Inkspell (5 page)

When twilight fell he looked around for a safe place to sleep. Finally, he climbed up onto a fallen oak with its root-ball towering so high into the air that it offered good shelter for the night. The root-ball was like a great rampart of earth, yet some of the roots still clung to the ground as if unwilling to let go of life. The crown of the fallen tree had put out new shoots, although they now pointed to the ground and not the sky. Dustfinger nimbly clambered along the mighty trunk, digging his fingers into its rough bark.

When he reached the roots, which were now thrusting up into the air as if they could find nourishment there, a few fairies flew up, chattering crossly. They had obviously been looking for
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building materials for their nests. Of course: It would soon be autumn, time for a more weatherproof sleeping place. The blue fairies took no particular trouble over the nests they built in spring, but as soon as the first leaf turned color they began improving them, padding them with animal fur and birds’ feathers, weaving more grass and twigs into the walls, sealing cracks with moss and fairy spit.

Two of the tiny blue creatures didn’t fly away when they saw him. They stared avidly at his sandy hair as the evening light, falling through the treetops, tinged their wings with red.

“Ah, of course!” Dustfinger laughed softly. “You want some of my hair for your nests.” He cut off a lock with his knife. One of the delighted fairies seized the hair in her delicate, insect like hands and fluttered quickly away with it. The other fairy, so tiny that she could only just have hatched from her mother-of-pearl egg, followed her. He had missed those bold little blue creatures, he’d missed them so much.

Down below among the trees, night was falling, but in the light of the setting sun the treetops overhead were turning red as sorrel in a summer meadow. Soon the fairies would be asleep in their nests, the mice and rabbits in their holes and burrows. The cool of the night would make the lizards’ legs stiff, the birds would fall silent, predators would prepare to go hunting, their eyes like yellow lights in the darkness. Let’s hope they don’t fancy a fire-eater for dinner, thought Dustfinger, stretching his legs out on the fallen trunk. He thrust his knife into the cracked bark beside him, wrapped himself in the cloak he hadn’t worn for ten years, and stared up at the leaves. They were growing darker and darker now. An owl rose from an oak and swooped away, little more than a shadow among the branches. A tree whispered in its sleep, words that no human ear could understand.

Dustfinger closed his eyes and listened. He was home again.

Chapter 4 – Silvertongue’s Daughter

Was there only one world after all, which spent its time dreaming of others?

–
Philip Pullman,
The Subtle Knife

Meggie hated quarrelling with Mo. It left her shaking inside, and nothing could comfort her – not a hug from her mother, not the licorice candies Resa’s aunt Elinor gave her if their loud voices had carried to the library, not Darius, who firmly believed in the miraculous healing powers of hot milk and honey in such cases.

Nothing helped.

This time it had been particularly bad, because Mo had really only come to see her to say good-bye. He had a new job waiting, some sick books too old and valuable to be sent to him. In the past Meggie would have gone with him, but this time she had decided to stay with Elinor and her mother.

Why did he have to come to her room just when she was reading the notebooks again? They’d often quarreled over those notebooks recently, although Mo hated a quarrel as much as she did.

Afterward, he usually disappeared into the workshop that Elinor had had built behind the house for him, and a time would come, once Meggie couldn’t bear to be angry with him anymore, when she would follow him there. He never raised his head when she slipped through the doorway, and without a word Meggie would sit down beside him on the chair that was always ready for her and watch him at work, just as she had done even before she could read. She loved watching his hands free a book from its shabby dress, separate stained pages from each other, part the threads holding together a damaged quire, or soak rag paper to mend a sheet of paper worn thin. It was never long before Mo turned and asked her a question of some kind: Did she like the color he’d chosen for a linen binding, did she agree that the paper pulp he’d mixed for repairs had turned out slightly too dark? It was Mo’s way of apologizing, of saying: Don’t let’s quarrel, Meggie; let’s forget what we said just now.

But that was no good today. Because he hadn’t disappeared into his workshop, he’d gone away to see some book collector or other and give the collector’s printed treasures a new lease on life.

This time he wouldn’t come to her with a present to make up for the quarrel – a book he’d found in a second-hand bookshop somewhere, or a bookmark decorated with blue jay feathers found in Elinor’s garden. .

So why couldn’t she have been reading some other book when he came into her room?

“Good heavens, Meggie, you seem to have nothing in your head but those notebooks!” he had said angrily. It had been the same every time, these last few months, whenever he had found her like that in her room – lying on the rug, deaf and blind to all that went on around her, eyes glued to the words with which she had written down what Resa told her – tales of what she had seen

“there,” as Mo bitterly called it.

There.

Inkworld was the name Meggie gave to the place of which Mo spoke so slightingly and her mother sometimes with such longing. Inkworld, after the book about it, Inkheart. The book was gone, but her mother’s memories were as vivid as if not a day had passed since she was there –

in that world of paper and printer’s ink where there were fairies and princes, water-nymphs, fire-elves, and trees that seemed to grow to the sky.

Meggie had sat with her mother for countless days and nights, writing down what Resa’s fingers told her. Resa had left her voice behind in the Inkworld, so she talked to her daughter either with pencil and paper or with her hands, telling the story of those years – those terrible magical years, she called them. Sometimes she also drew what her eyes had seen but her tongue could no longer describe: fairies, birds, strange flowers, conjured up on paper with just a few strokes, yet looking so real that Meggie almost believed she had seen them, too.

At first Mo himself had bound the notebooks in which Meggie wrote down Resa’s memories –

and each binding was more beautiful than the last – but a time came when Meggie noticed the anxiety in his eyes as he watched her reading them, completely absorbed in the words and pictures. Of course she understood his uneasiness; after all, for years he had lost his wife to this world made of words and paper. How could he like it if his daughter thought of little else? Oh yes, Meggie understood Mo very well, yet she couldn’t do as he asked – close the books and forget the Inkworld for a while.

Perhaps her longing for it wouldn’t have been quite as strong if the fairies and brownies had still been around, all those strange creatures they had brought back from Capricorn’s accursed village. But none of them lived in Elinor’s garden now. The fairies’ empty nests still clung to the trees, and the burrows that the brownies had dug were still there, but their inhabitants were gone. At first Elinor thought they had run away or been stolen, but then the ashes had been found. They covered the grass in the garden, fine as dust, gray ashes, as gray as the shadows from which Elinor’s strange guests had once appeared. And Meggie had realized that there was no return from death, even for creatures made of nothing but words.

Elinor, however, could not reconcile herself to this idea. Defiantly, desperately, she had driven back to Capricorn’s village – only to find the streets empty, the houses burned down, and not a living soul in sight. “You know, Elinor,” Mo had said when she came back with her face tearstained, “I was afraid of something like this. I couldn’t really believe there were words to bring back the dead. And besides – if you’re honest with yourself you must admit they didn’t fit into this world.”

“Nor do I!” was all Elinor had replied.

Over the next few weeks, Meggie often heard sobbing from Elinor’s room when she slipped into the library one last time in the evening to find a book. Many months had passed since then – they had all been living together in Elinor’s big house for nearly a year, and Meggie had a feeling that Elinor was glad not to be alone with her books anymore. She had given them the best rooms;
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Elinor’s old schoolbooks and a few writers she no longer much liked had been banished to the attic to make more space. Meggie’s room had a view of snow-topped mountains, and from her parents’ bedroom you could see the distant lake with its gleaming water, which had so often tempted the fairies to fly in that direction.

Mo had never simply gone off like that before. Without a word of good-bye. Without making up the quarrel. .

Perhaps I should go down and help Darius in the library, thought Meggie as she sat there wiping the tears from her face. She never cried while she was quarrelling with Mo; the tears didn’t come until later . . and he always looked terribly guilty when he saw her red eyes. She was sure that yet again everyone had heard them quarrelling! Darius was probably making the hot milk and honey already, and as soon as she put her head around the kitchen door Elinor would begin calling Mo, and men in general, names. No, she’d better stay in her own room.

Oh, Mo. He had snatched the notebook she was reading out of her hand and taken it with him!

And that one was the book where she had collected ideas for stories of her own: beginnings that had never gotten any further, opening words, crossed-out sentences, all her failed attempts ..

How could he just take it away from her? She didn’t want Mo to read it; she didn’t want him seeing how she tried in vain to fit the words together on paper, words that came to her tongue so easily and with such power when she read aloud. Meggie could write down what Resa described to her; she could fill pages and pages with the stories her mother told her. But as soon as she tried to make something new of them, a story with a life of its own, her mind went blank.

The words seemed to fly out of her head – like snowflakes leaving only a damp patch on your skin when you put out your hand to catch them. Someone knocked on Meggie’s door.

“Come in!” she snuffled, looking in her trouser pockets for one of the old-fashioned handkerchiefs that Elinor had given her. (“They belonged to my sister. Her name began with an M, like yours. Embroidered in the corner there, see? I thought it would 30 be better for you to have them than let the moths eat holes in them.”)

Her mother put her head around the door.

Meggie tried a smile, but it was a miserable failure.

“Can I come in?” Resa’s fingers traced the words in the air faster than Darius could have said them aloud. Meggie nodded. By now she understood her mother’s sign language almost as easily as the letters of the alphabet – she knew it better than Mo and much better than Elinor, who often called for Meggie in desperation when Resa’s fingers went too fast for her.

Resa closed the door behind her and sat down on the windowsill with her daughter. Meggie always called her mother by her first name, perhaps because she hadn’t had a mother for ten years, or perhaps because, for the same inexplicable reason, she had always called her father just Mo.

Meggie recognized the notebook as soon as Resa put it on her lap. It was the one that Mo had taken. “I found it lying outside your door,” said her mother’s hands.

Meggie stroked the patterned binding. So Mo had brought it back. Why hadn’t he come in?

Because he was still too angry, or because he was sorry?

“He wants me to put them away in the attic. At least for a while.” Meggie suddenly felt so
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small. And at the same time so old. “He said, ‘Perhaps I ought to turn into a glass man or dye my skin blue, since my wife and daughter obviously think more of fairies and glass men than of me.’”

Resa smiled and stroked Meggie’s nose with her forefinger. “Yes, I know, of course he doesn’t really think that! But he always gets so angry when he sees me with the notebooks…”

Resa looked out through the open window. Elinor’s garden was so large that you couldn’t see where it began or ended, you just saw tall trees and rhododendron shrubs so old that they surrounded Elinor’s house like an evergreen wood. Right under Meggie’s window was a lawn with a narrow gravel path around it. A garden seat stood to one side of the lawn. Meggie still remembered the night when she had sat there watching Dustfinger breathe fire. Elinor’s ever-grumpy gardener had swept the dead leaves off the lawn only that afternoon. You could still see the bare patch in the middle where Capricorn’s men had burned Elinor’s best books. The gardener kept trying to persuade Elinor to plant something in that space, or sow more grass seed there, but Elinor just shook her head energetically. “Who grows grass on a grave?” she had snapped the last time he suggested it, and she told him to leave the yarrow alone, too. It had grown luxuriantly around the sides of the blackened patch ever since the fire, as if to make its flat flower heads a reminder of the night when Elinor’s printed children were swallowed up by the flames.