Inkspell (68 page)

On the second night a boy came to the mine. He worked in the stables of the Castle of Night and had been spying for the Black Prince ever since the Piper had his brother hanged. He said that the Adderhead would let the prisoners go along the road leading down to the harbor, on condition that they boarded a ship there and never returned.

“The road to the harbor. Ah,” was all the Prince said when the informer had gone again – and he set out with Dustfinger that same night. Farid didn’t ask if he could go, too. Fie simply followed them.

The road was little more than a footpath leading through the trees. It ran straight down Mount Adder, as if in a hurry to slip under the canopy of leaves. “The Adderhead pardoned a troop of prisoners once before and let them go along this road,” said the Prince, when they were under the trees at the roadside. “And they did reach the sea without mishap, just as he had promised, but the ship waiting for them was a slave ship, and they say the Adderhead got a particularly fine silver bridle for those prisoners, a scant dozen of them.”

Slaves? Farid remembered markets where people were sold, and buyers gaped at them and felt them as if they were cattle. Girls with blonde hair had been in great demand.

“Don’t look as if Meggie had been sold already!” said Dustfinger.

“The Prince will think of something – won’t you?” The Black Prince tried to smile, but he couldn’t conceal the fact that he was eyeing the road with great concern. “They must
never
reach that ship,” he said. “And we can only hope that the Adderhead doesn’t send too many soldiers to escort them. We must hide them quickly – in the mine at first, that will be best, until everything’s quieted down again. And very likely,” he added almost as an afterthought, “we shall need fire.”

Dustfinger blew on his fingers until flames as delicate as butterfly wings were dancing there.

“What do you think I’m still here for?” he asked. “Fire there shall be. But I will not take a sword in my hand, in case that’s what you’re hoping. You know I ‘m no good with such things.”

Chapter 68 – A Visit

“If I cannot get me forth out of this house,” he thought, “I am a dead man!”

– Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Black Arrow

When Meggie woke, she didn’t know for a moment where she was.
In Elinor’s house?
she wondered.
With Fenoglio?
But then she saw Mo bending low over the big table, binding a book.

The book. Five hundred blank pages. They were in the Castle of Night, and Mo was to have the book finished tomorrow… A flash of lightning illuminated the soot-blackened ceiling, and the thunder that followed sounded menacingly loud, but it wasn’t the storm that had woken Meggie.

She had heard voices. The guards. There was someone at the door. Mo had heard it, too.

“Meggie, he mustn’t work such long hours. It could bring back the fever,” the Barn Owl had told her that very morning, before they took him down to the dungeons again. But what could she do about it? Mo sent her to bed the moment she began yawning too often. (“That was the twenty-third yawn, Meggie. Go on, bed for you, or you’ll be dead on your feet before this damned book is finished.”) Then it would be ages before he went to sleep himself. He stayed up cutting, folding, and stitching until it was nearly dawn. He’d done that tonight as well.

When one of the guards opened the door, Meggie thought for a dreadful moment that Mortola had come to kill Mo after all, before the Adderhead let him go. But it was not the Magpie. The Adderhead stood in the doorway, breathing heavily. Two servants stood behind him, their faces pale with exhaustion, carrying silver candelabras from which wax dripped to the floorboards.

Their master, treading heavily, approached the table at which Mo worked and stared at the book. It was almost finished.

“What are you doing here?” Mo still had the paper knife in his hand. The Adderhead stared at him. His eyes were even more bloodshot than on the night when Meggie had made her bargain with him.

“How much longer?” he demanded. “My son is crying. He cries all night. He feels the White Women coming close, just as I do. Now they want to fetch him away, too, him and me at the same time. Folk say they’re particularly hungry on stormy nights.”

Mo put down the knife. “The book will be finished tomorrow, as agreed. It would have been ready sooner, but the leather to cover it was full of tears and holes made by thorns, so that held us up, and the paper wasn’t as good as it might have been, either.”

“Yes, yes, very well, the librarian has passed on your complaints!” The Adderhead’s voice sounded as if he had been shouting himself hoarse. “If Taddeo had his way, you’d spend the rest of your life in this room, rebinding
all
my books. But I will let you go – you, your daughter, your wife, and those good-for-nothing strolling players. They can all go, I just want the book! Mortola has told me about the three words that your daughter so cunningly failed to mention, but never mind that – I shall take good care that no one writes them in its pages! I want to be able to laugh in the Cold Man’s face at last – laugh at him and his pale women! Another night like this and I shall be beating my head against the wall, I shall kill my wife, I shall kill my child, I shall kill all of you. Do you understand, Bluejay or whatever your name is? You must finish the book before dark falls again! You must!”

Mo stroked the wooden boards that he had covered with leather only the day before. “I’ll be finished by the time the sun rises. But you must swear to me on your son’s life that then you will let us go at once.”

The Adderhead looked at him as if the White Women were there standing behind him. “Yes, yes, I swear by whomever and whatever you like! By sunrise, that sounds good!” He walked ponderously over to Mo and stared at his chest. “Show me!” he whispered. “Show me where Mortola wounded you. With the magic weapon that my master-at-arms took apart so thoroughly that now no one can put it together again. I had the fool hanged for that.”

Mo hesitated, but finally he opened his shirt.

“So close to the heart!” The Adderhead put his hand on Mo’s chest as if to make sure that the heart in it was really still beating. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you must indeed know a way to cheat death or you wouldn’t be alive now.”

He turned abruptly and waved the two servants over to the door. “Very well, I shall have you fetched soon after sunrise, you and the book,” he said over his shoulder.

“Now get me something to eat in the hall!” Meggie heard him shouting outside the door as the guards bolted it again. “Wake the cooks, wake the maids and the Piper. Wake them all! I want to eat and listen to a few dark songs. And the Piper must sing them so loudly that I don’t hear the child crying.”

Then his footsteps retreated, and only the rolling of the thunder remained. A flash of lightning made the pages of the almost finished book shine as if they had a life of their own. Mo had gone over to the window. He stood there motionless, looking out.

“By sunrise! Can you do it?” asked Meggie anxiously.

“Of course,” he said, without turning. Lightning was flickering over the sea like a distant light being switched on and off by someone – except that no such light existed in this world. Meggie went over to Mo, and he put his arm around her. He knew she was afraid of thunderstorms.

When she was very small and had crept into bed with him, he always told her the same story: Thunderstorms were because the sky longed to be united with the earth, and reached out fiery fingers to touch it on such nights.

But Mo didn’t tell that story today.

“Did you see the fear in his face?” Meggie whispered to him. “Exactly as Fenoglio described it.”

“Yes, even the Adderhead must play the part that Fenoglio has written for him,” replied Mo. “But so must we, Meggie. How do you like that idea?”

Chapter 69 – The Night Before

True, I talk of dreams,

Which are the children of an idle brain,

Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,

Which is as thin of substance as the air.

– William Shakespeare,
Romeo and Juliet

It was the last night before the day when the Adderhead would show his clemency. In a few hours, just before dawn, they would all be in position by the road. None of the informers had been able to say exactly when the prisoners were to come down it they knew only that this would be the day. The robbers were sitting together, telling one another tales of old adventures in loud voices. Presumably that was their means of keeping fear at bay, but Dustfinger did not feel like either talking or listening. He kept waking suddenly from sleep, but not because of the voices that came to his ears. Pictures in his mind woke him, terrible pictures that had been robbing him of sleep for days.

This time they had been particularly bad, and so real that he started up as if Gwin had jumped on his chest. His heart was still thudding hard as he sat there staring into the dark. Dreams – in the other world they had often kept him from sleeping, too, but he couldn’t remember any of them as bad as this one. “It’s the dead. They bring bad dreams,” Farid always said. “They whisper terrible things to you, and then they lie on your breast to feel your racing heart. It makes them feel alive again!”

Dustfinger liked this explanation. He feared death but not the dead. But suppose it was quite different, suppose the dreams were showing him a story already waiting for him somewhere?

Reality was a fragile thing; Silvertongue’s voice had shown him that once and for all.

Roxane stirred in her sleep beside him. She turned her head and murmured the names of her children, the dead as well as the living. There was still no news from Ombra. Even the Black Prince had heard nothing for a long time, either from the castle or the city, no word of what had happened after the Adderhead sent Cosimo’s body back to his daughter, with the news that hardly any of the men who had followed him would come back, either.

Roxane whispered Brianna’s name again. Every day she stayed here with him cut her to the heart, Dustfinger knew that only too well. So why didn’t he simply go back with her? Why not turn his back on this infernal hill and return at last to a place where you didn’t have to hide underground like an animal?
Or like a dead man
, he added in his thoughts.

You know why
, he told himself.
It’s the dreams. The accursed dreams.
He whispered fire-words to banish the darkness in which dreams put forth such dreadful blossoms. A flame licked up sleepily from the ground beside him. He held out his hand and let it dance up his arm, lick his fingers and his forehead, in the hope that it would simply burn away the horrible pictures. But even the pain did not rid him of them, and Dustfinger extinguished the flame with the flat of his hand. His skin was sooty and hot afterward, as if the fire had left its black breath behind, but the dream was still there, a terror in his heart, too black and strong even for the fire.

How could he simply go away when he saw such images by night – pictures of the dead, again and again, nothing but blood and death? The faces changed. Sometimes it was Resa’s face he
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saw, sometimes Meggie’s, then at other times the face of the Barn Owl. He had seen the Black Prince, too, with blood on his breast. And today – today it had been Farid’s face. Just like the night before.

Dustfinger closed his eyes when the pictures came back, so plain and clear… Of course he had tried to persuade the boy to stay with Roxane tomorrow, when he set off with the robbers along the road they were to come down, Resa and Silvertongue, Meggie, the Barn Owl, and all the others. (Just how many there would be, even the Prince’s informers could not say.) But it was hopeless.

Dustfinger leaned back against the damp stone into which hands long gone had cut the narrow galleries, and looked at the boy. Farid had curled up like a small child, knees drawn up against his chest, with the two martens beside him. They slept at Farid’s side more and more often when they came back from hunting, perhaps because they knew that Roxane did not like them.

How peacefully the boy lay there, not at all as Dustfinger had just seen him in his dreams. A smile even flickered across his dark face. Perhaps he was dreaming of Meggie, Resa’s Meggie, as like her mother as one flame is like another and yet so different. “You do think she’s all right, don’t you?” Farid asked that question heaven knows how many times a day. Dustfinger still clearly remembered the feeling of being in love for the first time. How vulnerable his heart had suddenly been! Such a trembling, quivering thing, happy and miserably unhappy at once.

A cold wind blew through the galleries, and Dustfinger saw the boy shivering in his sleep. Gwin raised his head when he rose and took the cloak off his shoulders, covering Farid with it. “Why are you looking at me like that?” he whispered to the marten. “He’s crept into your heart just as he crept into mine. How could it happen to us, Gwin?”

The marten licked his paw and looked at him from dark eyes. When he dreamed it was surely only of hunting, not of dead boys.

Suppose the old man was sending the dreams? The idea made Dustfinger shudder as he lay down beside Roxane on the hard ground again. Yes, Fenoglio could be sitting in some corner, as he had often done these last few days, spinning bad dreams for him. That was exactly what he had done with the Adderhead’s fears!
Nonsense
, thought Dustfinger angrily, putting his arm around Roxane.
Meggie isn’t here. Without her, the old man’s words are nothing but ink. Now try
to get some sleep, or you’ll be nodding off as you wait among the trees with the others tomorrow.

But it was a long time before he could close his eyes.

He just lay there and listened to the boy’s breathing.