Inkspell (48 page)

Farid just nodded. He was staring at the open stable door and smiled with relief when Meggie came out again.

“See that?” she whispered to him when she was back beside Farid. “It was perfectly easy.”

“Good!” said Dustfinger, beckoning Farid over to his side. “Then let’s cross our fingers and hope that what we have to do now is as easy. What about it, Farid? Do you feel like playing with fire?”

The boy carried out his task with as cool a head as Meggie. Apparently lost to the world but in a spot where the men guarding the Prince had a clear view of him, he began making fire dance as naturally as if he were standing in some peaceful marketplace, not in front of an inn that sheltered Firefox and the Piper. The guards nudged each other, laughed, glad of something to pass the time this sleepless night.
Seems that I’m the only one here whose heart is beating faster
, thought Dustfinger, as he stole past heaps of stinking offal and rotting vegetables. It looked as if the fat landlord’s cooks simply threw everything they couldn’t serve to the guests out here behind the house. A few rats scurried off when they heard Dustfinger’s footsteps, and the hungry eyes of a brownie glowed among the bushes. They had tied up the Prince next to a mountain of carcasses, and his bear just far enough away to keep him from reaching the bones. He squatted there, snorting unhappily through his muzzle, which was bound, now and then uttering a miserably muted howl.

The guards had stuck a torch in the ground not far away, but the flame went out at once when the wind carried Dustfinger’s quiet voice to it. Nothing was left but a faint glow – and the Black Prince raised his head. He knew at once who must be slinking around in the dark when the fire so suddenly died down. A few more quick and silent steps, and Dustfinger took cover behind the bear’s furry back.

“That boy’s really good!” whispered the Prince without turning around. A sharp knife would soon deal with the ropes binding him.

“Yes, very good. And afraid of nothing, unlike me.” Dustfinger examined the padlocks on the bear’s chains. They were rusty but not particularly difficult to open. “What do you say to a little walk in the forest? But the bear must be quiet, quiet as an owl. Can he do it?” He ducked when one of the guards turned, but the man had obviously just heard the maid who was coming out of the kitchen to tip a bucket of refuse onto the garbage heaps behind the building. She disappeared again, with a curious look at the bound Prince – and took with her the noise that had come spilling out of the doorway.

“What about the others?”

“Four guards outside the stable, another four told off by Firefox to guard Silvertongue, and there must be ten more guarding the other prisoners. It’s unlikely that we can distract the attention of all of them, certainly not for long enough to get the injured and crippled to safety.”

“Silvertongue?”

“Yes, the man they were looking for in your camp. What do you call him?” A padlock sprang open. The bear growled; perhaps Jink was making him uneasy. The second chain had better stay where it was for now, or he’d probably eat the marten. Dustfinger set about cutting the ropes tying up the Black Prince. He had to hurry, for they must be gone before Farid’s arms tired. The second padlock clicked. Another quick glance at the boy ..
By the fire of the elves!
thought Dustfinger.
He throws the torches almost as high as I do now!
But just as the Prince was throwing off his ropes, a fat man marched up to Farid with a maid and a soldier behind him. He shouted at the boy and pointed indignantly to the flames. Farid just smiled, skipped back while Gwin leaped around his legs, and went on juggling the burning torches. Oh yes, he was as clever as Meggie!

Dustfinger signed to the Prince to go with him. The bear groped his way along after them, following his master’s low voice. A pity he really was only a bear and not a Night-Mare. There’d have been no need to tell one of those to keep quiet. But at least he was black, as black as his master, and the night swallowed them up as if they were a part of it.

“We’ll meet down on the road by the fallen tree.” The Prince nodded and disappeared into the darkness. As for Dustfinger, he set off in search of the boy and Resa’s daughter.

The soldiers were all shouting in confusion in the yard now that it was clear that the Black Prince had escaped; even the Piper had come out of the inn. But neither Farid nor the girl could be seen. The soldiers began searching the outskirts of the forest and the slope behind the house, carrying torches. Dustfinger whispered words into the night until the fire felt sleepy, and torch after torch was extinguished as if the slight breeze had blown them out. The men stopped in the middle of the road, feeling uneasy, and looked around with eyes full of fear – fear of the dark, fear of the bear, fear of everything else that roamed the woods by night.

None of them dared go as far as the place where the fallen tree was blocking the road. The forest and the hills were as quiet as if no human foot had ever trodden there. Gwin was perched on the tree trunk, and Farid and Meggie were waiting on the other side under the trees. The boy had a bleeding lip, and the girl had laid her head wearily against his shoulder. Embarrassed, she straightened up as Dustfinger emerged in front of them.

“Is he free?” asked Farid.

Dustfinger put a hand under his chin and looked at the split lip. “Yes. Whatever happens tomorrow, the Prince and his bear will lend us a hand. How did you do that?” The two martens scurried past him and disappeared into the forest side by side.

“Oh, it’s nothing. One of the soldiers tried to grab me, but I got away. Well, tell me, was I good?”

As if he didn’t know the answer.

“So good that I’m beginning to worry. If you carry on like this I’ll soon be out of a job.”

Farid smiled. How sad Meggie looked, though. She seemed as lost as the child they had found in the looted camp. It wasn’t difficult to imagine how she was feeling, even if, like Dustfinger himself, you had never known your parents. Acrobats, some of the women among the strolling
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players, a traveling physician .. he had had many substitutes for them. Any of the Motley Folk who looked after abandoned children were like their parents.
Well, say something to her,
Dustfinger, anything
, he thought. You often used to cheer up her mother. Though usually it was just for a short time .. stolen time.

“Listen.” He kneeled down in front of Meggie and looked at her. “If we really manage to free some of them tomorrow, the Black Prince will take them to safety – but the three of us will follow the others.”

She looked at him as distrustfully as if he were a worn tightrope that she must walk high in the air.

“Why?” she asked quietly. When she spoke in a low tone you didn’t guess at the power that her voice could exert. “Why do you want to help them?” She didn’t have to spell it out:
Last time you
didn’t. Back in Capricorn’s village.
What could he say? That it was easier to stand by and watch in a strange world than in your own?

“Let’s say I may have something to make up for,” he said at last. He knew he didn’t have to explain what he meant. They both remembered that night, in another tale, when he had betrayed her to Capricorn.
And there’s something else, too
, he almost added,
I think your mother has been a
captive long enough.
But he didn’t say that. He knew that Meggie wouldn’t have liked it.

A good hour later the Black Prince joined them, uninjured and with his bear.

Chapter 44 – The Burning Tree

Do you see the tongues of fire Darting, flickering higher and higher? Do you see the flames
all dancing, Flaring, off the dry wood glancing?

– James Kriiss, “Fire”

Resa’s feet were bleeding. The road was stony and wet with .the morning dew. They all had their hands bound again, except the children. She had been terrified that the soldiers wouldn’t let them walk with the other prisoners but would load them onto the cart instead. “Cry if they try to make you get up there!” she had whispered to the little ones. “Cry and scream until they let you walk with us.” But luckily that hadn’t been necessary. How scared the three children looked –

two girls and a boy, not counting the baby still inside Mina’s belly.

The elder girl, who was just six, was walking between Resa and Mina. Whenever Resa glanced at her she wondered what Meggie had looked like at that age. Mo had shown her photographs, wonderful photographs taken in all the years she herself had missed, but those weren’t her own memories but his. And Meggie’s.

Brave Meggie. Resa’s heart still contracted when she remembered how her daughter had passed her the sheet of paper in the stable. Where was she now? Was she watching them from somewhere in the forest?

Only when the hue and cry over the Black Prince had broken out had she been able to read the note, by the light of the torch left burning overnight in the stable. None of the others could read, so she had been able to pass on Dustfinger’s news to the women sitting near her only in whispers. After that, there had been no chance to tell the men, too, but the ones who could walk would run, anyway. Resa was to look after the children, and they knew what they were to do.

The other girl and the boy were walking between their mother and the woman with claw like fingers who had wanted to take Mo back to Capricorn’s fortress. Resa had said nothing to her about Dustfinger’s news, and every glance the woman cast her said: I was right, too! But Mina smiled when she looked at Resa, Mina with her round belly, who could have thought she had good reason to hate her for what had happened. Perhaps the flowers she gave Resa in the cave really had brought luck. Mo was better, much better – after she had thought for so many endless hours that every breath he drew would be his last. Now that the Prince had escaped, a horse was pulling the cart with Mo on it. The bear had set the Prince free, they whispered, which finally proved that he was indeed a Night-Mare. His ghostly glance had made the chains disappear, and he had turned himself into a human being and cut his master’s bonds. Resa wondered whether that human being had a scarred face.

When all the noise had begun in the night she had been so scared for Dustfinger, Meggie, and the boy, but next morning the fury on the soldiers’ faces told her that they had gotten away. But where was the fallen tree Meggie had mentioned in her note?

The little girl beside her was clinging to her dress. Resa smiled at the child – and sensed the Piper looking down at her from his horse. She quickly turned her head away. Luckily, neither he nor Firefox had recognized her. She had often enough listened to the Piper’s bloodthirsty songs in Capricorn’s fortress – the minstrel still had a human nose on his face in those days – and she had polished Firefox’s boots, but fortunately he had not been one of those who chased her and
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the other maids.

Up above the prisoners’ heads the soldiers were describing, at the tops of their voices, what their master would do to the Black Prince once he’d caught him and his enchanted bear again.

Now that they were on horseback once more their tempers had clearly improved. From time to time the Piper turned in his saddle and contributed some particularly cruel idea. Resa would have liked to put her hands over the ears of the little girl beside her. The child’s mother was not among the prisoners but was wandering the country with some of the other strolling players, happy in the belief that her daughter was safe in the Secret Camp.

The girl would run. So would the other children with their mother. The claw-fingered woman would probably try to escape, too, and Sootbird and most of the other men. The minstrel with the injured leg who was on the cart with Mo would stay, like Twofingers, because he was afraid of the soldiers’ crossbows, and so would the old stilt-walker, who no longer trusted his legs.

Benedicta, who could hardly see where she was going, would stay behind, too, and Mina, whose child would soon be coming into the world .. and Mo.

The road went ever more steeply downhill. Overhead, the branches of the trees were intertwined. It was a still, windless morning, cloudy and damp, but Dustfinger’s fires burned even in rain. Resa peered past the horses. How close together the trees stood, nothing but darkness showing between them even in broad daylight. The plan was for them to run to the left.

Did Meggie expect her to try and escape, too? How often she had asked herself that – and she always came to the same conclusion: No, Meggie knows that I won’t leave her father alone. She loves him just as much.

Resa’s pace slowed. There it was, the fallen tree, its trunk green with moss. The little girl looked up at her, wide-eyed. They had feared that one of the children would talk, but they had been silent as the grave all morning.

Firefox swore when he saw the tree. He reined in his horse and told the first four horsemen to dismount and clear the obstacle out of the way. They obeyed, looking sullen, handed their horses’ reins to other men and strode toward the tree trunk. Resa dared not look at the roadside, for fear that any glance of hers might give away Dustfinger or Meggie. She thought she heard fingers snapping and then a whisper, barely audible. Not human words, but fire-words.

Dustfinger had once spoken them for her in the other world, where they didn’t work, where fire was deaf and dumb. “They sound much better when I say them there,” he had said, and he told her about the fire-honey he took from the elves. She remembered the sound very well, all the same – as if flames were biting their way through black coal, as if they were hungrily devouring white paper. No one else heard the whisper through the rustle of the leaves, the steady rain, the twittering of birds, and the chirping of crickets.

The fire licked up from beneath the bark of the tree like a nest full of snakes. The men didn’t notice. Only when the first flame shot up, hot and greedy, rising so high that it almost brought down the leaves of the trees, did they stumble back in alarm and disbelief. The riderless horses reared and tried to break free as the fire hissed and danced.