say that you can see the people you love even after death,’ she said quietly. ‘They say the dead visit you by night, or at least in your dreams; your longing for them calls them back, if only for a little while … Rosanna didn’t come. I went to women who said they could speak to the dead. I burned herbs whose fragrance was supposed to summon her, and I lay awake long nights hoping that she would come back, at least once. But it was all lies. There’s no way back. Or have you been there? Did you find one?’
‘In the realm of the dead? No.’ Dustfinger shook his head with a sad smile. ‘No, I didn’t go quite so far. But believe me, if I had, then even from there I’d have sought some way to get back to you …’
How long she looked at him! No one else had ever looked at him like that. And once again he tried to find words, the words that could explain where he had been, but there were none.
‘When Rosanna died,’ Roxane’s tongue seemed to shrink from the word, as if it could kill her daughter a second time, ‘when she died and I held her in my arms, I swore something to myself: I swore that never, never again would I be so helpless when death tried to take away someone I love. I’ve learned a great deal since then. Perhaps today I could cure her. Or perhaps not.’
She looked at him again, and when he returned her glance he did not try to hide his pain, as he usually would.
‘Where did you bury her?’
‘Behind the house, where she always used to play.’
He turned to the open door, wanting at least to see the earth under which she lay, but Roxane held him back. ‘Where have you been?’ she whispered, laying her forehead against his chest.
He stroked her hair, stroked the fine grey strands like silken cobwebs running through the sooty black, and buried his face in it. She still mixed a little bitter orange into the water when she washed her hair. Its perfume brought back so many memories that he felt dizzy. ‘Far away,’ he said. ‘I’ve been very, very far away.’ Then he just stood there holding her tightly, unable to believe that she was really there again, not just a figment of his dreams, not just a memory, blurred and vague, but a woman of flesh and blood with fragrant hair … and she was not sending him away.
How long they simply stood there like that, he didn’t know.
‘What about our older girl? How is Brianna?’ he asked at last.
‘She’s been living up at the castle for four years now. She serves Violante, the Prince’s daughter-in-law, known to everyone as Her Ugliness.’ She came out of his arms, smoothed her pinned-up hair, and reached for his hands. ‘Brianna sings for Violante, looks after her spoilt little son and reads to her,’ she said. ‘Violante adores books, but her eyesight is bad, so she can’t easily read them for herself – let alone that she must do it in secret because the Prince thinks poorly of women who read.’
‘But Brianna can read?’
‘Yes, and I’ve taught my son to read too.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Jehan. After his father.’ Roxane went over to the table and touched the flowers standing on it.
‘Did I know him?’
‘No. He left me this farm – and a son. The fire-raisers set light to our barn, he ran in to save the livestock, and the fire consumed him. Isn’t it strange – that you can love two men and fire protects one of them, but kills the other?’ She was silent for some time before she spoke again. ‘Firefox was leader of the arsonists then. They were almost worse than under Capricorn. Basta and Capricorn disappeared at the same time as you, did you know?’
‘Yes, so I’ve heard,’ he murmured, unable to take his eyes off her. How lovely she was. How beautiful. It almost hurt to look at her. When she came towards him again every movement reminded him of the day he had first seen her dance.
‘The fairies did very well,’ she said quietly, stroking his face. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone had simply painted those scars on your face with a silver pencil.’
‘A lie, but a kind one,’ he said just as softly. No one knew better than Roxane where the scars came from. They would neither of them forget the day when the Adderhead had commanded her to dance and sing before him. Capricorn had been there too, with Basta and all the other fire-raisers, and Basta had stared at Roxane like a tom-cat eyeing a tasty bird. He had pursued her day after day, promising her gold and jewels, threatening and flattering her, and when she rejected him again and again, alone and in company, Basta made enquiries to discover the identity of the man she preferred to him. He lay in wait for Dustfinger on his way to Roxane, with two other men, who held him down while Basta cut his face.
‘You didn’t marry again after your husband died?’ You fool, he thought, are you jealous of a dead man?
‘No, the only man on this farm is Jehan.’
The boy appeared in the doorway as suddenly as if he had been listening behind it, just waiting for his name to be spoken. Without a word he made his way past Dustfinger and sat down on the bench.
‘The flowers are even bigger now,’ he said.
‘Did you burn your fingers on them?’
‘Only a little.’
Roxane pushed a jug of cold water over to him. ‘Here, dip them in that. And if it doesn’t help I’ll break an egg for you. There’s nothing better for burns than a little egg white.’
Jehan obediently put his fingers in the jug, still looking at Dustfinger. ‘Doesn’t he ever burn himself?’ he asked his mother.
Roxane had to smile. ‘No, never. Fire loves him. It licks his fingers, it kisses him.’
Jehan looked at Dustfinger as if his mother had said that fairy and not human blood ran in his veins.
‘Careful, she’s teasing you!’ said Dustfinger. ‘Of course it bites me too.’
‘Those scars on your face – they weren’t made by fire?’
‘No.’ Dustfinger helped himself to more bread. ‘This woman, Violante,’ he said. ‘Cloud-Dancer told me the Adderhead is her father. Does she hate the strolling players as much as he does?’
‘No.’ Roxane ran her fingers through Jehan’s black hair. ‘If Violante hates anyone, it’s her father himself. She was seven when he sent her here. She was married to Cosimo when she was twelve, and six years later she was a widow. Now there she sits in her father-in-law’s castle, trying to care for his subjects, as he has long neglected to do in his mourning for his son. Violante feels for the weak. Beggars, cripples, widows with hungry children, peasants who can’t pay their taxes – they all go to her, but Violante is a woman. Any power she has is only because everyone’s afraid of her father, even on this side of the forest.’
‘Brianna likes it at the castle.’ Jehan wiped his wet fingers on his trousers and looked at their reddened tips with concern.
Roxane dipped his fingers back in the cold water. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ she said. ‘Our daughter likes to wear Violante’s cast-off clothes, sleep in a soft four-poster bed, and have the fine folk at court pay her compliments. But I don’t care for it, and she knows I don’t.’
‘The Ugly Lady sends for me too sometimes!’ There was no mistaking the pride in Jehan’s voice. ‘To play with her son. Jacopo pesters her and Brianna when they’re reading, and no one else will play with him because he always starts screaming when you have a fight with him … and when he loses he shouts that he’s going to have your head chopped off!’
‘You let him play with a prince’s brat?’ Dustfinger cast Roxane an anxious glance. ‘Whatever their age, princes are never friends to anyone. Have you forgotten that? And the same is true of their daughters, especially if the Adderhead is their father.’
Roxane made her way past him in silence. ‘You don’t have to remind me what princes are like,’ she said. ‘Your daughter is fifteen years old now, it’s a long time since she took any advice from me. But who knows, maybe she’ll listen to her father, even if she hasn’t seen him for ten years. Next Sunday the Laughing Prince is holding festivities to celebrate his grandson’s birthday. A good fire-eater is sure to be welc
ome at the castle, since Sootbird is the only one they’ve had to entertain them all these years.’ She stopped in the open doorway. ‘Come along, Jehan,’ she said, ‘your fingers don’t look too bad, and there’s plenty of work still to do.’
The boy obeyed without protest. At the door he cast a last, curious look at Dustfinger, then ran off – and Dustfinger was left alone in the little house. He looked at the pots and pans near the fire, the wooden bowls, the spinning-wheel in the corner and the chest that spoke of Roxane’s past. Yes, it was a simple house, not much bigger than a charcoal-burner’s hut, but it was a home – something that Roxane had always wanted. She had never liked to have only the sky above her by night … even if he made the fire grow flowers for her, flowers to watch over her sleep.
9
Meggie Reads
‘Don’t ask where the rest of this book is!’ It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. ‘All books continue in the beyond …’
Italo Calvino,
If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller
When all was quiet in Elinor’s house, and the garden was bright in the moonlight, Meggie put on the dress that Resa had made for her. Several months ago, she had asked her mother what kind of clothes women wore in the Inkworld.
‘Which women?’ Resa had enquired. ‘Farmers’ wives? Strolling players? Princes’ daughters? Maidservants?’
‘What did you wear?’ Meggie asked, and Resa had gone into the nearest town with Darius and bought some dress material there: plain, coarsely woven red fabric. Then she had asked Elinor to bring the old sewing machine up from the cellar. ‘That’s the sort of dress I wore when I was living in Capricorn’s fortress as a maid,’ her hands had said, putting the finished dress over Meggie’s head. ‘It would have been too fine for a peasant woman, but it was just about good enough for a rich man’s servant, and Mortola was very keen that we shouldn’t be much worse dressed than the Prince’s maids – even if we only served a gang of fire-raisers.’
Meggie stood in front of her wardrobe mirror and examined herself in the dull glass. She looked strange to herself. And she’d be a stranger in the Inkworld too; a dress alone couldn’t alter that. A stranger, just as Dustfinger was here, she thought – and she remembered the unhappiness in his eyes. Nonsense, she told herself crossly, pushing back her smooth hair. I’m not planning to spend ten years there.
The sleeves of the dress were already a little too short, and it was stretched tight over her breasts too. ‘Good heavens, Meggie!’ Elinor had exclaimed when she realized, for the first time, that they weren’t as flat as the cover of a book any more. ‘Well, I imagine your Pippi Longstocking days are over now!’
They hadn’t found anything suitable for Farid to wear, not in the attic or in the trunks of clothes down in the cellar that smelled of mothballs and cigar smoke, but he didn’t seem to mind. ‘Who cares? If it works we’ll start out in the forest,’ he said. ‘No one will be interested in my jeans there, and as soon as we come to a village or town I’ll steal myself something to wear!’
Everything always seemed so simple to him. He couldn’t understand that Meggie felt guilty because of Mo and Resa, any more than he understood her anxiety to find the right clothes. When she confessed that she could hardly look Mo and her mother in the eye after deciding to go with him, he had just asked ‘Why?’, looking at her blankly. ‘You’re thirteen! Surely they’d be marrying you off to someone quite soon anyway?’
‘Marrying me off?’ Meggie had felt the blood rise to her face. But how could she talk about such things to a boy out of a story in the Thousand and One Nights, where all women were servants or slave-girls – or lived in a harem?
‘Anyway,’ added Farid, kindly ignoring the fact that she was still blushing, ‘you’re not intending to stay very long, are you?’
No, she wasn’t. She wanted to taste and smell and feel the Inkworld, see fairies and princes – and then come home again to Mo and Resa, Elinor and Darius. There was just one problem: the words Orpheus had written might take her into Dustfinger’s story, but they couldn’t bring her back. Only one person could write her back again – Fenoglio, the inventor of the world she wanted to visit, the creator of glass men and blue-skinned fairies, of Dustfinger and Basta too. Yes, only Fenoglio could help her to return. Every time Meggie thought of that, her courage drained away and she felt like cancelling the whole plan, striking out those three little words she had added to what Orpheus had written: ‘… and the girl’.
Suppose she couldn’t find Fenoglio, suppose he wasn’t even in his own story any more? Oh, come on! He must still be there, she told herself whenever that thought made her heart beat faster. He can’t simply write himself back, not without someone to read what he’s written aloud! But suppose Fenoglio had found another reader there, someone like Orpheus or Darius? The gift didn’t seem to be unique, as she and Mo had once thought.
No, he’s still there! I’m sure he is! thought Meggie for the hundredth time, reading her goodbye letter to Mo and Resa once more. She herself didn’t know why she had chosen to write it on the letterhead that she and Mo had designed together. That was hardly going to mollify him.
Dearest Mo, dear Resa. Meggie knew the words by heart.
Please don’t worry. Farid has to find Dustfinger to warn him about Basta, and I’m going too. I won’t stay long – I just want to see the Wayless Wood, the Laughing Prince and Cosimo the Fair, and perhaps the Black Prince and Cloud-Dancer. I want to see the fairies again, and the glass men – and Fenoglio. He’ll write me back here. You know he can do it, so don’t worry. Capricorn isn’t in the Inkworld any more, after all.
See you soon, lots of love and kisses, Meggie.
P.S. I’ll bring you a book back, Mo. Apparently there are wonderful books there, hand-written books full of pictures, like the ones in Elinor’s glass cases. Only even better. Please don’t be angry.
She had torn up this letter and rewritten it three times, but that had made matters no better. Because she knew that there were no words that could stop Mo being angry with her and Resa weeping with anxiety – the way she did the day Meggie came home from school two hours later than usual. She put the letter on her pillow – they couldn’t miss seeing it there – and went over to the mirror again. Meggie, she thought, what are you doing? What do you think you’re doing? But her reflection did not reply.
When she let Farid into her room just after midnight he was surprised to see her dress. ‘I don’t have shoes to go with it,’ she said. ‘But luckily it’s quite long, and I don’t think my boots show much, do they?’
Farid just nodded. ‘It looks lovely,’ he murmured awkwardly.
Meggie locked the door after letting him in, and took the key out of the lock so that it could be unlocked again from outside. Elinor had a second key, and though she probably wouldn’t be able to find it at first, Darius would know where it was. Meggie glanced at the letter on her pillow once more …
Over his shoulder, Farid had the rucksack she had found in Elinor’s attic. ‘Oh, he’s welcome to it,’ Elinor had said when Meggie asked her. ‘It once belonged to an uncle of mine. I hated him! The boy can put that smelly marten in it. I like the idea!’
The marten! Meggie’s heart missed a beat.
Farid didn’t know why Dustfinger had left Gwin behind, and Meggie hadn’t told him, although she knew the reason only too well. She herself, after all, had told Dustfinger what part the marten was to play in his story. He was to die a dreadful, violent death because of Gwin – if what Fenoglio had written came true.
But Farid just shook his head sadly when she asked him about the marten. ‘He’s gone,’ said the boy. ‘I tied him up in the garden, because the bookworm woman kept on at me about her birds, but he gnawed through the rope. I’ve looked for him everywhere, but I just can’t find him!’
Clever Gwin.
‘He’ll have to stay here,’ said Meggie. ‘Orpheus didn’t write anything about him, and Resa will look after
him. She likes him.’
Farid nodded, and glanced unhappily at the window, but he didn’t contradict her.
The Wayless Wood – that was where Orpheus’s words would take them. Farid knew where Dustfinger had meant to go after arriving in the forest: to Ombra, where the Laughing Prince’s castle stood. And that was where Meggie hoped to find Fenoglio too. He had often told her about Ombra when they were both Capricorn’s prisoners. One night, when neither of them could sleep because Capricorn’s men were shooting at stray cats outside again, he had whispered to Meggie, ‘If I could choose to see one place in the Inkworld, then it would be Ombra … After all, the Laughing Prince is a great lover of books, which can hardly be said of his adversary the Adderhead. Yes, life must surely be good for a writer in Ombra. A room in an attic somewhere, perhaps in the alley where the cobblers and saddlers work – their trades don’t smell too bad – and a glass man to sharpen my quills, a few fairies over my bed, and I could look down into the alley through my window and see all life pass by …’
‘What are you taking with you?’ Farid’s voice startled Meggie out of her thoughts. ‘You know we’re not supposed to bring too much.’
‘Of course I know.’ Did he think that just because she was a girl she needed a dozen dresses? All she was going to carry was the old leather bag that had always gone with her and Mo on their travels when she was little. It would remind her of Mo, and she hoped that in the Inkworld it would be as inconspicuous as her dress. But the things she’d stuffed into it would certainly attract attention if anyone saw them: a hairbrush made of plastic, modern like the buttons on the cardigan she had packed; also a couple of pencils, a penknife, a photograph of her parents and one of Elinor. She had thought hard about what book to take. Going without one would have seemed to her like setting off naked, but it mustn’t be a heavy book, so it had to be a paperback. ‘Books in beach clothes,’ Mo called them, ‘badly dressed for most occasions, but useful when you’re on holiday.’ Elinor didn’t have a single paperback on her shelves, but Meggie herself owned a few. In the end she had decided on one that Resa had given her, a collection of stories set near the lake that lay close to Elinor’s house. That way she would be taking a little bit of home with her – for Elinor’s house was her home now, more than anywhere else had ever been. And who knew, maybe Fenoglio would be able to use the words in it to write her back again, back into her own story …
Farid had gone to the window. It was open, and a cool wind was blowing into the room, moving the curtains that Resa had made. Meggie shivered in her new dress. The nights were still very mild, but what would the season be in the Inkworld? Perhaps it was winter there …
‘I ought to say goodbye to him, at least,’ murmured Farid. ‘Gwin!’ he called softly into the night air, clicking his tongue.
Meggie quickly pulled him away from the window. ‘Don’t do that!’ she snapped. ‘Do you want to wake everyone up? I’ve already told you, Gwin will be fine here. He’s probably found a female marten by now. There are a few around the place. Elinor’s always afraid they’ll eat the nightingale that sings outside her window in the evening.’
Farid looked very unhappy, but he stepped back from the window. ‘Why are you leaving it open?’ he asked. ‘Suppose Basta …’ He didn’t finish his sentence.
‘Elinor’s alarm system works even if there’s an open window,’ was all Meggie said, while she put the notebook Mo had given her in her bag. There was a reason why she didn’t want to close the window. One night in a hotel by the sea, not far from Capricorn’s village, she had persuaded Mo to read her a poem. A poem about a moon-bird asleep in a peppermint wind. Next morning the bird was fluttering against the window of their