Darius had taken two of the children on to his lap and was quietly telling them a story. The little ones often woke him in the middle of the night because he knew how to drive away their bad dreams with stories, and Darius patiently resigned himself to his task. He liked Fenoglio’s world, although it probably frightened him more than Elinor – but would he change it with his voice if Fenoglio asked him to? Would he read aloud what Meggie herself might not want to?
What was on the sheets of paper that Fenoglio had hidden so hastily from her and Elinor?
What did they say?
Go and look, Meggie, she told herself. You won’t be able to sleep anyway.
As she went round behind the wall marking off the place where Fenoglio slept, she heard Rosenquartz’s quiet snoring. His master was sitting with the Black Prince, but the glass man lay on the clothes under which Fenoglio had hidden the written pages. Meggie carefully picked him up, surprised as usual to feel how cold his transparent limbs were, and laid him on the cushion that Fenoglio had brought with him from Ombra. Yes, the pages were still exactly where he had hidden them from Elinor and her. There were more than a dozen, covered with words written in haste – scraps of sentences, questions, snippets of ideas that presumably made no sense to anyone but their author: the pen or the sword? Who does Violante love? Careful, the Piper … Who writes the three words? Meggie couldn’t decipher all of it, but on the very first page, in capital letters, were the words that made her heart beat faster: The Song of the Bluejay.
‘Just ideas, Meggie, as I told you. Only questions and ideas.’
Fenoglio’s voice made her spin round in such alarm that she almost dropped the pages on the sleeping Rosenquartz.
‘The Prince is rather better,’ said Fenoglio, as if she had come to him to hear that. ‘It really does look as if my words have kept someone alive for once, instead of killing them. But then again, perhaps he’s only alive because this story thinks he can still be useful to it. How would I know?’ He sat down beside Meggie with a sigh and gently took what he had written from her hand.
‘Your words saved Mo too, before all this,’ she said.
‘Yes, maybe.’ Fenoglio brushed his hand over the dry ink as if that would dust the words free of anything harmful. ‘All the same, you don’t trust them now any more than I do, do you?’
He was right. She had learnt both to love and to fear the words.
‘Why The Song of the Bluejay?’ she asked softly. ‘You can’t write any more about him! He’s my father now! Make up a new hero. I’m sure you can invent one. But let Mo be Mo again, just Mo and no one else.’
Fenoglio looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Are you sure that’s what your father himself wants? Or don’t you mind about that?’
‘Of course I do!’ Meggie’s voice was so sharp that Rosenquartz woke with a start. He looked around him with a bewildered expression – and fell asleep again. ‘But Mo certainly wouldn’t want you catching him in your words like a fly in a spider’s web. You’re changing him!’
‘Nonsense! Your father himself decided to be the Bluejay! I just wrote a few songs, and you’ve never read a single one of them aloud! So how would they change anything?’
Meggie bowed her head.
‘Oh no!’ Fenoglio looked at her, horrified. ‘You did read them?’
‘After Mo rode to the castle. To protect him, to make him strong and invulnerable. I read them aloud every day.’
‘Well, who’d have thought it! Then let’s hope the words in the songs work as well as those I’ve written for the Black Prince.’ Fenoglio put an arm around her shoulders, as he had often done when they were both Capricorn’s prisoners – in another world, in another story. Or was it the same story after all?
‘Meggie,’ he said quietly. ‘Even if you go on reading my songs aloud, even if you read them a dozen times a day – we both know they haven’t made your father the Bluejay. If I’d chosen him as the model for the Piper, do you think he’d have become a murderer? Of course not! Your father is like the Black Prince! He feels for the weak. I didn’t write that into his heart – it was always there! Your father didn’t ride to Ombra Castle because of my words but for the children asleep out there. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps this story is changing him, but he’s changing the story too! He’s telling the next part of it through what he does, Meggie, not because of what I write. Even if the right words might be able to help him …’
‘Protect him, Fenoglio!’ Meggie whispered. ‘Snapper’s after him, and he hates Mo.’
Fenoglio looked at her in surprise. ‘What do you mean? You actually want me to write something about him? Heavens, it was confusing enough when I had only my own characters to worry about!’
And you let them die without giving it a thought, Meggie told herself, but she didn’t say so aloud. After all, Fenoglio had saved the Black Prince today – and he had really feared for him. What would Dustfinger have said about this sudden fit of sympathy?
Rosenquartz started snoring again.
‘Hear that?’ asked Fenoglio. ‘Can you tell me how such a ridiculously small creature can snore at such volume? Sometimes I feel like stuffing him in the inkwell overnight just to get some peace and quiet!’
‘You’re a terrible old man!’ Meggie reached for the written pages again and ran her finger along the words jotted down there. ‘What does all this mean? The pen or the sword? Who writes the three words? Who does Violante love?’
‘Well, those are only some of the questions to be answered as this story goes on. All good stories hide behind a tangle of questions, and it isn’t easy to find out their dodges. And this story certainly has a mind of its own, but,’ and here Fenoglio lowered his voice as if the story itself could be eavesdropping, ‘if you ask the right questions it will whisper all its secrets to you. A story like this is a very talkative thing.’
Fenoglio read aloud what he had written. ‘The pen or the sword? A very important question. But I don’t know the answer yet. Perhaps it will be both. Well, however that may be … Who will write the three words? Your father let himself be taken prisoner to do that, but who knows … will the Adderhead really allow his daughter to trick him? Is Violante as clever as she thinks, and who does Her Ugliness love? I am afraid she’s fallen in love with your father. I think she fell in love with him a long time ago, before she ever met him.’
‘What?’ Meggie looked at him in astonishment. ‘What are you talking about? Violante isn’t much older than me and Brianna!’
‘Nonsense! Not in years, perhaps, but with all the experience she’s had, she’s at least three times your age. And like so many princes’ daughters she has a very romantic notion of robbers. Why do you think she made Balbulus illuminate all my Bluejay songs? And now he’s riding along beside her in flesh and blood. Not unromantic, is it?’
‘You’re dreadful!’ Meggie’s indignant voice woke Rosenquartz again.
‘Why? I’m only explaining what would have to be taken into account if I were really to try bringing this story to a good end, although it may have had different ideas itself for some time. Suppose I’m right? Suppose Violante loves the Bluejay and your father rejects her? Will she protect him from the Adderhead all the same? What role will Dustfinger take? Will the Piper see what game Violante is playing? Questions, nothing but questions! Believe you me, this story is a labyrinth! It looks as if there were several ways to go, but only one is right, and there’s a nasty surprise ready to punish you for every false step. This time, though, I’ll be prepared. This time I’ll see the traps it’s setting me, Meggie – and I’ll find the right way out. But for that I have to ask questions. For instance: where’s Mortola? I can’t get that question out of my mind. And what, by all inky devils, is Orpheus up to? Questions, more and more questions … but Fenoglio is back in the game again! And he’s saved the Black Prince!’
Every wrinkle in his old face expressed self-satisfaction.
Oh, he really was a terrible old man!
46
The Castle in the Lake
There is something about it that opens no door to words.
John Steinbeck,
Travels with Charlie
They rode north, further and further north. On the morning of the second day, Violante had Mo’s hands, bound until now for fear of her father’s spies, loosened after one of her soldiers told her that otherwise the Bluejay would soon lose the use of them. More than fifty soldiers had been waiting for them barely a mile out of Ombra. Hardly any of them were older than Farid, and they all looked as determined as if they would follow Violante to the end of the world.
With every mile they put behind them the woods were darker and the valleys deeper. The hills became mountains. Snow already lay on some of the passes, so that they had to dismount and lead their horses, and on the second night rain fell, covering the white snow with treacherous ice. The mountain range through which they were riding seemed almost uninhabited. Only very occasionally did Mo see a village in the distance, an isolated farmhouse or a charcoal-burner’s hut. It was almost as if Fenoglio had forgotten to populate this part of his world.
Dustfinger joined them when they first stopped to rest. He did it as naturally as if nothing were simpler than to pick up the trail that Violante’s soldiers were so carefully obliterating. The soldiers looked at him in the same respectful but wary way as they looked at Mo. Bluejay … Fire-Dancer … of course they knew the songs, and their eyes asked: are these men made of the same flesh as us?
For himself, Mo knew the answer – although he sometimes wondered whether by now ink, rather than blood, flowed through his veins. He wasn’t so sure about Dustfinger. The horses shied when they saw him, although he could calm them with a whisper. He hardly slept or ate, and he plunged his hands into fire as if it were water. But when he talked about Roxane or Farid, there was human love in his words, and when he looked round for his daughter surreptitiously, as if he were ashamed of it, it was with the eyes of a mortal father.
It was good to ride, just to ride on while the Inkworld unfurled before them like elaborately folded paper. And with every mile Mo doubted more and more that all this had really been made by Fenoglio’s words. Wasn’t it more likely that the old man had simply been a reporter describing a tiny part of this world, a fraction of it that they had long ago left behind? Strange mountains rimmed the horizon, and Ombra was far away. The Wayless Wood seemed as distant as Elinor’s garden, the Castle of Night nothing but a dark dream.
‘Have you ever been in these mountains before?’ he once asked Dustfinger, who rode beside him in silence most of the time. Sometimes Mo thought he could hear the other man’s thoughts. Roxane, they whispered. And Dustfinger’s eyes kept wandering to his daughter, who was riding at Violante’s side and didn’t deign to give her father a glance.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ replied Dustfinger, and it was the same as every time Mo spoke to him: it seemed as if he were calling him back from that place for which there were no words. Dustfinger didn’t talk about it, and Mo asked no questions. He knew what the other man was thinking. The White Women had touched them both, sowing in their hearts a longing for that place, a constant, wordless, bittersweet longing.
Dustfinger looked over his shoulder as if in search of a familiar view. ‘I never rode north in the old days. The mountains frightened me,’ he said, and smiled as if he were smiling at his old self, who had known so little of the world that a few mountains could scare him. ‘I was always drawn to the sea. The sea and the south.’
Then he fell silent again. Dustfinger had never been very talkative, and his journey to the land of Death hadn’t changed that. So Mo left him to his silence and wondered, once more, whether the Black Prince had heard yet from Farid that the Bluejay was no longer in Ombra, and how Meggie and Resa had taken the news. It was so hard to leave them further behind with every step his horse took, even if he did it knowing that the further away he was, the safer they were. Don’t think about them, he told himself. Don’t wonder when or whether you’ll see them again. Tell yourself the Bluejay never had a wife or a daughter. Just for a while.
Violante turned in the saddle as if to make sure she hadn’t lost him. Brianna whispered something to her, and Violante smiled. Her Ugliness had a beautiful smile, although you seldom saw it. It showed how young she still was.
They were riding up a densely wooded hill. Sunlight fell through the branches of the almost leafless trees, and in spite of the snow covering the moss and roots further up the slopes there was still a smell of autumn here, of rotting leaves and the last fading flowers. Fairies, drowsy with the onset of winter, flitted through the grass, which was yellow now and stiff with frost. Brownie tracks crossed their path, and Mo thought he heard wild glass men scurrying about under the bushes that grew on the slope above them. One of Violante’s soldiers began to sing quietly, and the sound of his young voice made Mo feel as if everything he had left behind were fading: his concern for Resa and Meggie, the Black Prince, the children of Ombra and the threat of the Piper, even his bargain with Death. There was only the path, the endless path winding up into the strange mountains, and the desire in his heart that he couldn’t tame, a wish to ride further and further on into this bewildering world. What did the castle to which Violante was leading them look like? Were there really giants in the mountains? Where did the path end? Did it ever end at all? Not for the Bluejay, a voice inside him whispered, and for a moment his heart beat like the heart of a ten-year-old boy, as fearless and as fresh.
He sensed Dustfinger’s eyes resting on him. ‘You like this world of mine.’
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ Mo himself could hear the guilt in his voice.
Dustfinger laughed louder than Mo had ever heard him laugh before. He looked so different without the scars – as if the White Women had healed his heart as well as his face. ‘And you’re ashamed of it!’ he said. ‘Why? Because you still think everything here is just made of words? It is indeed a strange thing: look at you! Anyone might think you belonged here as much as me. Are you sure someone didn’t just read you over into that other world of yours?’
Mo didn’t know whether or not he liked that idea. ‘Fairly sure,’ he answered.
The wind blew a leaf against his chest. Tiny limbs hung from it, a frightened face, pale brown like the leaf itself. Orpheus’s leaf-men had obviously spread quickly. The strange creature bit Mo’s finger when he reached for it, and the next gust of wind blew it away.
‘Did you see them last night too?’ Dustfinger turned in the saddle. The soldier riding behind them avoided his eyes. There is no land more foreign than the realm of Death.
‘See who?’
Dustfinger responded with a mocking smile.
There had been two of them. Two White Women. They had been standing among the trees just before daybreak.
‘Why do you think they’re following us? To remind us that we still belong to them?’
Dustfinger merely shrugged his shoulders, as if the answer wasn’t important and the question was the wrong one. ‘I see them every time I close my eyes. Dustfinger! they whisper. We miss you. Does your heart hurt again? Do you feel the burden of time? Shall we lift it from you? Shall we make you forget once more? I tell them no. Let me feel all of it a little longer. Who knows, perhaps you’ll be taking me back soon anyway. Me,’ he added, looking at Mo, ‘and the Bluejay.’
Dark clouds were gathering above them, as if they had been waiting beyond the mountains, and the horses grew restless, but Dustfinger calmed them with a few quiet words.
‘What do they whisper to you?’ he asked Mo, looking at him as if he knew the answer already.
‘Ah.’ It was difficult to talk about the White Women. As difficult as if they held his tongue down as soon as he tried. ‘Usually they simply stand there as if they were waiting for me. And if they do speak to me they always say the same thing: only Death will make you immortal, Bluejay.’
He hadn’t told anyone that before, not the Black Prince or Resa or Meggie.
What would be the point? The words would only have frightened them.
But Dustfinger knew the White Women – and the one they served. ‘Immortal,’ he repeated. ‘Yes, they like to say such things, and no doubt they’re right. But what about you? Are you in a hurry for immortality?’
Mo could find no answer for that.
Ahead, Violante turned her horse around. The path had brought them to the crest of a mountain, and far below lay a lake with a castle reflected in its waters, drifting on the ripples like a stone fruit floating a long way from the bank. Its walls were as dark as the spruce trees that grew on the slopes of the surrounding mountains, and an almost endless bridge, narrow as a ribbon of stone and supported on countless piers, led over the water to land, where two ruined watchtowers stood among a few abandoned huts.
‘The Impregnable Bridge!’ whispered one of the soldiers, and all the stories he had heard about this place were echoed in that whisper.
It began to snow again, tiny, wet flakes that disappeared in the dark lake as if it were devouring them. Violante’s young soldiers stared at their destination in dismal silence. It was not a very inviting sight. But their mistress’s face lit up like a young girl’s.
‘What do you say, Bluejay?’ she asked Mo, putting her gold-framed glasses on her nose. ‘Look at it. My mother described this castle to me so often that I feel as if I’d grown up here myself. I only wish these glasses were stronger,’ she added impatiently, ‘but even from here I can see that it’s beautiful!’
Beautiful? Mo would have called the castle sinister. But perhaps, to the Adderhead’s daughter, that was one and the same thing.
‘Now do you see why I’ve brought you here?’ Violante asked. ‘No one can take this castle. Even the giants couldn’t harm it when they still came to this valley. The lake is too deep, and the bridge is just wide enough for a single horseman.’
The path leading down to the banks of the lake was so steep that they had to lead their horses. It was as dark under the dense spruce trees as if their needles ate up the daylight, and Mo felt his heart grow heavy again. But Violante walked on impatiently, and the rest of them could hardly keep up with her as they passed through the trees that grew so close together.
‘Night-Mares!’ whispered Dustfinger, when the silence among the trees grew as dark as the needles that covered the ground. ‘Black Bogles, Red-Caps … everything that would terrify Farid lives here. Let’s hope this castle really is uninhabited.’
When they were standing on the banks of the lake at last, mist hung above the water, and the bridge and the castle rose from the white vapour as if they had just been born out of it. Stony growths from the depths of the water. The huts on the bank looked much more real now, although it was obvious that they had been standing empty for a very long time. Mo led his horse to one of the watchtowers. The door was charred, the interior black with soot.
Violante came to his side. ‘A nephew of my grandfather’s was the last who tried to capture this castle. He never got across the lake. My grandfather bred predatory fish in it. They’re said to be larger than horses, and they crave human flesh. The lake guards this castle better than any army could. There were never many soldiers here, but my grandfather always made sure there were enough provisions to withstand a siege. Cattle were kept in the castle, and he had vegetables grown and fruit trees planted in several of the inner courtyards. All the same, so my mother told me, she had to eat fish more often than she liked.’
Violante laughed, but Mo looked out over the dark water uneasily. It was as if, through the drifting swathes of mist, he saw all the dead soldiers who had tried to cross the Impregnable Bridge. The lake was like
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