‘Well, so long as it hurts, I’m still alive.’
The wind carried the sound of horses’ hooves up to them. Weapons clashed, voices rang through the night.
‘I tell you what,’ said Mo quietly. ‘Let’s play our old game. We’ll imagine we’re in another story. In Hobbiton, maybe, that’s quite a peaceful place, or with Wart and the wild geese. What do you think?’
She did not reply for some time. Then she took his hand and whispered, ‘I’d like to imagine us in the Wayless Wood together. You and me and Resa. Then I could show you the fairies, and the fire-elves and the whispering trees, and – no, wait! Balbulus’s workshop! That’s it. I’d like to be there with you. He’s an illuminator, Mo. In the Castle of Sighs in Ombra! The best of all illuminators. You could see his brushes and pigments …’
Suddenly she sounded so excited! She could still forget everything, like a child – she could forget the bolted door and the gallows in the courtyard. The mere thought of a couple of fine paintbrushes would do it. ‘Very well,’ said Mo, stroking her fair hair again. ‘Anything you say. Let’s imagine we’re in the castle of Ombra. I really would like to see those brushes.’
62
Where to?
I dreamed a limitless book,
A book unbound,
Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance
On every line there was a new horizon drawn,
New heavens supposed;
New states, new souls.
Clive Barker,
Abarat, Preface
Farid was waiting by the statue, as they had agreed. He had hidden behind it – obviously he still found it hard to believe that he was invisible – and he hadn’t managed to get a sight of Meggie. Dustfinger could tell from his voice; it was husky with disappointment. ‘I got into the tower, I even saw the cell, but it’s just too well guarded. And in the kitchen they were saying she’s a witch and she’ll be killed along with her father!’
‘Well, what did you expect they’d be talking about? Did you hear anything else?’
‘Yes, something about Firefox. They said he’ll send Cosimo back to the dead.’
‘Ah. Nothing about the Black Prince?’
‘Only that there are people looking for him, but they haven’t found him. They say he and his bear can exchange shapes, so that sometimes the bear is the Prince and the Prince is the bear. And they say he can fly and make himself invisible, and that he’s going to rescue the Bluejay!’
‘Really?’ Dustfinger laughed quietly. ‘The Prince will like that. Right, come on. It’s time for us to be off.’
‘Be off?’ Dustfinger felt Farid’s fingers clutching his arm. ‘Why? We could hide. The castle’s so big, no one would find us.’
‘You think so? What would you do here anyway? Meggie wouldn’t go with you even if you could magic her through locked doors. Have you forgotten the deal she was offering the Adderhead? Resa says it will take Silvertongue a few weeks to bind a book, and the Adderhead won’t hurt a hair of his head or Meggie’s until he has that book, will he? So come on! It’s time we looked for the Prince. We must tell him about Sootbird.’
Outside, it was still as dark as if morning would never come. This time they slipped through the castle gate together with a troop of men-at-arms. Dustfinger would have liked to know where they were going so late at night. Let’s hope they’re not hunting the Prince, he thought, cursing Sootbird for his treacherous heart.
The men-at-arms galloped off down the road leading away from Mount Adder into the mountains. Dustfinger was standing there watching them go when something furry suddenly jumped up at him. Taken by surprise, he stumbled into the structure of one of the gallows. Two feet were swinging back and forth above him. But Gwin clung to his arm as naturally as if his master had always been invisible.
‘Damn it all!’ His heart was in his mouth as he seized the marten. ‘You’ll be the death of me yet, you little beast, won’t you?’ he hissed at him. ‘Where did you spring from?’
As if in answer, Roxane stepped out of the shadow of the castle walls. ‘Dustfinger?’ she whispered as her eyes searched for his invisible face. Jink appeared behind her and raised his nose, sniffing.
‘Yes, who did you think?’ He guided her on with him, pressing her close to the wall so that the sentries on the battlements couldn’t see her. This time he didn’t ask why she had followed them. He was too glad that she was there. Even if the expression on her face reminded him for a moment of Resa and her sadness. ‘There’s nothing we can do here for the moment,’ he whispered. ‘But did you know that Sootbird is a welcome guest in the Castle of Night?’
‘Sootbird?’
‘Yes. It’s bad news. You ride back to Ombra and see to Jehan and Brianna. I’ll go and look for the Black Prince and warn him of this cuckoo in the nest.’
‘And how are you going to find him?’ Roxane smiled, as if she could see his baffled face. ‘Shall I take you to him?’
‘You?’
‘Yes.’ Up above, the guards called something to each other. Dustfinger drew Roxane even closer to the wall. ‘The Prince cares for his Motley Folk very well,’ she whispered. ‘And as I’m sure you can imagine, he doesn’t always earn the money he needs for cripples and old folk, widows and orphans, by doing tricks in market places. His men are skilful poachers and the terror of tax gatherers, they have hiding places all over the forest, in Argenta and Lombrica alike, and there are often sick or wounded men there … Nettle will have nothing to do with robbers, nor will the moss-women, and they don’t trust most physicians. So some time ago they began coming to me. I’m not afraid of the forest, I’ve been in its darkest corners with you. Arrow wounds, broken bones, a bad cough – I know how to cure all those, and the Prince trusts me. I was always Dustfinger’s wife to him, even when I was married to another man. Perhaps he was right.’
‘Was he?’ Dustfinger spun round. Someone was clearing his throat in the darkness.
‘Didn’t you say we must be gone before the sun rises?’ Farid’s voice sounded reproachful.
By fire and fairies, he’d forgotten the boy! And Farid was right. Morning couldn’t be far away, and the shadow of the Castle of Night was not the best place to discuss dead husbands.
‘Very well. Catch the martens!’ Dustfinger whispered into the night. ‘But don’t, for heaven’s sake, scare me to death like that again, understand? Or I’ll never let you make yourself invisible again.’
63
The Badger’s Earth
‘Oh, Sara. It is like a story.’
‘It is a story … everything is a story. You are a story – I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.’
Frances Hodgson Burnett,
The Little Princess
Farid followed Dustfinger and Roxane through the night with an expression that must surely be as dark as the sky above them. It hurt to leave Meggie behind in the castle, however sensible it was. And now here was Roxane coming with them too. Although he had to admit that she seemed to know exactly where she was going. They soon came upon the first hiding-place, well concealed behind thorny undergrowth, but it was deserted. In the next they found two men who distrustfully drew their knives, and did not put them back in their belts until Roxane had spoken to them at length. Perhaps they sensed the presence of Dustfinger and Farid, in spite of their invisibility. Fortunately Roxane had once cured a nasty ulcer for one of them, and he finally told her where she would find the Prince.
The Badger’s Earth. Farid thought he heard those words twice. ‘Their main hide-out,’ was all that Roxane said. ‘We must be there by daybreak. But they warned me that there are said to be soldiers on the move, a great many of them.’
From then on Farid sometimes thought he heard the clink of swords in the distance, the snorting of horses, voices, marching footsteps – but perhaps he was only imagining it. Soon the first rays of sunlight penetrated the leaf canopy above them, gradually turning their bodies visible again, like reflections on dark water. It was good
not to have to keep looking for his own hands and feet, and to see Dustfinger again. Even if he was walking beside Roxane.
Now and then Farid sensed her looking at him, as if she were still searching his dark face for some similarity to Dustfinger. At her farm she had once or twice asked him questions about his mother. Farid would have liked to tell her that his mother had been a princess, much, much more beautiful than Roxane, and that Dustfinger had loved her so dearly that he stayed with her for ten years until death took her from him, leaving him only with their son, their dark-skinned, black-eyed son who now followed him like a shadow. But his age wasn’t quite right for this tale, and moreover Dustfinger would probably have been furious if Roxane had asked him for the truth behind it, so in the end Farid told her only that his mother was dead – which was probably correct. If Roxane was stupid enough to think Dustfinger had come back to her only because he had lost another woman, all the better. Every glance that Dustfinger cast her filled Farid’s heart to the brim with jealousy. Suppose he decided to stay with her for ever, at the farm with the fragrant fields of herbs? Suppose he stopped wanting to go from one market place to the next, but preferred to live with her, kissing her and laughing with her as he already did only too often, forgetting fire and Farid?
The forest became denser and denser, and the Castle of Night might have been only a bad dream, when they suddenly saw over a dozen men standing among the trees around them. Armed men in ragged clothes. They appeared so silently that even Dustfinger hadn’t heard them. They surrounded them with hostile expressions on their faces, knives and swords in their hands, and stared at the two figures who were still almost transparent around the chests and arms.
‘Hey, Snapper, don’t you know me?’ asked Roxane, going up to one of them. ‘How are your fingers doing?’
The man’s face cleared. He was a heavily built fellow with a scar on his neck. ‘Ah, the herb-witch,’ he said. ‘Of course. Why are you roaming the forest here so early? And what are those ghosts with you?’
‘We’re not ghosts. We’re looking for the Black Prince.’ As Dustfinger moved to Roxane’s side all the men’s weapons turned his way.
‘What are you doing?’ Roxane asked the men angrily. ‘Look at his face. Did you never hear of the fire-dancer? The Prince will set his bear on you if he hears that you threatened him.’
The men put their heads together and scrutinized Dustfinger’s scarred face uneasily.
‘Three scars as pale as cobwebs,’ whispered Snapper. ‘Oh yes, we’ve all heard about him, but only in songs …’
‘Who says songs can’t be believed?’ Dustfinger breathed into the cool morning air and whispered fire-words until a flame consumed his steaming breath. The robbers flinched back and stared at him, as if this only reinforced their certainty that he was a ghost. However, Dustfinger raised both hands in the air and put the flame out between them as if nothing could be easier. Then he bent down and cooled the palms of his hands on the dewy grass.
‘Did you see that?’ Snapper looked at the others. ‘That’s just what the Prince has always told us about him – he catches fire as you might catch a rabbit, he speaks to it like a lover.’
The robbers took the three into their midst. Farid looked uneasily at the men’s faces as he walked along beside them. They reminded him of other faces, faces from an earlier life, from a world that he did not like to remember, and he stayed as close as he could to Dustfinger’s side.
‘Are you sure these are the Prince’s men?’ Dustfinger asked Roxane in an undertone.
‘Oh yes,’ she whispered back. ‘He can’t choose who will follow him.’
Farid did not think this answer very reassuring.
The robbers in Farid’s old life had claimed caves full of treasure as their own, caverns more magnificent than the halls of the Castle of Night. The hide-out where Snapper took them could not be compared with those caves. Its entrance, hidden in a crevice in the ground among tall beech trees, was so narrow that you had to squeeze your way in, and even Farid had to duck his head in the passage beyond it. The cave it led to was not much better. Other passages branched off, obviously leading even deeper underground. ‘Welcome to the Badger’s Earth!’ said Snapper, while the men sitting on the floor of the cave looked at them suspiciously. ‘Who says that only the Adderhead can dig deep into the ground? There are several men among us who toiled in his mines for years. They found out how you can nest far down in the earth and not have it fall on your head.’
The Prince was alone in a cave to one side of the others; only the bear was with him, and he looked tired. But at the sight of Dustfinger his face brightened, and the news they brought was not so much of a surprise to him as they had expected.
‘Ah yes, Sootbird!’ he said, and Snapper drew a finger across his throat at the mention of that name. ‘I ought to have asked myself much sooner how he could afford the alchemists’ powders he uses in his fire-eating shows. The few coins he earns in market places wouldn’t run to it. But unfortunately I didn’t have him watched until after the attack on the Secret Camp. He soon parted from the other prisoners we freed and met the Adderhead’s informers on the border. While those he betrayed are in the dungeons of the Castle of Night, and there’s nothing I can do for them! Here I am stuck in a forest swarming with soldiers. The Adderhead is assembling them up on the road that leads to Ombra.’
‘Cosimo?’ It was Roxane who spoke the name, and the Prince nodded.
‘Yes. I sent him three messengers with three warnings. One came back, but only to say that Cosimo laughed in his face. I’ll admit I don’t remember him as being quite so stupid. The year he spent away seems to have robbed him of his reason. He’s planning to make war on the Adderhead with an army of peasants. It’s as if we were to march against the Adderhead ourselves.’
‘We’d have a better chance,’ said Snapper.
‘Yes, I expect we would.’ The Black Prince sounded so discouraged that Farid’s heart failed him. Secretly, he had always put far more trust in the Prince than in Fenoglio’s words, but what could this troop of ragged men digging themselves holes in the forest like rabbits do against the Castle of Night?
The men brought them something to eat, and Roxane looked at Dustfinger’s leg. She treated the wound with an ointment that made it smell like spring in the cave for a moment. And Farid couldn’t help thinking of Meggie. He remembered a story that he had heard by a fire on a cold night in the desert. It was the tale of a thief who fell in love with a princess; he still remembered it very well. The two were so deeply in love that they could speak to each other over a distance of many miles. Each could hear the other’s thoughts even if walls separated them, each knew whether the other was sad or happy … but intently as Farid listened to his own feelings, he could sense nothing. He couldn’t even have said whether Meggie was still alive. She seemed to have gone away, gone away from his heart, from the world. When he brushed the tears from his eyes, he felt Dustfinger looking at him.
‘I’ll have to rest this wretched leg or it will never heal,’ he said quietly. ‘But we’ll go back. When the time comes …’
Roxane frowned, but she said nothing. The Prince and Dustfinger began talking so quietly that Farid had to move close to them to make anything out. Roxane put her head on Dustfinger’s lap and was soon asleep. But Farid curled up like a puppy beside him, closed his eyes, and listened to the two men.
The Black Prince wanted to know all about Silvertongue – whether the day of the execution was fixed, where he was held prisoner, how his wound was doing. Dustfinger told him what he knew. And he told him about the book that Meggie had offered the Adderhead as a ransom for her father.
‘A book to hold Death prisoner?’ The Prince laughed incredulously. ‘Has the Adderhead taken to believing in fairy-tales?’
Dustfinger did not reply to that. He said nothing about Fenoglio; he did not say that they were all part of a story that an old man had written. In his place Farid wouldn’t have said so either. The Blac
k Prince probably wouldn’t believe that there were words which could decide even his own fate, words like invisible paths from which you could not turn aside. The bear grunted in his sleep, and Roxane turned her head restlessly. She was holding Dustfinger’s hand as if she wanted to take him into her dreams.
‘You told the boy you’d go back,’ said the Prince. ‘You can come with us.’
‘Are you going to the Castle of Night? Why? Do you plan to storm it with these few men? Or tell the Adderhead that he’s caught the wrong man? With this on your nose?’ Dustfinger put his hand among the blankets lying on the floor, and brought out a bird mask. Bluejay feathers sewn to cracked leather. He put the mask on his scarred face.
‘Many of us have worn that mask before,’ said the Prince. ‘And now they’re going to hang another innocent man for the deeds we’ve done. I can’t allow that! This time it’s a bookbinder. Last time, after we attacked one of the silver transports, they hanged a charcoal-burner just because he had a scar on his arm. His wife is probably still mourning him.’
‘It’s not just the deeds you did. Fenoglio invented most of them!’ Dustfinger sounded irritated. ‘Damn it, Prince, you can’t save Silvertongue. You’ll only die too. Or do you seriously think the Adderhead will let him go just because you’ve turned yourself in?’
‘No, I’m not such a fool as that. But I must do something.’ The Prince put his hand in his bear’s mouth, as he so often did, and as always that hand, as if miraculously, came back intact from between the bear’s teeth.
‘Yes, yes, very well.’ Dustfinger sighed. ‘You and your unwritten rules. You don’t even know Silvertongue! How can you want to die for someone you don’t know?’
‘Who would you die for?’ the Prince asked in return.
Farid saw Dustfinger look at Roxane’s sleeping face – and then turn to him. He quickly closed his eyes.
‘You’d die for Roxane,’ he heard the Prince say.
‘Perhaps,’ said Dustfinger, and through his lashes Farid saw him trace Roxane’s dark brows with his finger. ‘Or perhaps not. Do you have many informers in the Castle of Night?’
‘Yes, indeed. Kitchen-maids, stable boys, even a few of the guards – although they come very expensive – and most useful of all, a falconer who sends me a message now and then by one of his clever birds. I shall hear at once when they’ve fixed the day of the execution. You know the Adderhead doesn’t have such things done in a market place or in front of the common people in the castle courtyard any more, not since you spoiled
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