Inkspell (8 page)

“So, what?” Meggie pushed the chair from her desk over to him and sat down on the windowsill herself. Farid sat down as hesitantly as he had entered her room.

“You must get me there, too. Please!” He held the dirty piece of paper out to her again, with such a pleading expression in his black eyes that Meggie didn’t know where to look. How long and thick his eyelashes were! Hers were nowhere near as beautiful. “Please! I know you can do it!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dustfinger had gone, though.

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

Orpheus.

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

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

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

Meggie was still staring at the words written by Orpheus.

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

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

Orpheus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

Farid did not reply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Perhaps,” was all Meggie would say.

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

Chapter 6 – The Inn of the Strolling Players

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

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

MEMORIES!”

–
Philip Ridley,
Dakota of the White Flats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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