The Piper’s sword had cut deep into Resa’s arm, but Brianna had learnt a good deal from her mother, even though she liked singing to Violante better than growing herbs in stony fields.
‘The arm will heal,’ she said as she bound up the wound. But the bird would never leave Resa now. Silvertongue knew that as well as Dustfinger.
The Piper had done his best to send the Bluejay after his master to his death. He had wounded him in the shoulder and on the left arm, but in the end he alone had followed the Adderhead, and Dustfinger made the fire consume both his body and his master’s.
Pale-faced, Violante stood at Silvertongue’s side as the Adderhead and the Piper turned to ashes. She looked younger, as if she had shed a few years in the cell where her father had flung her – almost as forlorn as a child – yet when she turned away at last from the fire devouring her father, she put her arm around her son. Dustfinger had never seen her do a thing like that before. Everyone still disliked Jacopo, though he had saved them all. Even Silvertongue with his soft heart felt the same, though he was ashamed of it. Dustfinger saw it in his face.
There were still a dozen of Violante’s child soldiers alive. They found them in the dungeon cells, but the Adderhead’s soldiers had all gone, like the White Women. Only their abandoned tents still stood on the banks of the lake, with the black coach and a few riderless horses. Jacopo claimed that his great-grandfather’s man-eating fish had come up from the lake and eaten some of the men as they ran for their lives over the bridge. Neither Silvertongue nor Violante believed him, but Dustfinger went out on to the bridge and found a few shimmering scales on the wet stones, as large as linden leaves. So they didn’t take the bridge, but left the Castle in the Lake along the tunnel down which the Piper had come.
It was snowing when they stepped out into the open, and the castle disappeared behind them among the swirling snowflakes as if it were dissolving into the whiteness. The world around them was as still as if it had used up all words, as if all the tales there were to tell in this world had now been told. Dustfinger found Orpheus’s tracks in the frozen mud of the bank, and Silvertongue looked at the trees into which they disappeared as if he could still hear Orpheus’s voice inside him.
‘I wish he were dead,’ he said quietly.
‘A clever wish,’ replied Dustfinger. ‘But I’m afraid it’s too late to make it come true.’ He had looked for Orpheus after the Piper was dead, but his room had been empty, like Thumbling’s. The world looked so bright this cold morning. They were all so light at heart. But the darkness remained, and would go on telling its part of the story.
They caught some of the horses left behind by the Adderhead’s men. Although weakened by his wounds, Silvertongue was in a hurry. At least let’s save our daughters.
‘The Black Prince will have been looking after Meggie,’ Dustfinger told him, but the anxiety was still on his face as they rode further and further south.
They were a silent company, all caught up in their own thoughts and memories. Only Jacopo sometimes raised his clear voice, as demanding as ever. ‘I’m hungry.’ ‘I’m thirsty.’ ‘When will we be there?’ ‘Do you think the Milksop has killed the children and the robbers?’ His mother always answered him, although often abstractedly. The Castle in the Lake had spun a bond between them out of shared fear and dark memories, and perhaps the strongest strand of it was the fact that Jacopo had done what his mother intended to do when she rode to the castle. The Adderhead was dead. But Dustfinger felt sure that, all the same, Violante would feel her father behind her like a shadow all her life – and very likely Her Ugliness knew it herself by now.
Silvertongue took the Bluejay away with him too. It seemed as if the two of them were riding side by side, and not for the first time Dustfinger wondered whether they were only two sides of the same man. Whatever the answer was, the bookbinder loved this world as much as the robber did.
On the first night, when they stopped to rest under a tree with furry yellow catkins falling from its bare branches, the swift came back, although Resa had thrown the last of the seeds into the lake. She changed shape in her sleep and flew up into the flowering branches, where moonlight painted her plumage silver. When Dustfinger saw her sitting there he woke Silvertongue, and they waited under the tree together until the swift flew down again at dawn and turned back into a woman there between them.
‘What will become of the child?’ she asked, full of dread.
‘It will dream of flying,’ Silvertongue replied. Just as the bookbinder dreamt of the robber, and the robber of the bookbinder, and the Fire-Dancer dreamt of the flames and the minstrel woman who could dance like them. Perhaps, after all, this world was made of dreams, and an old man had merely found the words for them.
Resa wept when they came to the cave and found it empty, but Dustfinger discovered the Strong Man’s sign outside the entrance, drawn on the rocks in soot, and buried underneath it was a message obviously left by Doria for his big brother. Dustfinger had heard of the tree with the nests in it that Doria described, but he had never seen it with his own eyes.
It took them two days to find the tree, and Dustfinger was the first to see the giant. He took Silvertongue’s reins, and Resa put her hand to her mouth in alarm. But Violante stared at the giant like an enchanted child.
He was holding Roxane in his hand as if she too were a bird. Brianna went pale at the sight of her mother between those mighty fingers, but Dustfinger dismounted and went up to the giant.
The Black Prince was standing between the giant’s vast legs, with the bear beside him. He was limping as he went to meet Dustfinger, but he looked happier than he had for a long time.
‘Where’s Meggie?’ asked Silvertongue as the Prince hugged him, and Battista pointed up into the tree. Dustfinger had never seen such a tree before, not even in the wild heart of the Wayless Wood, and he wanted to climb up to the nests at once and see the branches covered with frost-flowers where the women and children perched like birds.
Meggie’s voice called her father’s name, and Silvertongue went to meet her as she let herself down the trunk on a rope, as naturally as if she had always lived in the trees. But Dustfinger turned and looked up at Roxane. She whispered something to the giant, who put her down on the ground as carefully as if he believed she was made of glass. Roxane. He vowed never to forget her name again. He would ask the fire to write its letters in his heart so that not even the White Women could wash it away. Roxane. Dustfinger held her in his arms, and the giant looked down at them with eyes that seemed to reflect all the colours in the world.
‘Look around,’ Roxane whispered to him, and Dustfinger saw Silvertongue embracing his daughter and wiping the tears off her face. He saw the bookworm woman running to Resa – how in the name of all the fairies did she come to be here? – Tullio burying his furry face in Violante’s skirt, the Strong Man almost smothering Silvertongue in his bear hug … and …
Farid.
He stood there digging his toes into the newly fallen snow. He still went barefoot, and surely he’d grown taller?
Dustfinger went up to him. ‘I see you’ve taken good care of Roxane,’ he said. ‘Did the fire obey you while I was gone?’
‘It always obeys me!’ Yes, he had grown older. ‘I fought Sootbird.’
‘Imagine that!’
‘My fire ate his fire.’
‘Did it indeed?’
‘Yes! I climbed up on the giant and made fire rain down on Sootbird. And then the giant broke his neck.’
Dustfinger couldn’t help smiling, and Farid returned his smile. ‘Do you … do you have to go away again?’ He looked as anxious as if he feared the White Women were already waiting.
‘No,’ said Dustfinger, smiling again. ‘No, not for a while, I think.’
Farid. He’d ask the fire to write that name in his heart as well. Roxane. Brianna. Farid. And Gwin, of course.
80
Ombra
What if this road, that has held no surprises
/>
These many years, decided not to go
Home after all; what if it could turn
Left or right with no more ado
Than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin
Were like a long, supple bolt of cloth,
that is shaken and rolled out, and takes
a new shape from the contours beneath?
And if it chose to lay itself down
In a new way; around a blind corner,
across hills you must climb without knowing
what’s on the other side; who would not hanker
to be going, at all risks? Who wants to know
a story’s end, or where a road will go.
Sheenagh Pugh,
What If This Road
When the Black Prince took the children back to Ombra snow lay on the battlements above the city wall, but the women threw flowers they had made out of scraps of fabric cut from old clothes. The lion emblem waved from the city towers again, but now his paw was laid on a book with blank pages, and his mane was made of fire. The Milksop had gone. He had fled from the giant, not to Ombra, but straight to the Castle of Night and his sister’s arms, and Violante had returned to take possession of the city and prepare it for the return of its children.
Meggie was standing with Elinor, Darius and Fenoglio in the square outside the castle gates as the mothers hugged their sons and daughters, and Violante, speaking from the battlements, thanked the Black Prince and the Bluejay for saving them.
‘You know what, Meggie?’ Fenoglio whispered to her, as Violante had provisions from the castle kitchens distributed to the women. ‘Maybe Her Ugliness will fall in love with the Black Prince some day. After all, he was the Bluejay before your father took the part, and Violante was more in love with the role than the man anyway!’
Oh, Fenoglio! He was just the same as ever. Although the giant had gone back to his mountains long ago, he had completely restored the old man’s self-confidence.
The Bluejay had not come to Ombra. Mo and Resa had stayed behind at the farm where they had once lived. ‘Let the Bluejay go back to where he came from,’ he had told the Prince. ‘Into the strolling players’ songs.’ They were singing them everywhere already: how the Jay and the Fire-Dancer, all by themselves, had defeated the Adderhead and the Piper with all their men …
‘Please, Battista,’ Mo had said, ‘why don’t you, at least, write a song telling the true story? About the people who helped the Jay and the Fire-Dancer. About the swift – and the boy!’
Battista had promised Mo to write a song like that, but Fenoglio only shook his head. ‘No one will sing it, Meggie. People don’t like their heroes to need help, particularly not from women and children.’
No doubt he was right. Perhaps that meant Violante would have a hard time on the throne of Ombra, although all its people were cheering her today. Jacopo stood beside his mother. He looked more like a small copy of his father every day, but all the same he still reminded Meggie even more of his sinister grandfather. She shuddered to think how ready Jacopo had been to deliver the Adderhead up to Death – even though that had been the saving of Mo.
Another widow now ruled the country on the far side of the forest, and she too had a son and was taking care of the throne for him. Meggie knew that Violante expected war, but no one wanted to think of that today. This day belonged to the children who had come home. Not one of them was missing, and the strolling players sang about Farid’s fire, the tree full of nests, and the giant who had so mysteriously come out of the mountains at just the right moment.
‘I’ll miss him,’ Elinor had whispered as he disappeared among the trees, and Meggie felt the same. She would never forget how the Inkworld was reflected on his skin, or how light-footed he was when he strode away, so gentle in such a big body.
‘Meggie!’ Farid made his way through the women and children. ‘Where’s Silvertongue?’
‘With my mother,’ she replied – and was surprised to find that her heart beat no faster than usual at the sight of him. When had that changed?
Farid frowned. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘and Dustfinger’s with his minstrel woman again. He kisses her so often you might think her lips tasted of honey.’
Oh dear. Farid was still jealous of Roxane.
‘I think I’ll go away for a while,’ he said.
‘Go away? Where to?’
Behind Meggie, Elinor and Fenoglio began arguing over something Elinor didn’t like about the look of the castle. Those two loved arguing with each other, and they had plenty of opportunity for arguments because they were neighbours now. The bag in which Elinor had packed all kinds of things that might come in useful in the Inkworld, including her silver cutlery, was still standing in her house in the other world (‘Well, I was very excited, it’s easy to forget such things then!’), but fortunately she had been wearing the Loredan family jewels when Darius read them both over, and Rosenquartz had sold them for her so cleverly (‘Meggie, you’ve no idea what a shrewd businessman that glass man is!’) that now she was the proud possessor of a house in the street where Minerva lived.
‘Where to?’ Farid made a fiery flower grow between his fingers and placed it on Meggie’s dress. ‘Oh, I think I’ll just stroll from village to village the way Dustfinger used to.’
Meggie looked at the burning flower. The flames faded like real petals, and only a tiny spot of ash was left on her dress. Farid. His mere name used to quicken her pulse, but now she hardly listened as he told her about his plans, all the marketplaces where he would put on a show, the mountain villages, the far side of the Wayless Wood. Her heart leapt only when she suddenly saw the Strong Man standing there with the women. A few of the children had climbed on to his shoulders, just as they often used to in the cave, but she couldn’t see the face she was looking for beside him. Disappointed, she let her eyes wander on, and blushed when Doria was suddenly standing there in front of her. Farid abruptly fell silent, and looked at the other boy in the same way as he so often looked at Roxane.
The scar on Doria’s forehead was as long as Meggie’s middle finger. ‘A blow with a spiked mace, not particularly well aimed,’ Roxane had said. ‘Head wounds bleed a lot, so they probably thought he was dead.’ Roxane had nursed him for many nights on end, but Fenoglio’s opinion was still that Doria was alive thanks only to the story he had written long ago about the boy’s future. ‘And anyway, even if you want to believe it was Roxane who made him better, then who made up Roxane, may I ask?’ He was certainly his old self again.
‘Doria! How are you?’ Meggie involuntarily put out her hand and caressed the scar on his forehead. Farid gave her a strange look.
‘Fine. My head’s as good as new.’ Doria brought something out from behind his back. ‘Is this what they’re like?’
Meggie stared at the tiny wooden aeroplane he had made.
‘That’s how you described them, isn’t it? The flying machines.’
‘But you were unconscious!’
He smiled and put his hand to his head. ‘The words are in here, all the same. But I don’t know how the music thing is supposed to work. You know, the little box that plays music.’
Meggie had to smile. ‘Oh yes, a radio. That wouldn’t be any good here. I don’t know just how to explain it to you …’
Farid was still looking at her. Then he abruptly took her hand. ‘Excuse us,’ he told Doria, and led Meggie into the nearest house entrance with him. ‘Does Silvertongue know how you look at him?’
‘Look at who?’
‘Who!’ He passed his finger over his forehead as if tracing Doria’s scar. ‘Listen,’ he said, stroking her hair back. ‘Why don’t you come with me? We could go from village to village together. The way we did when we and Dustfinger were following your mother and father. Do you remember?’
How could he ask that?
Meggie looked over her shoulder. Doria was standing beside Fenoglio and Elinor. Fenoglio was looking at the aeroplane.
‘I’m sorry, F
arid,’ she said, gently removing his hand from her shoulder. ‘But I don’t want to leave.’
‘Why not?’ He tried to kiss her, but Meggie turned her face away. Even though she felt tears coming to her eyes. Do you remember?
‘I wish you luck,’ she said, kissing him on the cheek. He still had the most beautiful eyes of any boy she’d ever seen. But now her heart beat so much faster for someone else.
81
Later
Almost five months later a baby will be born at the lonely farm where the Black Prince once hid the Bluejay. It will be a boy, dark-haired like his father, but with his mother’s and sister’s eyes. He will think that every wood is full of fairies, that a glass man sleeps on every table – so long as there’s some parchment on it – that books are written by hand, and the most famous of illuminators paints with his left hand because his right hand is made of leather. He will think that strolling players breathe fire and perform comic plays in every marketplace, that women always wear long dresses, and soldiers stand at every city gate.
And he will have an aunt called Elinor who tells him there’s a world which is not like this one. A world with neither fairies nor glass men, but with animals who carry their young in a pouch in front of their bellies, and birds with wings that beat so fast it sounds like the humming of a bumblebee, with carriages that drive along without any horses, and pictures that move of their own accord. Elinor will tell him how, long ago, a horrible man called Orpheus brought his parents out of that world and into this one by magic, and how this Orpheus finally had to flee from his father and the Fire-Dancer to the northern mountains, where it’s to be hoped he froze to death. She will tell him that even the most powerful men don’t carry swords in the other world, but there are much, much more terrible weapons there. (His father owns a very fine sword, kept wrapped in a cloth in his workshop. He hides it from the child, but sometimes the boy will secretly unwrap it and runs his fingers over the shiny blade.) Elinor will tell him amazing things about that other world. She will even claim that the people there have built coaches that can fly, but he doesn’t really believe that, although Doria has made