the boy sleeping in her lap.

“Brianna was furious when she heard I was going to ride after her father,” she said. “I only hope Cosimo will look after her and won’t begin his war before I get back.”

Fenoglio made no reply to that. Why tell her about Cosimo’s plans? To make her even more anxious? No. He took out the letter for Meggie from under his cloak. Written words that could become sound, a mighty sound .. He had never before made Rosenquartz seal a letter so carefully.

“This letter can save Meggie’s parents,” he said urgently. “It can save her father. It can save us all, so take good care of it!”

Roxane turned the sealed parchment this way and that, as if it seemed to her too small for such great claims. “I never heard of a letter that could open the dungeons of the Castle of Night,” she said. “Do you think it’s right to give the girl false hopes?”

“They aren’t false,” said Fenoglio, rather hurt to find that she had so little faith in his words.

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“Very well. If I find Dustfinger, and the girl is still with him, she’ll get your letter.” Roxane stroked her son’s hair again, very gently, as if to brush away a leaf. “Does she love her father?”

“Yes. Yes, she loves him very much.”

“My daughter loves hers, too. Brianna loves him so much that she won’t speak a word to him now. When he went away in the old days, when he just used to go into the forest or down to the sea, anywhere that fire or the wind happened to lure him, she would try to run after him on her little feet. I don’t think he even noticed, he always disappeared so fast, quick as a fox that has stolen a chicken. But she loved him all the same. Why? That boy loves him, too. He even thinks Dustfinger needs him, but he needs no one, only fire.”

Fenoglio looked thoughtfully at her. “You’re wrong,” he said. “He was wretchedly unhappy when he was away. You should have seen him.”

She eyed him incredulously. “You know where he was?”

Now what? Old fool that he was, what had he said this time? “Well, yes,” he stammered. “Yes.

Yes, I was there myself.” He needed some lies, and where were they? The truth wasn’t going to be much use this time. A few good lies were needed to explain everything. Why shouldn’t he find a few good words for Dustfinger for a change – even if he envied him his wife?

“He says he couldn’t come back.” She didn’t believe it, but you could tell from Roxane’s voice how much she wished she did.

“That’s exactly how it was! He had a bad time! Capricorn set Basta on him, they took him far, far away and tried to make him tell them how to talk with fire.” Here came the lies now, and they might even be close to the truth, who could say? “Believe me, Basta took his revenge for your preference for Dustfinger! They shut him away for years, and he finally escaped, but they soon found him and beat him half to death.” Meggie had told him that part. A little of the truth couldn’t hurt, and Roxane didn’t have to know that it was because of Resa. “It was dreadful, dreadful!” Fenoglio felt the pleasure of storytelling run away with him, the pleasure of watching Roxane’s eyes widen as she hung on his lips, waiting eagerly for his next words. Should he make Dustfinger a little villainous after all? No, he’d killed him once already, he’d do him a favor today.

He would make his wife forgive him, once and for all, for staying away those ten years.

Sometimes I can be a truly benevolent person, thought Fenoglio.

“He thought he’d die. He thought he’d never see you again, and that was the worst of it for him.”

Fenoglio had to clear his throat. He was moved by his own words – and so was Roxane. Oh yes, he saw the distrust disappear from her eyes, he saw them soften with love. “After that he wandered in strange lands, like a dog turned out of doors, looking for a way that would take him not to Basta or Capricorn but to you.” The words were coining as if of their own accord now. As if he really knew what Dustfinger had felt all those years. “He was forlorn, truly forlorn, his heart was cold as a stone from loneliness. There was no room in it for anything but longing – longing for you. And for his daughter.”

“He had two daughters.” Roxane’s voice was almost includible.

Damn it, he’d forgotten that. Two daughters, of course! But Roxane was so rapt with his words that his mistake didn’t break the spell.

“How do you know all this?” she asked. “He never told me you knew each other so well.”

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Oh, no one knows him better, thought Fenoglio. I can assure you, my beauty, no one knows him better.

Roxane pushed her black hair back from her face. Fenoglio saw a trace of gray in it, as if she had combed it with a dusty comb. “I shall ride early in the morning,” she said.

“Excellent.” Fenoglio drew his horse to his side. Why was it so difficult to get onto these creatures with anything like elegance? “Look after yourself,” he said, when he was finally on the horse’s back. “And the letter, too. And give Meggie my love. Tell her everything will be all right. I promise.”

As he rode away she stood beside her sleeping son, looking thoughtful, and watched him go. He really did hope she would find Dustfinger, and it wasn’t just that he wanted Meggie to get his words. No. A little happiness in this story couldn’t hurt, and Roxane was not happy without Dustfinger. That was the way he’d fixed it.

He doesn’t deserve her, all the same, thought Fenoglio again as he rode toward the lights of Ombra, which were neither as bright nor as many as the lights of his old world but were at least equally inviting. Soon the houses behind the protecting walls would be without their men folk.

They would all be going with Cosimo, including Minerva’s husband – although she had begged him to stay – and the cobbler whose workshop was next to his. Even the rag-collector who went around every Tuesday was going to fight the Adderhead. Would they follow Cosimo as willingly if I’d made him ugly? Fenoglio wondered. Ugly as the Adderhead with his butcher’s face? No, people find it easier to believe that a man with a handsome face has good intentions, so he had done well to put an angel on the throne. Yes, that was clever, extremely clever. Fenoglio caught himself humming quietly as the horse carried him past the guards. They let him in without a word, their prince’s poet, the man who put their world into words and had made it out of words.

Bow your heads to Fenoglio!

The guards would go with Cosimo, too, and the soldiers up in the castle, and the grooms who were hardly as old as the boy who went around with Dustfinger. Even Minerva’s son Ivo would have gone if she had let him. They’ll all come back, thought Fenoglio, as he rode toward the stables. Or most of them, at least. It will end well, I know it will. Not just well, but very well indeed!

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Chapter 52 – Angry Orpheus

 

All words are written in the same ink, “flower” and “power,” say, are much the same, and though I might write “blood, blood, blood” all over the page, the paper would not be stained nor would I bleed.

– Philippe Jaccottet, “Chant d’en Bas”

 

Elinor lay on her air mattress staring at the ceiling. She had quarreled with Orpheus again, even though she knew she’d be punished with the cellar. Sent to bed early, Elinor! she thought bitterly. That was how her father used to punish her as a child when he caught her yet again with a book that he didn’t think she should be reading at her age. Sent to bed early, sometimes at five in the afternoon. It had been particularly bad in summer, when the birds were singing and her sister was playing outside under the window – her sister who didn’t care for books at all, but liked nothing so much as telling tales on Elinor when, instead of playing with her, she buried her head in a book that her father had said she mustn’t read.

“Elinor, please don’t quarrel with Orpheus!” Darius had tried drumming that into her so often, but no, she just couldn’t control her temper! How could she be expected to, when his wretched dog slobbered all over some of her most valuable books because his master never thought of putting them back on their shelves when he’d had his fun with them?

Recently, however, he hadn’t been taking any more books off the shelves, not one. That at least was a small comfort. “He just reads Inkheart, ” Darius had whispered to her as they were washing the dishes together in the kitchen. Her dishwasher had broken down. As if it wasn’t bad enough to be working as a kitchen maid in her own house, now her hands were all swollen with washing-up water! “He seems to be looking for words,” Darius whispered. “Then he puts them together differently, writes them down, writes and writes; the wastepaper basket is brimming over. He keeps on trying, and then he reads what he’s written out loud, and when nothing happens .. ”

“Yes? Then what?”

“Oh, nothing,” Darius had said evasively, scrubbing away industriously at a pan encrusted with fat, but Elinor knew that if it was “nothing” he wouldn’t have turned so embarrassed and silent.

“Then what?” she repeated – and Darius, blushing to his ears, had finally told her. Then Orpheus threw her books, her wonderful books, at the walls. He flung them on the floor in his rage – now and then one even sailed out of the window – and all because he couldn’t do what Meggie had 262

 

done. Inkheart was closed to him, however lovingly he cooed and implored in his velvety voice, reading and rereading the sentences he so longed to slip between.

Of course, she had run straight off when she next heard him shouting. She’d gone to save her printed children. “No!” Orpheus had yelled, so loudly that you could hear him in the kitchen. “No, no, no! Let me in, you thrice-accursed thing! I sent Dustfinger back into you! Can’t you understand that? What would you be without him? I gave you back Mortola and Basta! I’ve earned my reward, haven’t I?”

The man built like a wardrobe wasn’t standing outside the library door to stop Elinor. He was probably roaming the house yet again, to see if he could find something worth stealing after all.

Not in a hundred years would it have occurred to him that the books were by far the most valuable things in the place. Later, Elinor couldn’t remember the names she had called Orpheus.

She remembered only the book he was holding in his raised hand, a beautiful edition of the poems of William Blake. And for all her furious insults, he threw it out of the window, while the wardrobe man grabbed her from behind and dragged her to the cellar stairs.

Oh, Meggie! thought Elinor as she lay on the air mattress, staring up at the crumbling plaster on her cellar ceiling. Why didn’t you take me with you? Why didn’t you at least ask if I’d like to come, too?

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Chapter 53 – The Barn Owl

 

And every doctor must know that God has set a great mystery in the plants, if only because of the spirits and wild fancies that cast men into despair, and this aid comes not from the Devil but from Nature.

– Paracelsus, Works

 

The sea. Meggie hadn’t seen it since the day they drove back from Capricorn’s village to Elinor’s house with the fairies and brownies who were nothing but ashes now. “This is where the physician whom I told you about lives,” said Dustfinger, when the bay appeared beyond the trees. It was beautiful. The sun made the water shimmer like green glass, foaming glass constantly shaped by the wind into new folds. It was a strong wind, driving veils of cloud over the blue sky, and it carried a scent of salt and distant islands. It would have gladdened the heart but for the bare hill in the distance rising above the wooded slopes, and the castle on the top of the hill, broad and heavy as its master’s face, in spite of its silvered rooftops and battlements.

“Yes, there it is,” said Dustfinger when he saw Meggie’s look of alarm. “The Castle of Night. And the hill where it stands is called Mount Adder, what else? Bare as an old man’s bald head, so no one can come close under the cover of trees. But don’t worry, it’s not quite as close as it looks.”

“The towers,” said Farid. “Are they really all pure silver?”

“Oh yes,” said Dustfinger. “Dug from the mountains, this one and others. Roast fowls, young women, fertile land . , . and silver . . the Adder head has a hearty appetite for many things.”

A broad, sandy beach edged the bay. Where it joined the trees a long wall and a tower rose, sand-colored and inconspicuous. There was not a soul to be seen on the beach, no boat was drawn up on the pale sand, only that building – the low tower and the long, tiled rooftops hardly visible behind the wall. A path wound toward it like a viper’s trail, but Dustfinger led them around to the back of the building under cover of the trees. He beckoned impatiently to them before disappearing into the shadow of the wall. The wood of the door outside which he was waiting for them was weathered, and the bell hanging above it was rusty with the salty wind.

Wildflowers grew near the door, faded blossoms and brown seed heads with a fairy nibbling at them. She had paler skin than her woodland sisters.

It all seemed so peaceful. The buzz of a wasp reached Meggie’s ear, mingling with the roaring of the sea, but she remembered only too well how peaceful the mill had looked. Dustfinger had not forgotten it, either. He stood there listening intently before he finally put out his hand and pulled the chain of the rusty bell. His leg was bleeding again – Meggie saw him press his hand to it – but nonetheless he had kept urging them to make haste on the way to this place. “There’s no better physician,” was all he would say when Farid asked where he was taking them, “and none we can 264

 

trust more. In addition, it’s not far from there to the Castle of Night, and that’s where Meggie still wants to go, doesn’t she?” He had given them some leaves to eat, downy and bitter. “Get them down inside you,” he said when they made faces of disgust. “You can stay where we’re going only if you have at least five of them in your belly.”

The wooden door opened just a crack, and a woman peered through. “By all good spirits!”

Meggie heard her whisper, and then the door opened and a thin, wrinkled hand beckoned them in. The woman who quickly closed it behind them again was just as wrinkled and thin as her hand, and she stared at Dustfinger as if he had fallen straight from heaven.

“Yesterday! He said so yesterday!” she exclaimed. “You wait and see, Bella, he’s back, that’s what he said. Who else would have set the mill ablaze? Who else talks to fire? He didn’t get a wink of sleep all night. He was worried, but you’re all right, aren’t you? What’s the matter with your leg?”

Dustfinger put a finger to his mouth, but Meggie saw that he was smiling. “It could be better,” he said quietly. “And you talk as fast as ever, Bella, but could you take us to the Barn Owl now?”

“Yes, yes, of course!” Bella sounded slightly injured. “I suppose you have that horrible marten in there?” she inquired, with a distrustful look at Dustfinger’s backpack. “Don’t you go letting him out.”

“Of course not,” Dustfinger assured her, casting a glance at Farid, which obviously warned him to say nothing about the second marten asleep in his own backpack.

Without another word, the old woman beckoned them to follow her down a dark, unadorned colonnade. She took small, hasty footsteps, as if she were a squirrel wearing a long dress of coarsely woven fabric. “A good thing you came around the back way,” she said in a lowered voice as she led them past a series of closed doors. “I’m afraid the Adderhead has ears even here now, but luckily he doesn’t pay his informers well enough for them to work in the wing where we treat infectious cases. I hope you gave those two enough of the leaves?”

“Yes, indeed.” Dustfinger nodded, but Meggie saw that he looked around uneasily and inconspicuously put another of the leaves that he had given them into his own mouth. Not until they passed the fragile figures sunning themselves in the courtyard around which the colonnade ran did Meggie realize just where Dustfinger had brought them. It was an infirmary. Farid put his hand to his mouth in horror when they met an old man who looked as pale as if Death had come for him long ago, and he replied to the man’s toothless smile with only a frightened nod.

“Don’t look as if you were about to fall down dead!” Dustfinger whispered to him, although he didn’t look particularly comfortable here, either. “Your fingers will be well tended here, and moreover we’ll be relatively safe, which is more than can be said for many places on this side of the forest.”

“Yes, if there’s one thing the Adderhead fears,” added Bella in knowing tones, “it’s death and the diseases that lead to it. All the same, you shouldn’t let either the patients or the nurses here see more of you than they must. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life it’s never to trust anyone.

Except the Barn Owl, of course.”

“And what about me, Bella?” asked Dustfinger.

“You least of all!” was her only reply. She stopped at a plain wooden door. “It’s a pity your face is 265

 

so unmistakable,” she told Dustfinger, low-voiced, “or you could have put on a show for our patients. Nothing does the sick more good than a little pleasure.” Then she knocked on the door and, with a nod, stepped aside.

The room on the other side of the door was dark, for the only window was half hidden behind stacks of books. It was the kind of room Mo would have loved. He liked books to look as if someone had only just put them down. Quite unlike Elinor, he saw nothing wrong in leaving them lying there open, waiting for the next reader. The Barn Owl seemed to feel the same. He could hardly be spotted among all those piled books – a small man with short-sighted eyes and broad hands. He looked to Meggie like a mole, except that his hair was gray.

“Didn’t I say so?” He knocked two books off their stacks as he hurried toward Dustfinger. “He’s back,” I said, but they wouldn’t believe it. Obviously, the White Women are letting more and more of the dead come back to life these days!”

The two men embraced. Then the Barn Owl took a step back and looked Dustfinger thoroughly up and down. The physician was an old man, older than Fenoglio, but his eyes were as young as Farid’s. “You look all right,” he commented, pleased. “Except for your leg. What’s the matter with it? Did you get that injury at the mill? One of my women healers was taken up to the castle yesterday to tend two men bitten by fire. She brought back a strange story about an ambush and a horned marten that spits fire. . ”

Up to the castle? Instinctively, Meggie moved toward the physician. “Did she see the prisoners, too?” she interrupted him. “They would just have been taken there – strolling players, men and women. My mother and father are with them.”

The Barn Owl looked at her sympathetically. “Are you the girl that the Black Prince’s men told me about? Your father –”

“– is the man they take for the Bluejay.” Dustfinger finished the sentence. “Do you know how he and the other prisoners are?”

Before the Barn Owl could answer, a girl put her head around the door. She stared at the strangers in alarm. Her eyes lingered on Meggie so long that finally the Barn Owl cleared his throat.

“What is it, Carla?” he asked.

The girl bit her pale lips nervously. “I’m to ask if we have any eyebright left,” she said timidly.

“Of course. Go to Bella and she’ll give you some, but now leave us alone.”

The girl disappeared with a hasty nod, but she left the door open. Sighing, the Barn Owl closed it and then bolted it, too. “Where were we? Oh yes, the prisoners. The physician responsible for the dungeons is looking after them. He’s useless at his job, but who else could stand it up there?

Instead of healing the sick he has to preside over whippings and lashings. Luckily, they’re not letting him near your father, and the Adderhead’s own physician isn’t going to soil his fingers on a prisoner, so my best woman healer goes up to the castle every day to tend him.”

“How is my father?” Meggie tried not to sound like a little girl holding back her tears with difficulty, but she didn’t entirely succeed.

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“He’s badly wounded, but I think you know that?”

Meggie nodded. And the tears came again, flowing and flowing as if to wash it all out of her heart: her grief, her longing, her fear. Farid put his arm around her shoulders, but that just reminded her of Mo even more – of all the years he had protected her and held her close. And now that he was in trouble, she wasn’t with him.

“He’s lost a great deal of blood, and he’s still weak, but he’s doing well – much better, anyway, than we let the Adderhead know.” You could tell from the Barn Owl’s voice that he often had to talk to people who were anxious about those they loved. “My healer has advised him not to let anyone notice, to give us more time. But at the moment there really is nothing for you to worry about.”

Meggie’s heart soared. It will be all right, something inside her said – for the first time since Dustfinger had given her Resa’s note. Everything will be all right! Feeling embarrassed, she wiped the tears off her face.

“The weapon that wounded your father – my healer says it must be a terrible thing,” the Barn Owl continued. “I hope the Adderhead’s armorers are not working on some diabolical invention in secret!”

“No, that weapon was from a very different place.” And nothing good comes from that place, said Dustfinger’s face, but Meggie didn’t want to think of what a rifle could do to this world just now.

Her thoughts were with Mo.

“My father,” she told the Barn Owl, “would like this room very much. He loves books, and yours are really beautiful. Although he’d probably tell you that some of them needed rebinding, and that one won’t live much longer if you don’t soon do something about the beetles eating it.”

The Barn Owl picked up the book she had pointed out and caressed the pages just as Mo always did. “The Bluejay loves books?” he asked. “Unusual for a robber.”

“He’s not a robber,” said Meggie. “He’s a doctor like you, only he heals books instead of people.”

“Really? Then is it true that the Adderhead had captured the wrong man? In that case, I suppose when they say your father killed Capricorn, that isn’t true, either?”

“Oh yes, that’s true.” Dustfinger looked out of the window as if he saw the scene of Capricorn’s festivities outside. “And all he needed to do it was his voice. You ought to get him or his daughter to read to you sometime. Afterward, I assure you, you’ll see your books in a very different light.

You might well close and padlock them.”

“Really?” The Barn Owl looked at Meggie with great interest, as if he would like to hear more about Capricorn’s death, but there was another knock. This time a man’s voice came through the bolted door. “Will you come, master? We’ve prepared everything, but it will be better if you make the incision.”

Meggie saw Farid turn pale. “Just coming!” said the Barn Owl. “You go ahead. I hope I can welcome your father to this room someday,” he said to Meggie as he went to the door. “For you’re right: My books could certainly do with a doctor. Does the Black Prince have any plans for the prisoners?” He looked inquiringly at Dustfinger.

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“No. No, I don’t think so. Have you heard anything about the other captives? Meggie’s mother is among them.” It gave Meggie a pang that Dustfinger, and not she, had been the one to ask about Resa.

“No, I don’t know anything about the others,” replied the Barn Owl. “But now you must excuse me. I am sure Bella’s already told you that you had better keep to this part of the building. The Adderhead is spending more and more of his silver on informers. No place in Argenta is safe from them, not even this one.”

“I know.” Dustfinger picked up one of the books lying on the Barn Owl’s table. It was an herbal.

Meggie could imagine how Elinor would have looked at it – full of longing to own it – and Mo would have run a finger over the painted pages as if he could feel the brush that had conjured up the fine lines of the pictures on paper. But what was Dustfinger thinking of? The herbs in Roxane’s fields? “Believe me, I wouldn’t have come here but for what happened at the mill,” he said. “No one would want to bring danger to this place, but we’ll be gone again this very day.”

However, the Barn Owl wouldn’t hear of it. “Nonsense, you must stay until your leg and the boy’s fingers are better,” he said. “You know how glad I am you came. And I’m glad you have the boy with you, too. Did you know,” he asked, turning to Farid, “he’s never had a pupil before? I was always telling him that a master must pass on his art, but he wouldn’t listen to me. I pass mine on to many, and that’s why I must leave you now. I have to show a pupil how to cut off a foot without killing the man it’s attached to.”

Farid stared at him, horrified. “Cut it off?” he whispered.

“How do you mean, cut it off?” But the Barn Owl had already closed the door behind him.

“Didn’t I tell you?” said Dustfinger, feeling his injured thigh. “The Barn Owl is a first-class sawbones. But I think we’ll be allowed to keep our own fingers and feet.”

After Bella had treated Farid’s blisters and Dustfinger’s leg, she took them to a remote room, close to the door through which they had entered the building. Meggie liked the prospect of sleeping under a roof again, but Farid was not at all comfortable with the idea. Looking unhappy, he squatted on the lavender strewn floor, chewing one of the bitter leaves with determination.

“Can’t we sleep on the beach tonight? I should think the sand would be nice and soft,” he asked Dustfinger, who was stretching out on one of the straw mattresses. “Or in the forest?”

“If you like,” replied Dustfinger. “But let me sleep now. And stop looking as if I’d brought you among cannibals, or I won’t show you what I promised tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow?” Farid spat out the leaf into his hand. “Why not tonight?”

“Because it’s too windy now,” said Dustfinger, turning his back on him, “and because my damn leg hurts. . Do you need any more reasons?”

Remorsefully, Farid shook his head, put the leaf back in his mouth, and stared at the door as if Death in person might walk in any moment. But Meggie just sat there in the bare room, repeating to herself, over and over, what the Barn Owl had said about Mo: He’s doing well – much better, anyway, than we let the Adderhead know. . At the moment there really is nothing for you to worry about.

When twilight fell, Dustfinger limped outside. He leaned against a column and looked up at the 268

 

hill where the Castle of Night stood. Never moving, he gazed at the silver towers – and Meggie asked herself, for what was surely the hundredth time, if he was helping her only for her mother’s sake. Perhaps Dustfinger himself didn’t know.

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Chapter 54 – In the Dungeon of the Castle of Night

 

They say:

Speak for us (to whom?)

Some say: Avenge us (on whom?)

Some say: Take our place.

Some say: Witness

Others say (and these are women): Be happy for us.

– Margaret Atwood, “Down,” Eating Fire

 

Mina was crying again. Resa took the other woman in her arms as if she were still a child, hummed a tune, and rocked her as she sometimes rocked Meggie, although by now her daughter was almost as tall as Resa herself.

A girl came twice a day, a thin, nervous little thing, younger than Meggie, to bring them bread and water. Sometimes there was porridge, too, cold and sticky, but it filled the stomach and reminded Resa of the days when Mortola had locked her up for something she had or hadn’t done. The porridge had tasted just like this. When she asked the girl about the Bluejay, the child just ducked her head in fright and left Resa in fear – the fear that Mo was dead by now, that they had hanged him, up there in the huge courtyard, and the last thing he had seen in this world was not her face but the silver vipers’ heads with their tongues licking down from the walls.

Sometimes she saw it all so clearly in her mind’s eye that she put her hands over her eyes, but the pictures were still there. And the darkness around her made her think it could all have been a dream: that moment at Capricorn’s festivities when she had suddenly seen Mo standing beside Meggie, the year in Elinor’s house, all that happiness –just a dream.

At least she was not alone. Even if the glances of the others were often hostile, their voices brought her out of her dark thoughts for a brief while. Now and then someone told a story, to keep them from hearing the weeping from the other cells, the scurrying of rats, the screams, the stammering voices that had long since ceased to make sense. Usually, it was the women who told stories. Stories of love and death, betrayal and friendship, but they all ended happily, lights in the darkness, like the candles in Resa’s pocket with wicks that had now become damp. Resa 270

 

told fairy tales that Mo had read aloud to her long, long ago, when Meggie’s fingers were still soft and tiny, and the written word held no terrors for any of them yet. As for the strolling players, they told tales of the world around them: of Cosimo the Fair and his battle with the fire-raisers, of the Black Prince and how he found his bear, and his friend the fire-dancer, the man who made sparks rain down and fiery flowers blossom in the darkest night. Benedicta sang a song about him in a soft voice, a beautiful song, and in the end even Twofingers joined in, until the warder banged his stick against the bars and told them to keep quiet.

“I saw him once,” whispered Benedicta when the warder had gone away again. “Many years ago, when I was a little girl. It was wonderful. The fire was so bright that even my eyes could see it.

They say he’s dead.”

“No, he isn’t,” said Resa quietly. “Who do you think made the tree across the road burn?” They looked at her so incredulously! But she was too tired to tell them any more. She was too tired to explain anything. Let me go to my husband, that was all she wanted to say. Let me go to my child.

Don’t tell me any more stories; tell me how they are. Please.

Someone did at last give her news of Meggie and Mo, but Resa would rather have heard it from any other mouth.

The others were asleep when Mortola came. She had two soldiers with her. Resa was awake, because she was seeing those pictures again, pictures of Mo being brought into the courtyard, having the rope put around his neck . . He’s dead, and she has come to tell me! That was her first thought when the Magpie stood before her with a triumphant smile.

“Well, well, here’s our faithless maid!” said Mortola as Resa got to her feet with difficulty. “You seem to be as much of a witch as your daughter. How have you kept him alive? Perhaps I took aim a little too hastily. Never mind. A few more weeks and he’ll be strong enough for his execution!”

Alive.

Resa turned her head away so that Mortola wouldn’t see the smile that stole over her lips, but the Magpie was not looking at her face. She was enjoying the sight of her torn dress and bleeding, bare feet.

“The Bluejay!” Mortola lowered her voice. “Of course, I haven’t told the Adderhead that he’s going to execute the wrong man – why should I? It’s all working out just as I wanted. And I shall get my hands on your daughter, too.”

Meggie. The sense of happiness that had briefly warmed Resa’s heart disappeared as suddenly as it had come. Beside her, Mina sat up, woken by Mortola’s hoarse voice.

“Oh yes, I have powerful friends in this world,” continued the Magpie, with a self-satisfied smile.

“The Adderhead has caught me your husband, why wouldn’t he catch me your witch of a daughter, too? Do you know how I’ve convinced him that she’s a witch? By showing him a photograph of her. Yes, Resa, I let Basta take the photos of your little darling with him, all those pretty silver-framed photographs standing around the bookworm woman’s house. Of course the Adderhead thinks they’re magic pictures, mirror images captured on paper. His soldiers are afraid to touch them, but they’re showing them around all over the place. A pity we can’t duplicate them as we could in your world! But fortunately your daughter has joined forces with 271

 

Dustfinger, and there’s no need for any magic picture of him. Every peasant has heard of him –

him and his scars.”

“He’ll protect her!” said Resa. She had to say something.

“Oh yes? The way he protected you?”

Resa dug her fingers into the fabric of her dirty dress. There was no one, in either this or the other world, whom she hated as much as the Magpie. Not even Basta. It was Mortola who had taught her how to hate. “Everything is different here,” she managed to say. “Fire obeys him here, and he’s not alone as he was in the other world. He has friends.”

“Friends! Ah, I suppose you mean the other mountebanks: the Black Prince, as he calls himself, and the rest of that rabble!” Contemptuously, the Magpie scanned the other prisoners. They had almost all woken up. “Look at them, Resa!” said Mortola spitefully. “How are they going to help you out of here? With a few brightly colored balls or a couple of sentimental songs? One of them gave you away, did you know that? And as for Dustfinger, what could he do? Unleash fire to save you? It would burn you, too, and he certainly won’t risk that, besotted with you as he always was.” She leaned forward with a smile. “Did you ever tell your husband what good friends you two were?”

Resa did not reply. She knew Mortola’s games. She knew them very well.

“What do you think? Shall I tell him?” Mortola whispered, ready to pounce, like a cat waiting by a mouse hole.

“Do that,” Resa whispered back. “Tell him. You can’t tell him anything he doesn’t know already.

I’ve given him back the years you stole from us, word for word, day after day. And Mo knows, too, that your own son made you live in his cellar and let everyone think you were only his housekeeper.”

Mortola tried to hit her in the face, as she had so often done before, as she had done to all her maids – right in the middle of the face – but Resa caught her hand before it landed.

“He’s alive, Mortola!” she whispered to the Magpie. “This story isn’t over yet, and his death isn’t written anywhere in it but my daughter will whisper yours in your ear when she hears what you did to her father. You’ll see one day. And then I shall watch you die.”

This time she didn’t manage to catch Mortola’s hand, and her cheek was still burning long after the Magpie had gone away. She felt the eyes of the other prisoners like fingers feeling her face when she was sitting on the cold ground again. Mina was the first to say something. “Where did you meet the old woman? She mixed poisons for Capricorn.”

“I know,” said Resa tonelessly. “I belonged to her. For many long years.”

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Chapter 55 – A Letter from Fenoglio

Is there then a world

Where I rule absolutely on fate?

A time I bind with chains of signs?

An existence become endless at my bidding?

– Wislawa Szymborska, “The Joy of Writing”, View with a Grain of Sand

 

Dustfinger was asleep when Roxane arrived. It was already growing dark outside. Farid and Meggie had gone out to the beach, but he was lying down because his leg was hurting. When he saw Roxane standing in the doorway he thought at first his imagination was playing tricks on him, as it so often did by night. After all, he had once been here with her, very long ago. The room they had then had looked almost the same, and he had been lying on a straw mattress just like this, his face slashed and sticky with his own blood.

Roxane was wearing her hair loose. Perhaps that was why she woke the memory of that other night. His heart always seemed to miss a beat at the mere thought of it. He had been mad with pain and fear, had crawled away like a wounded animal, until Roxane found him and brought him here. At first the Barn Owl had hardly recognized him. He had given him something to drink that made him sleep, and when he woke again Roxane had been standing in the doorway, just as she was standing now. When the cuts would not heal, for all the physician’s skill, she had gone into the forest with him, deeper and deeper into the forest to find the fairies – and she had stayed with him until his face was healed well enough for him to venture among other people again. There could be few men whose love for a woman had been written on his face with a knife.

But what was his greeting when she suddenly appeared? “What are you doing here?” he asked.

Then he could have bitten off his tongue. Why didn’t he say how much he had missed her, so much that he had almost turned back a dozen times?

“Yes, indeed, what am I doing here?” Roxane asked back. Once she would have turned her back on him for such a question, but now she just smiled, so mockingly that he felt as awkward as a boy.

“Where have you left Jehan?”

“With a friend.” She kissed him. “What’s the matter with your leg? Fenoglio told me you were wounded.”

“It’s getting better. What do you have to do with Fenoglio?”

“You don’t like him. Why not?” Roxane stroked his face. How beautiful she looked. So very beautiful.

“Let’s just say he had plans for me that I didn’t care for in the least. Has the old man by any chance given you something for Meggie? A letter, for instance?”

Without a word, she brought it out from under her cloak. There the words were – words that wanted to come true. Roxane offered him the sealed parchment, but Dustfinger shook his head.

“You’d better give that to Meggie,” he said. “She’s down on the beach.”

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Roxane glanced at him in surprise. “You look almost as if you were afraid of a piece of parchment.”

“Yes,” said Dustfinger, reaching for her hand. “Yes, I am. Particularly when Fenoglio’s been writing on it. Come on, let’s go and look for Meggie.”

Meggie smiled awkwardly at Roxane when she gave her the parchment and for a moment looked curiously from her to Dustfinger, but then she had eyes only for Fenoglio’s letter. She broke the seal so hastily that she almost tore the parchment. There were three closely written sheets. The first was a letter to her. When she had read it Meggie put it away under her belt, paying it no further attention. The words she had been so eagerly waiting for filled the other two sheets.

Meggie’s eyes traveled over the lines so fast that Dustfinger could hardly believe she was really reading them. Finally, she raised her head, looked up at the Castle of Night – and smiled.

“Well, what does the old devil say?” asked Dustfinger.

Meggie offered him the two sheets. “It’s different from what I expected. Quite different, but it’s good. Here, read it for yourself.”

Gingerly, he took the parchment in his fingertips, as if he might burn himself on it more easily than on a flame. “When did you learn to read?” Roxane’s voice sounded so surprised that he had to smile.

“Meggie’s mother taught me.” Fool; why was he telling her that? Roxane gave Meggie a long look as he labored to decipher Fenoglio’s handwriting. Resa had usually written in capital letters, to make it easier for him.

“It could work, couldn’t it?” Meggie was looking over his shoulder.

The sea roared as if to agree with her. Yes, perhaps it really would work. . Dustfinger followed the written words like a dangerous path. But it was a path, and it led right into the middle of the Adderhead’s heart. However, Dustfinger didn’t like the part the old man intended Meggie to play. After all, her mother had asked him to take care of her.

Farid looked unhappily at the letters. He still couldn’t read. Sometimes Dustfinger felt that he suspected those tiny black signs of witchcraft. What else would he think of them, indeed, after all his experiences? “Come on!” Farid shifted impatiently from foot to foot. “What’s he written?”

“Meggie will have to go to the castle. Straight into the Adder’s nest.”

“What?” Horrified, the boy looked first at him and then at the girl. “But that’s impossible!” He took Meggie by the shoulders and turned her roughly around to face him. “You can’t go there. It’s much too dangerous!”

Poor boy. Of course she would go. “That’s the way Fenoglio has written it,” she said, removing Farid’s hands from her shoulders.

“Leave her alone,” said Dustfinger, giving Meggie the sheets of parchment back. “When are you going to read it aloud?”

“Now.”

Of course. She didn’t want to lose any time, and why should she? The sooner the story took a 274

 

new turn, the better. It could hardly get worse. Or could it?

“What’s all this about?” Roxane looked from one to another of them, baffled. She scrutinized Farid without much friendliness; she still didn’t like him. Dustfinger thought that wouldn’t change until something convinced her that Farid was not his son. “Explain!” she said. “Fenoglio said this letter could save her parents. But what can a letter do for someone in a dungeon in the Castle of Night?”

Dustfinger stroked her hair back. He liked to see her wearing it loose again. “Listen,” he said. “I know it’s difficult to believe, but if anything can open the dungeon doors in the Castle of Night, it’s this letter – and Meggie’s voice. She can make ink live and breathe, Roxane, just as you can bring a song to life. Her father has the same gift. If the Adder head knew that, then I imagine he’d have hanged him long ago. The words that Meggie’s father used to kill Capricorn looked just as harmless as these.”

The way she was looking at him! As incredulously as she used to when he had yet again tried to explain where he had been for weeks on end. “You mean magic, an inkspell?” she whispered.

“No. I mean reading aloud.”

She didn’t understand a word of this, of course, which was not surprising. Perhaps she would if she heard Meggie read, if she saw the words suddenly trembling in the air, if she could smell them, feel them on her skin. .

“I’d like to be alone when I read it,” said Meggie, looking at Farid. Then she turned and went back to the infirmary with Fenoglio’s letter in her hand. Farid wanted to follow her, but Dustfinger detained him.

“Let her!” he said. “Do you think she’ll disappear into the words? That’s nonsense. We’re all up to our necks in the story she’s going to read, anyway. She only wants to make sure the wind changes, and it will – if the old man has written the right words!”

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Chapter 56 – The Wrong Ears

Song lies asleep in everything

That dreams the day and night away, And the whole world itself will sing If once the magic word you say.

– Joseph von Eichendorff, “The Divining Rod”

Roxane brought Meggie an oil lamp before leaving her alone in the room where they would be sleeping. “Written words need light, that’s the awkward thing about them,” she said. “But if these words are really as important as you all say, I can understand that you want to read them alone. I’ve always thought my singing voice sounds best when I’m on my own, too.” She was already in the doorway when she added, “Your mother – do she and Dustfinger know each other well?”

Meggie almost replied: I don’t know. I never asked my mother. But at last she said, “They were friends.” She did not mention the resentment she still felt when she thought of how Dustfinger had known where Resa was, all those years, and hadn’t told Mo. But Roxane asked no more questions, anyway. “If you need any help,” was all she said before she left the room, “you’ll find me with the Barn Owl.”

Meggie waited until her footsteps along the dark corridor had died away. Then she sat down on one of the straw mattresses and put the sheets of parchment on her lap. What would it be like, she couldn’t help thinking as the words lay spread out before her, simply to do it for fun, just once? What would it be like to feel the magic of the words on her tongue when it wasn’t a matter of life or death, good or bad luck? Once, in Elinor’s house, she had been almost unable to resist that temptation, when she had seen a book that she’d loved as a small child – a book with mice in frilly dresses and tiny suits making jam and going for picnics. She had stopped the first word from forming on her lips by closing the book, though, because she’d suddenly seen some dreadful pictures in her mind. One of the dressed-up mice in Elinor’s garden surrounded by its wild relations, who would never in a million years dream of making jam. And an image of a little frilly dress, complete with a gray tail, in the jaws of one of the cats that regularly roamed among Elinor’s rhododendron bushes. Meggie had never brought anything out of the words on the page just for fun, and she wasn’t going to do it this evening, either.

“The whole secret, Meggie,” Mo had once told her, “is in the breathing. It gives your voice strength and fills it with your life. And not just yours. Sometimes it feels as if when you take a breath you are breathing in everything around you, everything that makes up the world and moves it, and then it all flows into the words.” She tried it. She tried to breathe as calmly and deeply as the sea – the sound of the surf came into the room from outside – in and out, in and out, as if she could capture its power in her voice. The oil lamp that Roxane had brought in filled the bare room with warm light, and outside one of the women healers walked softly by.

“I’m just going on with the story!” whispered Meggie. “I’m going on with the story. That’s what it’s waiting for. Come on!”

She pictured the massive figure of the Adderhead pacing sleeplessly up and down in the Castle of Night, never guessing that there was a girl who planned to whisper his name in Death’s ear this very night.

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She took the letter that Fenoglio had written her from her belt. It was as well that Dustfinger hadn’t read it.

Dear Meggie, it said, I hope that what I’m sending won’t disappoint you. It’s odd, but I have found that obviously I can write only what doesn’t contradict anything I wrote about the Inkworld earlier. I have to keep the rules I made myself, even though I often made them unconsciously.

I hope your father is all right. From what I hear he is now a prisoner in the Castle of Night – and I must admit that I am not entirely blameless there. Yes, I admit it. After all, as you will have found out by now, I used him as a living model for the Bluejay. I am sorry, but I really did think it was a good idea at the time. He made an excellent and noble robber in my imagination, and how could I guess that he would ever really come into my story? Well, be that as it may, he’s here, and the Adderhead won’t set him free just because I write a new passage saying so. I didn’t make him that way, Meggie. The story must be true to itself, that’s the only way to do it, so I can only send you these words. At first they may do no more than delay your father’s execution, but I hope they will ultimately lead to his freedom after all. Trust me. I believe the words I enclose are the only possible way of bringing this story to a truly happy ending, and you like stories with happy endings, don’t you?

Go on with my story, Meggie, before it goes on with itself!

I would have liked to bring you the words myself, but I have to keep an eye on Cosimo. I am rather afraid that in his case we made it a little too easy for ourselves. Take care of yourself, give my good wishes to your father when you see him again (which I hope will be soon) and to the boy who worships the ground under your feet, too oh yes, and tell Dustfinger, though I don’t suppose he’ll like it, that his wife is much too beautiful for him.

Love and kisses,

Fenoglio

P.S. Since your father is still alive, I have wondered whether perhaps the words I gave you for him in the forest worked after all? If so, Meggie, then that could be only because I made him. one of my characters, in a way – which would mean that some good came of the whole Bluejay story, don’t you think?

Oh, Fenoglio. What a master he was in the art of turning everything to his own advantage!

A breath of wind came through the window as Meggie reread the letter, making the sheets of parchment move as if the story itself were impatient and wanted to hear the new words. “Yes, all right. Here I go,” whispered Meggie.

She had not often heard her father read aloud, but she remembered exactly how Mo gave every word the right sound, every single word. .

It was quiet in the room, very quiet. The whole Inkworld every fairy, every tree, even the sea –

seemed to be waiting for her voice. ” Night after night, ” Meggie began, ” the Adderhead could get no rest. His wife slept soundly and deeply. She was his fifth wife, and younger than his three eldest daughters. Her body, pregnant with his child, was a mound under the bedclothes. It must be a boy this time; she had already borne him two daughters. If this child was another girl he would disown her, just as he had repudiated his other wives. He would send her back to her father or to some lonely castle in the mountains.

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Why could she sleep, although she feared him, while he paced up and down the magnificent bedchamber like an old dancing bear in its cage?

Because he alone felt the truly great fear. The fear of Death. Death waited outside the windows, outside the glass panes paid for by selling his strongest peasants. Death pressed its ugly face against them as soon as darkness swallowed up his castle like a snake swallowing a mouse. He had more torches lit every night, more candles, yet still the fear came – to make him shake and fall on his knees because they trembled so much, to show him his future: the flesh falling from his bones, the worms eating him, the White Women leading him away. The Adderhead pressed his hands to his mouth so that the guards outside the door would not hear him sobbing. Fear. Fear of the end of all his days, fear of the void, fear, fear, fear. Fear that Death was already in his body somewhere, invisible, growing and flourishing and eating him away – the one enemy he could never defeat, never burn or stab or hang, the one enemy from whom there was no escaping.

One night, blacker and more endless than any that had gone before, the fear was particularly terrible, and he had them all woken, as he quite often did, all who were sleeping peacefully in their beds instead of trembling and sweating like him: his wife, the useless physicians, the petitioners, scribes, administrators, his herald, the silver-nosed minstrel. He had the cooks driven into the kitchen to prepare him a banquet, but as he was sitting at his table, his fingers dripping with fat from the freshly roasted meat, a girl came to the Castle of Night. She walked fearlessly past the guards and offered him a deal: a bargain with Death.

That was how it would be. Because she was reading it. How the words made their way out through Meggie’s lips. As if they were weaving the future. Every sound, every character a thread. . Meggie forgot everything around her: the infirmary, the straw mattress she was sitting on, even Farid and his unhappy face as he watched her go. She went on spinning Fenoglio’s story; that was why she was here, spinning it out of threads of sound with her breath and her voice – to save her father and her mother. And this whole strange world that had enchanted her.

When Meggie heard the agitated voices she thought at first that they were coming out of the words, but they grew louder and louder. Reluctantly, she raised her head. She hadn’t read it all yet. There were still a few sentences waiting, waiting for her to teach them to breathe. Look at the words on the page, Meggie, she told herself. Concentrate!

She gave a start when a dull knocking resounded through the infirmary. The voices grew louder, she heard hasty footsteps, and Roxane appeared in the doorway. “They’ve come from the Castle of Night!” she whispered. “They have a picture of you, a strange picture. Quick, come with me!”

Meggie tried to put the parchment in her sleeve until she could read those last few sentences, but then thought better of it and pushed it down the neck of her dress. She hoped it would not show under the firm fabric. She could still taste the words on her tongue, she still saw herself standing before the Adderhead just as she had read it, but Roxane reached for her hand and pulled her along. A woman’s voice came down the colonnade, Bella’s voice, and then the voice of a man, loud and commanding. Roxane did not let Meggie’s hand go but led her on, past the doors behind which the patients slept or else lay awake listening to their own heavy breathing.

The Barn Owl’s room was empty. Roxane took Meggie in with her, bolted the door, and looked around. The window was barred, and the steps were coming closer. Meggie thought she heard the Barn Owl’s voice, and another voice, rough and threatening. Then, suddenly, there was silence. They had stopped outside the door. Roxane put her arm around Meggie’s shoulders.

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“They’re going to take you with them!” she whispered as the Barn Owl talked to the intruders on the other side of the door. “We’ll send word to the Black Prince. He has spies in the castle. We’ll try to help you, understand?”

Meggie just nodded.

Someone was hammering on the door. “Open up, little witch, or do we have to come and get you?”

Books, books everywhere. Meggie retreated among the stacks of volumes. There wasn’t a single book here she could have gone to for help, even if she’d wanted to. The knowledge in them could give her no aid. She’d have needed a story for that, but she remembered looking for a suitable story in vain in Capricorn’s house. She glanced at Roxane in search of help – and saw the same helplessness on Roxane’s face, too.

What would happen if they took her away with them? So many sentences were still unread.

Meggie tried desperately to remember just where she had been interrupted. .

More hammering on the door. The wood groaned; it would soon splinter and break. Meggie went to the door, pushed back the bolt, and opened it. She couldn’t count the soldiers standing out in the narrow corridor, but there were a great many of them. They were led by Firefox; Meggie recognized him in spite of the scarf he had tied over his mouth and nose. They all had such scarves wound around their faces, and their eyes above the cloth were terrified. I hope you’ve all caught the plague here, thought Meggie. I hope you die like flies. The soldier beside Firefox stumbled back as if he had heard her thoughts, but it was Meggie’s face that frightened him.

“Witch!” he exclaimed, staring at what Firefox held in his hand. Meggie recognized the narrow silver frame at once. It was her photograph, from Elinor’s library.

A murmur arose among the men-at-arms. But Firefox put his hand roughly under her chin, making her turn her face to him. “I thought so. You’re the girl from the stable,” he said. “I’ll admit you didn’t look to me like a witch there!” Meggie tried to turn her head away, but Firefox’s hand did not let go. “Well done!” he said to a girl who was standing among the men-at-arms looking lost. Her feet were bare, and she wore the same plain tunic as all the women who worked in the infirmary. Carla, wasn’t that her name?

She bent her head and looked at the piece of silver that the soldier pressed into her hand as if she’d never seen such a beautiful, shiny coin before. “He said I’d get work,” she whispered almost inaudibly. “In the castle kitchen. The minstrel with the silver nose said so.”

Firefox shrugged scornfully. “You’ve come to the wrong man here,” he said, turning his back to her heedlessly. “And this time I’m to take you, too, sawbones,” he said to the Barn Owl. “You’ve let the wrong sort of visitors through your gate once too often. I told the Adderhead it was high time to light a fire here, a great fire. I can still do that kind of thing extremely well, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Someone’s told him his death will come out of a fire. Since then he won’t let us light anything but candles.” There was no missing his contempt for his master’s weakness.

The Barn Owl looked at Meggie. I’m sorry, said his eyes. And she read a question in them, too: Where’s Dustfinger?’Yes, where?

“Let me go with her.” Roxane went up to Meggie and tried to put an arm around her shoulders again, but Firefox pushed her roughly back.

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“Only the girl in the witch picture,” he said, “and the physician.”

Roxane, Bella, and a few of the other women followed them to the gate leading out to the sea.

The surf shone in the moonlight, and the beach lay there deserted, except for a few footprints that no one, luckily, examined closely. The soldiers had brought horses for their prisoners.

Meggie’s laid its ears back when one of the soldiers put her on its back. Only when it was trotting toward the mountains with her did she dare to look surreptitiously around. But there was no sign of Dustfinger and Farid. Except for the footprints in the sand.

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Chapter 57 – Fire and Water

And what is word knowledge but a shadow of wordless knowledge?

– Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

 

All was quiet behind the walls of the infirmary when L. Dustfinger gestured to Farid to come out from among the trees. No weeping, no cursing the men who had come from the Castle of Night.

Most of the women had gone back to the sick and dying. Only Roxane still stood on the beach, looking at the path the soldiers had taken.

She went to Dustfinger, her footsteps weary.

“I’ll go after them!” stammered Farid beside him, his fists clenched. “At least there’s no missing that accursed castle!”

“What do you think you’re talking about, damn it?” Dustfinger snapped at him. “Do you believe you can just walk through the gates? That is the Castle of Night, where they stick chopped-off heads on the battlements.”

Farid ducked his head and stared up at the silver towers. They rose to the sky as if to impale the stars.

“But. . but Meggie,” he stammered.

“Yes, all right, we’ll follow her,” said Dustfinger, irritation in his voice. “My leg’s already looking forward to the climb. But we’re not stumbling off just like that. You have something to learn yet.”

The relief in the boy’s face when he looked at him – as if he were delighted at the prospect of creeping into the Adder’s nest!

Dustfinger could only shake his head at such idiocy.

“Something to learn? What?”

“What I was going to show you anyway.” Dustfinger went toward the water. He wished his leg would hurry up and heal.

Roxane followed him. “You two are going after them? What are you talking about?” Fear and rage were mingled on her face as she came between him and the boy. “You can’t go to the castle!

There’s no more you can do! Either for the girl, or for the Barn Owl, or for any of the others. Your wonderful letter came to nothing, nothing at all!”

“We’ll see,” was all Dustfinger would reply. “It depends whether Meggie read it out loud, and if so, how far she got.”

He tried to move her aside, but Roxane pushed his hands away. “Let’s send a message to the Black Prince!” There was desperation in her voice. “Have you forgotten all the fire-raisers up there at the castle? You’ll be dead before the sun rises! What about Basta? What about Firefox and the Piper? Someone is bound to recognize your face!”

“Who says I’m going to show my face?” he replied.

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Roxane flinched back. She cast Farid such a hostile glance that the boy turned away. “But that’s our secret. You’ve never shown anyone but me before. And you yourself said you’re the only one who can do it!”

“The boy will be able to do it, too!”

The sand crunched under his feet as he walked toward the waves. He did not stop until the surf was washing around his boots.

“What’s she talking about?” asked Farid. “What are you going to show me? Is it very difficult?”

Dustfinger looked around. Roxane was walking slowly back to the infirmary. She disappeared behind the plain wooden gate without once turning.

“What is it?” Impatiently, Farid tugged at his sleeve. “Tell me.”

Dustfinger turned his back to him. “Fire and water,” he said, “don’t really mix. You could say they’re incompatible. But when they do love each other, they love passionately.”

It was a long time since he had last spoken the words he now whispered. But the fire understood. A flame licked up between the wet pebbles that the sea had washed up on the sand.

Dustfinger bent and enticed it into the hollow of his hand as if it were a young bird, whispered, told it what he wanted, promised it a nocturnal game such as it had never played before . . and when it answered, crackling, flaring up, so hot that it burned his skin, he threw it into the foaming sea, fingers outstretched as if he still held the fire on invisible strings. The water snapped at the flame like a fish snapping at a fly, but the fire only burned brighter, while Dustfinger, standing on the shore, spread his arms wide.

Hissing and flaring, the fire imitated him, moving to left and right along the sea wave, farther and farther, until the surf, now rimmed with flames, rolled toward the shore, and a band of fire was washed up at Dustfinger’s feet like a love token. He plunged both hands into the blazing foam, and when he straightened up again he held a fairy fluttering in his fingers, as blue as her forest sisters but surrounded by a fiery luster, and her eyes were as red as the flames from which she was born. Dustfinger held her in his hands like a rare moth, waited for the prickling of his skin, the heat running up his arms as if he suddenly had liquid fire instead of blood in his veins. Not until it had burned its way right up to his armpits did he let the tiny creature fly away, chattering and swearing crossly, as they always did when you lured them to you by making the sea play with fire.

“What’s that?” asked Farid in alarm, looking at Dustfinger’s blackened hands and arms.

Dustfinger took a cloth from his belt and carefully rubbed the soot into his skin. “That,” he said,

“is something that will get us into the castle. But the soot works only if you get it from the fairies for yourself. So it’s your turn now.”

Farid looked at him incredulously. “But I can’t do that!” he stammered. “I don’t know how you did it.”

“Nonsense!” Dustfinger stepped back from the water and sat down on the damp sand. “Of 282

 

course you can do it! Just think of Meggie!”

Undecided, Farid looked up at the castle, while the waves licked his bare toes as if inviting him to play.

“Won’t they see the fire up there?”

“The castle is farther away than it looks. Believe me, your feet will show you that when we start climbing. And if the guards up there do see anything they’ll think it’s lightning, or fire-elves dancing over the water. When did you start thinking so hard before you began to play? All I can say is, if you wait much longer I shall certainly start remembering what a crazy notion going up there is.”

That convinced Farid.

The flame went out three times when he threw it into the breakers. But on the fourth attempt the waves were rimmed with fire for him as he had demanded – perhaps not quite such bright fire as they had made for Dustfinger, but the sea burned for Farid, too. And for the second time that night, fire and water played together.

“Well done,” said Dustfinger, as the boy looked proudly at the soot on his arms. “Spread it well over your chest and legs and face.”

“Why?” Farid looked at him, wide-eyed.

“Because it will make us invisible,” replied Dustfinger, rubbing soot into his own face. “Until sunrise.”

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Chapter 58 – Invisible as the Wind

 

“So sorry, your bloodiness, Mr. Baron, sir,” he said greasily. “My mistake, my mistake – I didn’t see you – of course I didn’t, you’re invisible – forgive old Peevsie his little joke, sir.”

– J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

 

It was an odd feeling, being invisible. Farid felt all-powerful and lost at the same time. As if he were nowhere and everywhere. The worst of it was that he couldn’t see Dustfinger. He had to rely on his hearing. “Dustfinger?” he kept whispering as he followed him through the night, and every time a quiet reply came back: “I’m here, right in front of you.”

The soldiers who had taken Meggie and the Barn Owl with them would have to follow a road – a bad one, almost entirely overgrown in many places – that wound up into the hills, bending and curving. Dustfinger, on the other hand, was making his way across country and up slopes too steep for horses, especially when they had to carry armed riders. Farid tried not to think how much it must be hurting Dustfinger’s leg. Now and then he heard him swearing quietly, and he kept stopping, invisible, nothing but a breathing in the night.

The castle was indeed farther away than it had looked from the beach, but finally its walls towered to the sky right in front of them. By comparison with this fortress, the castle of Ombra seemed to Farid like a toy, built by a prince who liked to eat and drink but had no intention of going to war. In the Castle of Night, every stone seemed to have been set in place with war in mind, and as Farid followed the sound of Dustfinger’s gasping breaths, he pictured to himself, with horror, what it must be like to storm up the steep slope with hot pitch raining down on you from the battlements above and bolts from crossbows flying your way.

Morning was still far off when they reached the castle gate. They still had a few precious hours of invisibility left, but the gate was shut, and Farid felt tears of disappointment fill his eyes. “It’s closed!” he whispered. “They’ve taken them into the castle already! Now what?” Every breath hurt him, they had traveled so fast. But what good did it do them now to be as transparent as glass, as invisible as the wind?

He sensed Dustfinger’s body beside him, warm in the windy night. “Of course it’s closed!” his voice whispered. “What did you expect? Did you think the two of us would overtake them? We wouldn’t have done that even if I wasn’t hobbling like an old woman! But you wait: They’re sure to open the gate for someone else tonight. Even if it’s only one of their informers.”

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“Or maybe we could climb in?” Farid looked up hopefully at the pale gray walls. He saw the guards on the battlements, armed with spears.

“Climb in? You really do seem to be head over heels in love. Can’t you see how smooth and high these walls are? Forget it we’ll wait.”

Six gallows towered in front of them. Dead men hung from four of them. Farid was thankful that in the darkness they just looked like bundles of old clothes. “Damn it!” he heard Dustfinger murmur. “Why doesn’t the fairy venom make your fear go away as well as your body?” The same thing had occurred to Farid, too, but he was not afraid of the guards, Basta, or Firefox. His fear, his terrible fear, was for Meggie. Being invisible only made it worse. There seemed to be nothing left of him but the pain in his heart.

A chilly wind was blowing tonight, and Farid was just breathing on his invisible fingers to warm them when hoofbeats echoed through the dark.

“There, now!” whispered Dustfinger. “Looks like we’re in luck for a change! Remember, whatever happens, we must be out of here before daybreak. The sun will make us visible again almost as fast as you can summon fire.”

The hoofbeats grew louder, and a horseman emerged from the darkness – not in the Adderhead’s pale silver but clothed in red and black. “Well, would you believe it?” whispered Dustfinger. “Sootbird, no less!”

One of the guards called something down from the battlements, and Sootbird replied.

“Come on!” Dustfinger hissed to Farid as the gate swung open, creaking. They followed so close to Sootbird that Farid could have touched his horse’s tail. Traitor, he thought, filthy traitor! He would have liked to drag him down from the saddle, put a knife to his throat, and ask what news he was bringing to the Castle of Night – but Dustfinger thrust him on, through the gigantic gate and into the courtyard. He led Farid onward as Sootbird rode to the castle stables. They were swarming with men-at-arms. Obviously, the Castle of Night was as wakeful as its master was said to be.

“Listen!” whispered Dustfinger, drawing Farid under an arch. “This castle is the size of a city and as full of nooks and crannies as a labyrinth. Mark the way you go with soot. I don’t want to have to search for you later because you’re lost like a child in the forest, understand?”

“But what about Sootbird? He gave away the Secret Camp, didn’t he?”

“Very likely. But forget him for now. Think of Meggie.”

“But he was among the prisoners!” A troop of soldiers marched past them. Farid flinched back in alarm. He still couldn’t believe that they really did not see him.

“So?” Dustfinger’s voice sounded like the wind itself speaking. “It’s the oldest disguise in the world for traitors. Where do you hide your informer? Among your victims. I expect the Piper told him once or twice what a magnificent fire-eater he was, and then they were best friends.

Sootbird’s always had peculiar taste in friends. Well, come on, or we’ll still be standing here when the sun melts our invisibility off us.”

That made Farid instinctively look up at the sky. It was a dark night. Even the moon seemed lost 285

 

in all the blackness, and he could not take his eyes off the silver towers.

“The Adder’s nest!” he whispered – and felt Dustfinger’s invisible hand drawing him on again, none too gently.

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Chapter 59 – The Adderhead

Thoughts of death

Crowd over my happiness

Like dark clouds

Over the silver sickle of the moon.

– Sterling Allen Brown, Poems to Read

 

The Adderhead was at table when Firefox brought Meggie to him. Exactly as she had read it in the story. The hall where he was feasting was so magnificent that the Laughing Prince’s throne room seemed plain as a farmhouse by comparison. The tiles over which Firefox dragged Meggie to his master were strewn with white rose petals. A sea of candles burned in claw footed candelabra, standing between columns covered with silver scales. The light of the candles made them shimmer like snakeskin. Countless servants hurried around between the scaly pillars, soundlessly, heads bent. Maidservants waited in respectful rows for a sign from their master.

They all looked tired, torn from sleep, just as Fenoglio had described it. Some were leaning their backs surreptitiously against the tapestries on the walls.

Beside the Adderhead, at a table that seemed to be laid for a hundred guests, sat a woman as pale as a porcelain doll, with such a childlike face that Meggie would have thought her the Adderhead’s daughter if she didn’t know better. The Silver Prince himself ate greedily, as if by swallowing the food that stood in countless dishes on the table covered with black cloth, he could swallow his own fear, too. But his wife touched nothing. It seemed to Meggie that the sight of her husband eating so greedily nauseated her; she kept passing her ringed hands over her swollen belly. Oddly enough, her pregnancy made her look even more like a child: a child with a thin, bitter mouth and cool eyes.

The silver-nosed Piper stood behind the Adderhead, one foot on a stool, his lute supported on his thigh, singing softly as his fingers slowly plucked the strings. But Meggie’s eyes did not linger on him long. At the end of the table she had seen someone she knew only too well. Her heart faltered like an old woman’s feet when Mortola returned her glance, with a smile so full of triumph that Meggie’s knees began to tremble. The man who had wounded Dustfinger in the mill sat beside Mortola. His hands were bandaged, and above his forehead the fire had burned a pathway into his hair. Basta was in an even worse state. He was sitting close to Mortola, his face so red and swollen that Meggie almost failed to recognize him. But he had escaped death once again. Perhaps the good-luck charms he always wore worked after all.

Firefox clutched Meggie’s arm tightly as he walked toward the Adderhead in his heavy fox-fur cloak – as if to prove that he personally had caught this little bird. He roughly pushed her in front of the table and threw the framed photograph down aimong the dishes.

The Adderhead raised his head and looked at her, with bloodshot eyes in which Meggie could still see the traces of the bad night Fenoglio’s words had given him. When he raised his greasy hand, the Piper fell silent behind him and propped his lute against the wall.

“There she is!” announced Firefox, as his master wiped the grease from his fingers and lips with an embroidered napkin. “I wish we had a witch-picture like this of everyone we’re after. Then the informers wouldn’t keep bringing us the wrong people.”

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The Adderhead had picked up the photograph. Appraisingly, he compared it with Meggie. She tried to bend her head, but Firefox forced up her face.

“Remarkable!” commented the Adderhead. “My best painters couldn’t have produced anywhere near as good a likeness of the girl.” With a bored expression, he reached for a little silver toothpick and prodded his teeth with it. “Mortola says you’re a witch. Is it true?”

“Yes!” replied Meggie, looking him straight in the eye. Now they’d find out whether Fenoglio’s words would come true again. If only she had been able to read to the end! She had read a great deal of it, but she could feel the rest of the words still waiting under her dress. Forget them, Meggie, she told herself. You must make the words you have already read come true – and hope that the Adderhead plays his part just as you do.

“Yes?” repeated the Adderhead. “So you admit it? Don’t you know what I usually do to witches and magicians? I burn them.” The same words. He was speaking Fenoglio’s words. Exactly as Fenoglio had put them into his mouth. Exactly as she had read them out loud in the infirmary a few hours ago.

She knew what she must answer. The words came into her mind of their own accord, as if they were hers and not Fenoglio’s.

Meggie looked at Basta and the other man from the mill. Fenoglio hadn’t written about them personally, but the answer was still right. “The last to burn,” she said calmly, “were your own men. Only one man commands fire in this world, and he’s not you.”

The Adderhead stared at her – watchful as a fat tomcat not yet certain how to play his game most satisfactorily with the mouse he has caught. “Ah,” he said in his heavy, thick voice. “I suppose you mean that fire-dancer. He likes to go around with poachers and footpads. You think he’ll come and try to rescue you, eh? Then, at last, I could feed him to the fire that you claim obeys him so well.”

“I don’t need anyone to rescue me,” replied Meggie. “I would have come to you myself in any case, even if you hadn’t had me brought here.”

There was laughter among the silver columns. The Adderhead leaned across the table and examined her with unconcealed curiosity.

“Well, well!” he said. “Really? Why? To plead with me to let your father go? Because that robber is your father, isn’t he? At least, Mortola says so. She even says we’ve caught your mother, too.”

Mortola! Fenoglio had never thought of her. He hadn’t written a word about her, but there she sat with her magpie gaze. Don’t think about it, Meggie. Be cold. Cold to your very heart, as you were on the night when you summoned the Shadow. But where was she to get the right words from now? Improvise, Meggie, she told herself, like an actress who’s forgotten her lines. Go on!

Make up your own words and then just mix them into the words Fenoglio wrote for you, like an extra spice.

“The Magpie is right,” she replied to the Adderhead. And sure enough, her voice sounded calm and steady, as if her heart wasn’t thudding in her breast like a small, hunted animal. “You took my father captive when she’d almost killed him, and you’re holding my mother prisoner in your dungeons. However, I’m not here to ask for leniency. I have a deal to offer you.”

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“Listen to the little witch!” Basta’s voice shook with hatred. “Why don’t I just slice her up nice and thin, and you can feed her to your dogs?”

However, the Adderhead ignored him. He kept his eyes fixed on Meggie’s face, as if seeking it for what she wasn’t saying. Be like Dustfinger, she told herself. You can never tell what Dustfinger is thinking or feeling from the way he looks. Try! It can’t be all that difficult.

“A deal?” The Adderhead took his wife’s hand, as casually as if he had just found it lying beside his plate by chance. “What do you plan to sell me that I can’t simply take for myself?”

His men laughed. Meggie tried not to notice that her fingers were numb with terror. Once again it was Fenoglio’s words that passed her lips. Words that she had read aloud.

“My father,” she continued, in a carefully controlled voice, “is no robber. He’s a bookbinder and an enchanter. He is the only man alive who doesn’t fear Death. Haven’t you seen his wound?

Didn’t the physicians tell you that injury ought to have killed him? Nothing can kill him. Mortola tried, and did he die? No. He has brought Cosimo the Fair back to life, although the White Women had already delivered him up to Death, and if you let him and my mother go then you need not fear Death, either, for my father,” said Meggie, taking her time over the last few words,

“my father can make you immortal.”

All was very quiet in the great hall.

Until Mortola’s voice broke the silence. “She’s lying!” she cried. “The little witch is lying! Don’t believe a word of it. It’s her tongue, her bewitched tongue. That’s her only weapon. Her father can die, all right, indeed he can! Bring him here and I’ll prove it. I’ll kill him myself before your eyes, and this time I’ll do it properly!”

No! Meggie’s heart began to race as if it would leap out of her breast. What had she done? The Adderhead was staring at her, but when at last he spoke it seemed as if he hadn’t even heard what Mortola had said.

“How?” was all he asked. “How could your father do what you promise?” He was thinking of the night to come now. Meggie saw it in his eyes. He was thinking of the fear waiting for him: It would be even worse than in the night just gone, even more merciless. .

Meggie leaned forward over the laden table. She spoke the words as if she were reading them aloud again. “My father will bind you a book!” she said, so quietly that apart from the Adderhead no one, except perhaps his doll-like wife, could hear her. “He will bind it for you with my help, a book with five hundred blank pages. He will cover it with wood and leather, he will give it brass clasps, and you will write your name on the first page in your own hand. In token of thanks, however, you will let him go, and with him all whose lives he asks for, and you will hide the book in a place known only to you, for hear this: As long as that book exists you will be immortal.

Nothing will be able to kill you, no disease, no weapon – as long as the book remains intact.”

“Indeed!” The Adderhead’s bloodshot eyes were staring at her. His breath smelled sweetish, as if he had been drinking wine that was too heavy. “And suppose someone burns it or tears it up?

Parchment doesn’t last like silver.”

“You will have to take good care of it,” replied Meggie quietly and it will kill you all the same, she added in her thoughts. She felt as if she were hearing her own voice reading Fenoglio’s words again (and how good they had tasted!): But there was that one thing the girl did not tell the 289

 

Adderhead: The book not only made him immortal but could kill him, too, if someone only wrote three words on its white pages, and those words were: heart, spell, death.

“What’s she whispering?” Mortola had risen to her feet. She leaned her bony hands on the table.

“Don’t listen to her!” she told the Adderhead. “She’s a witch and a liar! How often do I have to tell you? Kill her – her and her father – before they kill you! The old man probably wrote all her words for her, the old man I told you about!”

For the first time the Adderhead turned to look at Mortola, and Meggie briefly feared that he might believe her after all. But then she saw the anger in his face. “Be quiet!” he snapped at the Magpie. “Capricorn may have listened to you, but he’s gone, like the Shadow who made him powerful, and you are tolerated at this court only because you have rendered me certain services! But I don’t want to hear any more of your drivel about silver tongues and old men who can bring written words to life. Not another word out of you, or I’ll send you back to where you once came from – in the kitchen with the maids.”

Mortola turned as white as if she had no blood left in her veins. “I warned you!” she said hoarsely. “Don’t forget it!” Then, stony-faced, she sat down again. Basta cast her an anxious glance, but Mortola took no notice of him. She just stared at Meggie with such venom that she felt those eyes were burning a hole in her face.

The Adderhead, however, speared one of the tiny roasted birds lying on a silver platter in front of him with his knife and put it between his lips with relish. Obviously, his angry exchange with Mortola had given him an appetite. “Did I understand you correctly? You yourself would help your father with the work?” he asked, as he spat out the little bones into the hand of a servant who hastily stepped forward. “Does that mean he has taught a daughter his craft, as a master craftsman usually teaches his sons? Surely you know that such a thing is forbidden in my realm?”

Meggie looked at him fearlessly. Even these words had been written by Fenoglio, every one of them, and she knew what the Adderhead was going to say next, because she had read that, too.

“If a craftsman of Argenta breaks that law, my pretty child,” he went on, “I usually have his right hand chopped off. But, very well, I’ll make an exception in your case, since it’s to my own advantage.”

He’s going to do it, thought Meggie. He’s going to let me see Mo just as Fenoglio planned.

Happiness emboldened her. “My mother,” she said, although Fenoglio had not written anything about that, “she could help, too. Then it would be done even faster.”

“No, no!” The Adderhead smiled with delight, as if the disappointment in Meggie’s eyes tasted better than all the delicacies on silver dishes before him. “Your mother stays in her dungeon, as a little incentive for the two of you to work quickly.” He signaled impatiently to Firefox. “What are you waiting for? Take her to her father! And tell the librarian to set to work this very night, to provide everything a bookbinder needs for his work.”

“Take her to her father?” Firefox gripped Meggie’s arm, but he did not take a step. “You surely don’t believe her witchy nonsense?”

Meggie almost forgot to breathe. She had not read these words aloud; not one of them was written by Fenoglio. What would happen now? Not a foot moved in the hall; even the servants 290

 

stood still exactly where they were, and you could feel the silence. But Firefox went on. “A book to hold Death captive in its pages? Only a child would believe such a story, and this child has thought it up to save her father. Mortola’s right. Hang him now, before we become the laughingstock of the peasants! Capricorn would have done it long ago.”

“Capricorn?” The Adderhead spat out the name like one of the delicate bones he had spat into the servant’s hand. He did not look at Firefox as he spoke, but his thick fingers clenched into a fist on the table. “Since Mortola came back I’ve heard that name very often. But as far as I know Capricorn is dead – even his personal witch and poisoner couldn’t prevent that – and you, Firefox, have obviously forgotten who your new master is. I am the Adderhead! My family has ruled this land for more than seven generations, while your old master was only the bastard son of a soot-blackened smith! You were a fire-raiser, a murderer, no more, and I’ve made you my herald. A little more gratitude is called for, I think, or do you want to look for a new master?”

Firefox’s face turned almost as red as his hair. “No, Your Grace,” he said almost inaudibly. “No, I don’t.”

“Good!” The Adderhead impaled another bird on his knife. They were waiting in their silver dish, piled up like chestnuts. “Then do as I said. Take the girl to her father and make sure he soon sets to work. Have you brought that physician, as I ordered? The Barn Owl?”

Firefox nodded, without looking at his master.

“Good. Let him visit her father to tend him twice a day. We want our prisoner to be fit and well, understand?”

“I understand,” said Firefox hoarsely.

He looked neither to right nor left as he led Meggie out of the hall. All eyes followed her – and avoided her own eyes when they met theirs. Witch. That was what they had called her before, back in Capricorn’s village. Perhaps it was true. At that moment she felt powerful, as powerful as if the whole Inkworld obeyed her voice. They are taking me to Mo, she thought. They are taking me to him, and that will be the beginning of the end for the Adderhead.

But when the servants had closed the doors of the hall behind them, a soldier barred Firefox’s way.

“Mortola has a message for you,” he said. “You’re to search the girl for a sheet of paper or anything else with writing on it. She says you should look in her sleeves first. She hid something there once before.”

Before Meggie fully realized what was happening, Firefox took hold of her and roughly pushed up her sleeves. Finding nothing there, he was about to put his hands inside her dress, but Meggie pushed them away and took out the parchment herself. Firefox tore it from her fingers, stared at the written letters for a moment with the baffled look of a man who couldn’t read, and then, without a word, handed the parchment to the soldier.

Meggie felt dizzy with fear as he led her on. Suppose Mortola showed the letter to the Adderhead? Suppose, suppose .. ?

“Get moving!” growled Firefox, pushing her up a flight of stairs. As if numbed, Meggie stumbled up the steep steps. Fenoglio, she thought, Fenoglio, help me. Mortola knows about our plan.

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“Stop!” Firefox brutally grabbed her by the hair. Four men-at-arms were on guard outside a door with three bolts over it. A nod of the head from Firefox told them to open it.

Mo, thought Meggie. They really are taking me to him. And that thought extinguished any others.

Even thoughts of Mortola.

292

Chapter 60 – Fire on the Wall

Lo, on the whiteness of the wall,

Behold, appeared a human hand,

Which wrote and wrote, in letters tall,

A fiery message for the land.

– Heinrich Heine, “Belshazzar”

 

All was quiet in the wide, dark corridors as Dustfinger and Farid stole into the Castle of Night.

Only wax dripped from a thousand candles on the stone flags that all bore the Adderhead’s coat of arms. Servants hurried past them in soft-soled shoes, and maids scuttled by with bent heads.

Guards stood in endless passages and outside doorways so high that they seemed to have been made for giants, not ordinary humans. Every one of them bore the emblematic creature of the Adderhead – the snake striking at its prey – in scales of silver, and huge mirrors hung beside the doors. Farid kept stopping in front of them to look into the polished metal and reassure himself that he really was invisible.

Dustfinger made an acorn-sized flame dance on his hand so that the boy could follow him.

Servants were carrying delicious things to eat out of one of the halls they passed. Their aroma reminded Dustfinger painfully of his invisible stomach, and when he pushed his way past the servants as soundlessly as the Adderhead’s snake, he heard them talking in muted tones about a young witch and a deal that was to save the Bluejay from the gallows. Dustfinger, as invisible as their voices, listened to them and did not know which of his emotions was the stronger: relief that Fenoglio’s words were obviously coming true again, or fear of those words and the invisible threads spun by the old man, threads to catch even the Adderhead and make him dream of immortality, although Fenoglio had recorded his death in writing long ago. But had Meggie really read those deadly words before they took her away? “Now what?” Farid whispered. “Did you hear that? They’ve shut up Meggie with Silvertongue in one of the towers! How do I get there?”

His voice was shaking – heavens, what a plague love was! Anyone who claimed otherwise had never yet felt that wretched trembling of the heart.

“Forget it!” Dustfinger whispered to the boy. “The dungeons in the tower have strong doors.

Even invisible you wouldn’t get through them. And the place will be swarming with guards. After all, they still think they’ve caught the Bluejay. You’d do better to steal into the kitchen and listen to the maids and the menservants – you always learn something interesting that way. But be careful! I repeat: Invisible doesn’t mean immortal.”

“How about you?”

“I’m going to venture down to the dungeons under the castle, where the less valuable prisoners are held, to find the Barn Owl and Meggie’s mother. See that fat marble statue there? Must be some ancestor of the Adderhead. We’ll meet there. And don’t even think of following me! Farid?”

But the boy had already gone. Dustfinger suppressed a soft curse. He just hoped no one heard the boy’s lovesick heart thudding!

It was a long, dark way to the dungeons. One of the women healers who worked for the Barn Owl had told him where the entrance lay. None of the guards he passed even turned their heads as Dustfinger slipped by them. Two were lounging around at the mouth of the damp corridor, lit 293

 

only by a single torch, with the door to the dungeons at the end of it. Beyond that door the way went on down, down into the deadly entrails of the Castle of Night, which digested human beings like a stony stomach, now and then excreting a few dead bodies. There was another snake on the door that no one ever wished to enter, but here the silver adder was coiled around a skull.

The guards were quarreling – it was something to do with Firefox – but Dustfinger had no time to eavesdrop. He was only glad that all their attention was on each other as he slipped past. The door creaked slightly when he opened it, just wide enough to get through – his heart almost stopped as he did it – but the guards didn’t turn around. What wouldn’t he give for a fearless heart like Farid’s, even if it made you reckless! It was so dark beyond the door that, for a moment, he had to summon fire before his invisible feet made their way down the steps, and just in time. They were steep and well trodden, worn away by the people whom the dungeons had swallowed up. Fear and desperation rose to greet him like vapors from the depths. The steps were said to lead as far down under the hill as the castle towers rose to the sky above it, but Dustfinger had never met anyone who could confirm this tale. Of those he had known who were taken down here, he had never seen a single one alive again.

Dustfinger, Dustfinger, he thought before starting on the downward climb, this is a dangerous path to take just to pass the time of day with two old friends, and your visit won’t even do them much good. However, he had run after the Barn Owl for years just as Farid was now running after him, and as for Resa perhaps he recalled her name last to convince himself that he was certainly not climbing down this damned stairway on her account.

Unfortunately, even invisible feet make sounds, but luckily he only met guards once. Three warders passed him at such close quarters that he could smell the garlic on their breath, and he only just managed to press close to the wall in time to stop the fattest of them from bumping into him. During the rest of the dark downward climb, he met no one. There was a torch burning every few feet along the rough-hewn walls, so different from the finely chiseled masonry in the castle above. Dustfinger twice passed a room where more guards were sitting, but they never even raised their heads as he stole by, more quietly than a breath of air and equally invisible.

When the stairs finally came to an end, he almost collided with a warder pacing up and down a candlelit corridor with a bored expression on his face. Soundlessly, he slipped past the man. He peered into dungeons scarcely larger than holes, too low for anyone to stand up in. Others were large enough to take fifty men. It would certainly be easy simply to forget a prisoner down here, and Dustfinger’s heart contracted as he imagined how Resa must be feeling in this darkness. She had been a prisoner before, for so many years, and after that her freedom had lasted barely a year.

He heard voices, and followed them along another corridor until they grew louder. A small, bald-headed man came toward him. He passed so close that Dustfinger held his breath but the man didn’t notice him, just muttered something about stupid women and disappeared around the corner. Dustfinger pressed his back against the damp wall and listened. Someone was weeping –

a woman, and someone else was speaking soothingly to her. There was only one cell at the end of the corridor: a dark, barred cavern with a torch burning beside it. How was he to get past those damned bars? He went close to them. There sat Resa, stroking another woman’s hair to comfort her, while Twofingers sat beside them playing a sad tune on a little flute. No one could have done it half as well with all ten fingers as he did with seven. Dustfinger didn’t know the others: neither the women with Resa nor the other men. There was no sign of the Barn Owl.

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Where had they taken him? Had he perhaps been imprisoned with Silvertongue?

He looked around, listened. Somewhere a man laughed, probably one of the warders.

Dustfinger held a finger in the burning torch, whispered fire-words until a flame leaped from his fingertip like a sparrow picking up crumbs. When he had first shown Farid how to write his name on a wall in fire, the boy’s black eyes had almost popped out of his head. Yet it was perfectly easy. Dustfinger put his hand between the bars and passed his finger over the rough stone. Resa, he wrote, and saw Twofingers lower his flute and stare at the burning letters. Resa turned. Heavens, how sad she looked! He should have come sooner. A good thing her daughter couldn’t see her like this.

She rose, took a step toward her name, and hesitated. Still with his finger, Dustfinger drew a fiery line like an arrow pointing his way. She came close to the bars and stared at the empty air, incredulous and baffled.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You won’t see my face today, but it’s still as scarred as ever.”

“Dustfinger?” She reached into the air, and his invisible fingers took her hand. She was actually speaking! The Black Prince had told him she could speak again, but he hadn’t believed him.

“What a beautiful voice!” he whispered. “I always imagined it would be something like that.

When did you get it back?”

“When Mortola shot Mo.”

Twofingers was still staring at her. The woman Resa had been comforting turned to them, too.

Just so long as they didn’t say anything ..

“How are you?” she whispered. “How is Meggie?”

“Well. Better off than you, for sure. She and the writer got together to change this story for the better.”

Resa was clinging to the bars with one hand and to his own hand with the other. “Where is she now?”

“Probably with her father.” He saw the horror in her face. “Yes, I know, he’s up in the tower, but that’s what she wanted. It’s all part of the plan Fenoglio has thought up.”

“How is he? How’s Mo?”

Jealousy still gave him a pang. The heart was a stupid thing. “Said to be better, and thanks to Meggie he’s not going to be hanged for the time being, so don’t look so sad. Your daughter and Fenoglio have thought of a very clever way to save him. Him, and you, and all the others. . ”

Steps approached. Dustfinger let go of Resa’s hand and moved back, but the footsteps went past and away again.

“Are you still there?” Her eyes searched the darkness.

“Yes.” He took hold of her fingers once more. “We only ever seem to meet in dungeons now! How long does it take your husband to bind a book?”

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“Bind a book?”

He heard footsteps again, but this time the sound died away more quickly.

“Yes. It’s a crazy story, but since Fenoglio has written it and your daughter has read it, no doubt it will come true.”

She put her other hand through the bars until her fingers met his face. “You really are invisible!

How do you do it?” She sounded as curious as a little girl. She was curious about everything she didn’t know. He had always liked that in her.

“Only an old fairy trick!” Her fingers stroked his scarred cheek. Why can’t you help her, Dustfinger? he thought. She’ll go mad down here! Suppose he struck one of the warders down?

But there was still that endless staircase to climb, and after it the castle, the wide courtyard, the bare hilltop – nowhere to hide her, no tree to conceal her. Only stones and soldiers.

“What about your wife?” Her voice was beautiful. “Did you find her?”

“Yes.”

“What did you tell her?”

“About what?”

“The time you were away.”

“Nothing.”

“I’ve told Mo everything.”

Yes, no doubt she had. “Well, Silvertongue knows what you’re talking about, but I don’t think Roxane would have believed me, do you?”

“No, probably not.” For a moment she bent her head as if she were remembering – remembering the time he couldn’t tell Roxane about. “The Black Prince told me you have a daughter, too,” she whispered. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about her?”

Twofingers and the woman with the tearstained face were still staring at them. With luck they believed by now that they had imagined the fiery letters. There was only a faint trace of soot left on the wall, and it was not unusual, after all, for people to begin talking to the empty air in dungeons.

“I had two daughters.” Dustfinger jumped as someone screamed somewhere. “The elder is around Meggie’s age, but she’s angry with me. She wants to know where I was for those ten years. Perhaps you know a pretty story I can tell her?”

“What about the other one?”

“She’s dead.”

Resa just pressed his hand. “I’m sorry.”

“Yes. So am I.” He turned. One of the warders was standing at the end of the corridor. He called 296

 

something to another warder, and then walked on, looking sullen.

“Three weeks, maybe four!” Resa whispered. “That’s how long Mo would need, depending on the thickness of the book.”

“Good, then that’s not so bad.” He put his hand through the bars and stroked her hair. “A couple of weeks are nothing to all those years in Capricorn’s house, Resa! Remember that every time you feel like beating your head against these bars. Promise me.”

She nodded. “Tell Meggie I’m well!” she whispered. “And tell Mo, too, please. You’ll be talking to him as well, won’t you?”

“Yes, of course!” lied Dustfinger. What harm did it do to promise her that? For what else could he do to help her? The other woman began sobbing again. Her weeping echoed back from the moldering walls, louder and louder.

“Damn it all, shut your gob there!”

Dustfinger pressed close to the wall as the warder approached. He was a fat fellow, a hulk of a man, and Dustfinger held his breath as he stopped right beside him. For a terrible moment Twofingers was staring straight at Dustfinger as if he could see him, but then his eyes moved on, searching the darkness, perhaps for more fiery letters on the wall.

“Don’t cry!” Resa tried to calm the woman as the warder struck the bars with his stick.

Dustfinger could hardly find a corner to retreat into. The weeping woman buried her face in Resa’s skirt, and the warder turned with a grunt and trudged away again. Dustfinger waited until the sound of his footsteps had died away before returning to the bars. Resa was kneeling beside the woman, whose face was still buried in her dress, and talking to her softly.

“Resa!” he whispered. “I must go. Did they bring an old man down here tonight? A physician, he calls himself the Barn Owl.”

She came back to the bars. “No,” she whispered, “but the warders were talking about a physician they’ve arrested. He has to treat all the sick people in the castle before they shut him up with us.”

“That’ll be him. Give him my greetings.” It was hard for him to leave her alone in the dark like this. He would have liked to free her from her cage, just as he set fairies free in marketplaces, but Resa wouldn’t be able to fly away.

At the foot of the stairs, two warders were joking about the hangman whose work Firefox was only too keen to take over. Dustfinger slipped past them, quick as a lizard, but all the same one of them turned his way with a confused expression. Perhaps the smell of fire that Dustfinger wore like a second coat had risen to his nostrils.

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Chapter 61 – In the Tower of the Castle of Night

You never came out the way you came in.

– Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built

 

Mo was asleep when they brought Meggie to him. It was only the fever that made him sleep, numbing the thoughts that kept him awake hour after hour, day after day, while he listened to his own heartbeat in the draughty cell where they had put him, high in one of the silver towers.

The moon was still shining through the barred windows when the approaching footsteps roused him.

“Wake up, Bluejay!” The light of a torch fell into the cell, and Firefox pushed a slender figure through the door.

Resa? What kind of dream was this? A good one, for a change?

But it was not his wife they had brought. It was his daughter.

With difficulty, Mo sat up. He tasted Meggie’s tears on his face as she hugged him so hard that he drew in his breath sharply with pain.

Meggie. They had caught her, too.

“Mo? Say something!” She took his hand and looked at his face with concern. “How are you?” she whispered.

“Well, fancy that!” mocked Firefox. “The Bluejay really does have a daughter. I expect she’s about to tell you she’s here of her own free will, as she tried to make the Adderhead believe. She’s done a deal with him, and it’s supposed to save your neck. You should have heard the fairy tales she told. You could always sell her and her angel’s tongue to the strolling players.”

Mo didn’t even ask what he was talking about. He drew Meggie close as soon as the guard had bolted the door behind Firefox, kissed her hair, her forehead, took her face between his hands.

He had been so sure that he’d seen that face for the last time in the stable in the forest. “Meggie, for God’s sake,” he said, leaning his back against the cold wall, since he could still hardly stand.

He was so glad to see her there. So glad and so dismayed, too. “How did they catch you?”

“Never mind that. Everything will be all right, believe me!” She put her hand on his shirt where there was still dried blood on it. “You looked so sick in the stable .. I thought I’d never see you again.”

“I thought the same when I found that letter on your pillow.” He stroked the tears off her lashes as he had so often done before over the years. How tall she was, hardly a child anymore, although he could still clearly see the child in her. “Oh, heavens, it’s so good to see you, Meggie. I know I shouldn’t say so. A good father would say: Dear daughter, do you have to get yourself locked up every time I do?”

She had to laugh, but he saw the concern in her eyes. She passed her fingers over his face as if she were finding shadows that hadn’t been there before. Perhaps the White Women had left 298

 

their fingerprints behind, even though they hadn’t taken him away with them.

“Don’t look at me like that! I’m better, much better, and you know why.” He brushed the hair back from her forehead; it was so like her mother’s. The thought of Resa hurt like a sharp thorn.

“Those were powerful words. Did Fenoglio write them for you?”

Meggie nodded. “And he wrote more for me, too,” she whispered in his ear. “Words that will save you. You and Resa and all the others.”

Words. His whole life seemed to be woven from words. His life, and his death, too.

“They took your mother and the others to the dungeons under the castle.” He remembered Fenoglio’s description only too well: The dungeons under the Castle of Night, where fear clung to the walls like mold, and no ray of sun ever warmed the black stones.

“Mo?” Meggie put her hand on his shoulder. “Do you think you can work?”

“Work? Why?” He couldn’t help smiling, for the first time in a long, long while. “Do you think the Adderhead will forget he wants to hang me if I restore his books for him?”

But he didn’t once interrupt as she told him, in a low voice, Fenoglio’s idea for rescuing him. He sat on the straw mattress where he had lain these last few days and nights, counting the notches carved in the walls by other unfortunates, and listened to Meggie.

And the more of the story she told, the crazier Fenoglio’s plan seemed, but when she had finished Mo shook his head and smiled.

“Not a bad idea!” he said quietly. “No, the old fox is no fool, he knows his story.” It’s just a pity that Mortola presumably knows the altered version now, too, he added to himself. And that you were interrupted before you had read it to the end. As so often, Meggie seemed to see what he was thinking from his face. He saw it in her eyes. He stroked the bridge of her nose with his forefinger, as he always used to when she was little, so little that her hand could hardly close around his finger. Little Meggie, big Meggie, brave Meggie ..

“You’re so much braver than I am,” he said. “Bargaining with the Adderhead. I’d really have liked to see that.”

She put her arms around his neck and stroked his tired face. “You will see it, Mo!” she whispered.

“Fenoglio’s words always come true, much more so in this world than in our own. They made you well again, didn’t they?”

He just nodded. If he had said anything, she would have known from his voice that he found it difficult to believe, as she did, in a happy ending. Even when Meggie was younger she had always known at once if he was troubled in some way, but then it had been easy to take her mind off it with a joke, a pun, a story. It wasn’t so simple now. No one could see into Mo’s heart as easily as Meggie, except her mother. Resa had the same way of looking at him.

“I expect you’ve heard why they dragged me here, haven’t you?” he asked. “I’m supposed to be a famous robber. Remember when we used to play Robin Hood?”

Meggie nodded. “You always wanted to be Robin.”

“And you wanted to be the Sheriff of Nottingham. The baddies are stronger, Mo, you kept telling 299

 

me. Clever child. Do you know what they call me? You’ll like it.”

“The Bluejay.” Meggie almost whispered the name.

“Yes, exactly. What do you think? I don’t suppose there’s much hope the real Bluejay will come wanting his name back before my execution, do you?”

How gravely she was looking at him. As if she knew something he didn’t.

“There isn’t any other Bluejay, Mo,” she said quietly. “You are him.” Without another word she took his arm, turned up his sleeve, and let her finger trace the scar that Basta’s dogs had left.

“That wound was just healing when we were in Fenoglio’s house. He gave you an ointment to help the scar tissue form better, remember?”

He didn’t understand. Not a word. “So?”

“You are the Bluejay!” She repeated it. “No one else. Fenoglio wrote the songs about him. He made him up because he thought his world needed a robber – and he used you as his model! He was a noble robber in my imagination, that’s what he wrote to me.”

It was some time before Mo’s mind could take in the meaning of her words. Suddenly, he had to laugh. So loudly that the guard opened the barred flap in the door and stared in suspiciously. Mo wiped the laugh off his face and stared back until the guard disappeared again, cursing. Then he leaned his head against the wall behind him and closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry, Mo,” whispered Meggie. “So sorry. Sometimes Fenoglio is a terrible old man!”

“Well, yes.”

Perhaps that was why Orpheus had found it so easy to read him here. Because he was already in this story, anyway. “What do you think?” he asked. “Do I feel honored, or do I wring Fenoglio’s old neck?”

Meggie put her hand on his forehead. “You’re all hot! Lie down. You must rest.”

How often had he said the same to her; how many nights had he spent sitting beside her bed?

Measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever . . “Lord, Meggie,” he had groaned when she caught whooping cough, too, “can’t you leave out at least one childhood illness?”

The fever was pouring hot lead into his veins, and when Meggie bent over him, he thought for a moment that Resa was sitting beside him. But Meggie’s hair was fairer.

“Where are Dustfinger and Farid? They were with you, weren’t they? Have they been captured, too?” The fever made his tongue heavy.

“No, I don’t think so. Did you know Dustfinger has a wife?”

“Yes, it was because of her that Basta cut his face. Have you met her?”

Meggie nodded. “She’s very beautiful. Farid is jealous of her.”

“Really? I thought he was in love with you.”

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She went red, bright red.

“Meggie?” Mo sat up. When on earth was this fever finally going to go away? It made him as weak as an old man. “Oh no!” he said quietly. “I see I’ve missed something. My daughter falls in love and I fail to notice! One more reason to curse that damned book. You should have stayed with Farid. I’d have been all right.”

“You wouldn’t! They’d have hanged you!”

“They may yet. The boy must be worried out of his mind about you now. Poor fellow. Has he kissed you?”

“Mo!” She turned her face away, embarrassed, but she was smiling.

“I have to know. I think I even have to give my permission, don’t I?”

“Mo, stop it!” She nudged him in the ribs with her elbow, as usual when he was teasing her, and was horrified to see his face twist with pain. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Well, so long as it hurts, I’m still alive.”

The wind carried the sound of horses’ hooves up to them. Weapons clashed, and voices rang through the night.

“I tell you what,” said Mo quietly. “Let’s play our old game. We’ll imagine we’re in another story.

In Hobbiton, maybe, that’s quite a peaceful place, or with Wart and the wild geese. What do you think?”

She did not reply for some time. Then she took his hand and whispered, “I’d like to imagine us in the Wayless Wood together. You and me and Resa. Then I could show you the fairies, and the fire-elves, and the whispering trees, and – no, wait! Balbulus’s workshop! That’s it. I’d like to be there with you. He’s an illuminator, Mo. In the Castle of Sighs in Ombra! The best of all illuminators. You could see his brushes and pigments. . ”

Suddenly, she sounded so excited! She could still forget everything, like a child – she could forget the bolted door and the gallows in the courtyard. The mere thought of a couple of fine paintbrushes would do it. “Very well,” said Mo, stroking her fair hair again. “Anything you say.

Let’s imagine we’re in the castle of Ombra. I really would like to see those brushes.”

301

Chapter 62 – Where To?

 

I dreamt a limitless book,

A book unbound,

Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance

On every line there was a new horizon drawn,

New heavens supposed;

New states, new souls.

– Clive Barker, Abarat

Farid was waiting by the statue, as they had agreed. He had hidden behind it – obviously he still found it hard to believe that he was invisible – and he hadn’t managed to get a sight of Meggie.

Dustfinger could tell from his voice; it was husky with disappointment. “I got into the tower, I even saw the cell, but it’s just too well guarded. And in the kitchen they were saying she’s a witch and she’ll be killed along with her father!”

“Well, what did you expect they’d be talking about? Did you hear anything else?”

“Yes, something about Firefox. They said he’ll send Cosimo back to the dead.”

“Ah. Nothing about the Black Prince?”

“Only that there are people looking for him, but they haven’t found him. They say he and his bear can exchange shapes, so that sometimes the bear is the Prince and the Prince is the bear. And they say he can fly and make himself invisible, and that he’s going to rescue the Bluejay!”

“Really?” Dustfinger laughed quietly. “The Prince will like that. Right, come on. It’s time for us to be off.”

“Be off?” Dustfinger felt Farid’s fingers clutching his arm. “Why? We could hide. The castle’s so big, no one would find us.”

“You think so? What would you do here anyway? Meggie wouldn’t go with you even if you could magic her through locked doors. Have you forgotten the deal she was offering the Adderhead?

Resa says it will take Silvertongue a few weeks to bind a book, and the Adderhead won’t hurt a hair of his head or Meggie’s until he has that book, will he? So come on! It’s time we looked for the Prince. We must tell him about Sootbird.”

Outside, it was still as dark as if morning would never come. This time they slipped through the castle gate together with a troop of men-at-arms. Dustfinger would have liked to know where they were going so late at night. Let’s hope they’re not hunting the Prince, he thought, cursing Sootbird for his treacherous heart.

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The men-at-arms galloped off down the road leading away from Mount Adder into the mountains. Dustfinger was standing there watching them go when something furry suddenly jumped up at him. Taken by surprise, he stumbled into the structure of one of the gallows. Two feet were swinging back and forth above him. But Gwin clung to his arm as naturally as if his master had always been invisible.

“Damn it all!” His heart was in his mouth as he seized the marten. “You’ll be the death of me yet, you little beast, won’t you?” he hissed at him. “Where did you spring from?”

As if in answer, Roxane stepped out of the shadow of the castle walls. “Dustfinger?” she whispered as her eyes searched for his invisible face. Jink appeared behind her and raised his nose, sniffing.

“Yes, who did you think?” He guided her on with him, pressing her close to the wall so that the sentries on the battlements couldn’t see her. This time he didn’t ask why she had followed them.

He was too glad that she was there. Even if the expression on her face reminded him for a moment of Resa and her sadness. “There’s nothing we can do here for the moment,” he whispered. “But did you know that Sootbird is a welcome guest in the Castle of Night?”