What a terrible liar the old man was. You'd have thought someone who made up stories could tell better lies.
However that might be, Mo himself was no good at lying, either, so he kept quiet, silently cursing his curiosity, his impatience, his recklessness, while Balbulus went on staring at him. What had made him think he could simply discard the part he was expected to play in this world by putting on a few black clothes? What had made him think he could go back to being Mortimer the bookbinder for a few hours here in Ombra Castle?
"Oh, be quiet, Inkweaver!" Balbulus snapped at Fenoglio. "Just how much of a fool do you think I am? Of course I knew who he was the moment you mentioned him. A true master of his art.' Isn't that how you put it? Words can be very treacherous, as you really should know by now."
Fenoglio did not reply. Mo felt for the knife that the Black Prince had given him when they set out from Mount Adder. "From now on you must always have it with you," the Prince had told him, "even when you lie down to sleep." Mo had followed his advice, but what use would a knife be to him here? He'd be dead before he reached the foot of the stairs. For all he knew, maybe Jacopo himself had immediately realized who was standing in front of him and had raised the alarm, too. Come quick, the Bluejay's flown into the cage of his own free will!
I'm sorry, Meggie, thought Mo. Your father is an idiot. You rescued him from the Castle of Night only for him to get himself captured in another castle. Why hadn't he listened to her when she saw Sootbird in the marketplace?
Had Fenoglio ever written a song about the Bluejay's fear? The fear didn't come when he had to fight, not then. It came when he thought of fetters, chains, and dungeons, and desperation behind barred doors. Like now. He tasted fear on his tongue, felt it in his guts and his knees. At least an illuminator's workshop is the right place for a bookbinder to die, he thought. But the Bluejay was back now, cursing the bookbinder for being so reckless.
"Do you know what particularly impressed Taddeo? " Balbulus flicked a little powdered paint off his sleeve. Yellow as pollen, it clung to the dark blue velvet. "Your hands. He thought it astonishing that hands that knew so much about killing could treat the pages of a book with such care. And you do have beautiful hands. Look at mine, now!" Balbulus spread his fingers and examined them with distaste. "A peasant's hands. Large and coarse. All the same, would you like to see what they can do?"
And at last he stood aside and waved them over, like a conjuror raising the curtain on his show. Fenoglio tried to hold Mo back, but if he'd fallen into the trap, then he meant at least to taste the bait that would cost him his life.
There they were. Illuminated pages even better than those he had seen in the Castle of Night. Balbulus had adorned one of them with nothing but his own initial. The B spread right across the parchment, clad in gold and dark green and sheltering a nest full of fire-elves. On the page beside it, flowers and leaves twined around a picture hardly the size of a playing card. Mo followed the tendrils with his eyes, discovered seed-heads, fire-elves, strange fruits, tiny creatures that he couldn't name. The picture so skillfully framed showed two men surrounded by fairies. They were standing outside a village, with a crowd of ragged men behind them. One of the two was black and had a bear by his side. The other wore a bird mask, and the knife in his hand was a bookbinder's knife.
"The Black Hand and the White Hand of Justice. The Prince and the Bluejay." Balbulus looked at his work with barely concealed pride. "I'll probably have to make some changes. You're even taller than I thought, and your bearing… But what am I talking about? I'm sure you're not anxious for this picture to resemble you too much – although of course it's meant only for Violante's eyes. Our new governor will never see it, because luckily there's no reason for him to toil up all the stairs to my workshop. To the Milksop's way of thinking, the value of a book is defined by the amount of wine it will buy. And if Violante doesn't hide it well, he'll soon have exchanged it – like all the other books my hands have made – for wine or for a new silver-powdered wig. He can think himself truly lucky that I'm Balbulus the illuminator and not the Bluejay, or I'd be making parchment of his perfumed skin."
The hatred in Balbulus's voice was black as the night painted in his pictures, and for a moment Mo saw in those expressionless eyes a flash of the fire that made the illuminator such a master of his art.
Footsteps resounded on the stairs, heavy and regular, footsteps of a kind that Mo had heard only too often in the Castle of Night. Soldiers' footsteps.
"What a pity. I really would have liked a longer chat!" Balbulus heaved a regretful sigh as the door was pushed open. "But I'm afraid there are persons of much higher rank in this castle who want to talk to you."
Three soldiers took Mo between them. Fenoglio watched in dismay as they tied his hands.
"You can go, Inkweaver!" said Balbulus.
"But this – this is all a terrible misunderstanding!" Fenoglio was trying really hard not to let his voice betray his fear, but even Mo wasn't deceived.
"Perhaps you shouldn't have described him in such detail in your songs," Balbulus observed wearily. "To the best of my knowledge that's been his undoing once before. By way of contrast, look at my pictures. I always show him with his mask on!"
Mo heard Fenoglio still protesting as the soldiers pushed him down the stairs. Resa! No, this time he didn't have to fear for her. She was safe with Roxane at the moment, and the Strong Man was with her. But what about Meggie? Had Farid taken her to Roxane's farm yet? The Black Prince would look after both of them. He'd promised that often enough. And, who knew, perhaps they'd find their way back – back to Elinor in the old house crammed with books right up to the roof, back to the world where flesh and blood wasn't made of letters.
Mo tried not to think of where he would be by then. He knew just one thing: The Bluejay and the bookbinder would die the same death.
8. ROXANE'S PAIN
"Hope," said Sleet bitterly. "I've learned to live without it."
Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell, Midnight Over Sanctaphrax
Resa often rode over to see Roxane, although it was a long way and the roads around Ombra grew more perilous with every passing day. But the Strong Man was a good bodyguard, and Mo let her go because he knew how many years she had lived in this world already, surviving even without him and the Strong Man.
Resa and Roxane had made friends tending the wounded together in the mine below Mount Adder, and their long journey through the Wayless Wood with a dead man had only deepened their friendship. Roxane never asked why Resa had wept almost as much as she did on the night when Dustfinger struck his bargain with the White Women. They had become friends not through talking, but by sharing experiences for which there were no words.
It was Resa who had gone to Roxane by night when she heard her sobbing under the trees far from the rest of the company, Resa who had embraced and comforted her, although she knew there was no comfort for the other woman's sorrow. She did not tell Roxane about the day when Mortola shot Mo, leaving her alone with the fear that she had lost him forever. Through all those many days and nights when she sat in a dark cave cooling his hot, feverish brow, she had only imagined how it would feel never to see him again, never to touch him again, never to hear his voice again. But the fear of pain was quite different from pain itself. Mo was alive. He talked to her, slept at her side, put his arms around her. Whereas Dustfinger would never put his arms around Roxane again. Not in this life. Roxane had nothing but memories left, and perhaps memories were sometimes worse than nothing.
And she knew that Roxane was feeling that pain for the second time. The first time, so the Black Prince had told Resa, the fire didn't even leave Roxane her dead husband's body. Perhaps that was why she guarded Dustfinger's body so jealously. No one knew the place where she had taken him, to visit him when longing wouldn't let her sleep.
It was when Mo's fever kept returning at night, and he was sleeping badly, that Resa first rode to Roxane's farm. She herself had often had to gather pla
nts when she was in Mortola's service, but only plants that killed. Roxane had taught her to find their healing sisters. She told her which leaves were good for sleeplessness, which roots relieved the pain of an old wound, and that in this world it was wise to leave a dish of milk or an egg if you picked something from a tree, to please the wood-elves living in it. Many of the plants were strange to Resa, with unfamiliar odors that made her dizzy. Others she had often seen in Elinor's garden without guessing what power lay hidden in their inconspicuous stems and leaves. The Inkworld had taught her to see her own world more clearly and reminded her of something Mo had said long ago: "I think we should sometimes read stories where everything's different from our world, don't you agree? There's nothing's like it for teaching us to wonder why trees are green and not red, and why we have five fingers rather than six."
Of course Roxane knew a remedy for Resa's sickness. She was just telling her what herbs would help the flow of her milk later on when Fenoglio, with Meggie and Farid, rode into the yard. Resa asked herself why the old man and her daughter wore such a guilty look on their faces. Of course she didn't guess the reason.
Roxane put her arms around Resa as Fenoglio, his voice faltering, told them what had happened. But Resa didn't know what to feel. Fear? Despair? Anger? Yes, anger. That was what she felt first of all. She was angry with Mo for being so reckless.
"How could you have let him go?" she snapped at Meggie, so sharply that the Strong Man jumped. The words were out before she could regret them. But her anger stayed with her: Because Mo had gone to the castle even though he knew it was dangerous. And because he had done it behind her back. His daughter had been allowed to come with him, but to his wife he hadn't said a word.
Roxane stroked Resa's hair as she began to sob. Tears of rage, tears of fear. She was tired of feeling afraid.
Afraid of knowing Roxane's pain.
9. A GIVEAWAY
"You're going to stop cruelty?" she asked. "And greediness, and all those things? I don't think you could. You're very clever, but, oh no, you couldn't do anything like that."
Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan
A dungeon awaited him, what else? And then? Mo remembered the death that the Adderhead had promised him only too clearly. It could take days, many days and nights. The fearlessness that had been his constant companion over the last few weeks, the cold calm that hatred and the White Women had implanted in him – they were gone as if he had never felt them. Since meeting the White Women he no longer feared Death itself. It seemed to him familiar and at times even desirable. But dying was another matter, and so was imprisonment, which he feared almost more. He remembered, only too well, the despair waiting behind barred doors and the silence where even your own breath was painfully loud, every thought a torment, and where every hour tempted you simply to beat your head against the wall until you no longer heard and felt anything.
Mo had been unable to bear closed doors and windows since the days he had spent in the tower of the Castle of Night. Meggie seemed to have shed the fear of confinement like a dragonfly shedding its skin, but Resa felt as he did, and whenever fear woke one of them, they could find sleep again only in each other's arms.
Please, not a dungeon again.
That was what made fighting so easy – you could always choose death rather than captivity.
Perhaps he could seize a sword from one of the soldiers in one of the dark corridors, far from the other guards on duty. For guards stood everywhere with the Milksop's emblem on their chests. He had to clench his fists to keep his fingers from putting that idea into practice. Not yet, Mortimer, he told himself. Another flight of steps, burning torches on both sides. Of course, they were leading him down into the depths of the castle. Dungeons always lay high above or far below. Resa had told him about the cells in the Castle of Night, so deep in the mountainside that she had often thought she wouldn't be able to breathe in them. They weren't pushing and hitting him yet as the soldiers there had done. Would they be more civil when it came to torturing and quartering him, too? Down and down they went, step by step. One in front of him, two behind him, breathing on the back of his neck. Now, Mortimer! Try it now! There are only three of them! Their faces were so young – children's faces, beardless, frightened under their assumed ferocity. Since when had children been allowed to play soldiers? Always, he answered himself. They make the best soldiers because they still think they're immortal.
Only three of them. But even if he killed them quickly they would shout, bringing more men down on him.
The stairs ended at a door. The soldier in front of him opened it. Now! What are you waiting for? Mo flexed his Fingers, getting ready. His heart was beating a little faster, as if to set the pace for him.
"Bluejay." The soldier turned to him, bowed, and left. There was a look of embarrassment on his face. In surprise, Mo scrutinized the other two. Admiration, fear, respect. The same mixture that he had met with so often, the result not of anything he had done himself, but of Fenoglio's songs. Hesitantly, he went through the open doorway – and only then did he realize where they had brought him.
The vault of the princes of Ombra. Mo had read about that, too. Fenoglio had found fine words for this place of the dead, words that sounded as if the old man dreamed of lying in such a vault himself someday. But in Fenoglio's book the most magnificent sarcophagus of all hadn't yet been there. Candles burned at Cosimo's feet, tall, honey-colored candles. Their perfume sweetened the air, and his stone image, lying on a bed of alabaster roses, was smiling as if in a happy dream.
Beside the sarcophagus, very erect as if to compensate for the lack of light, stood a young woman in black, her hair drawn severely back.
The soldiers bowed their heads to her and murmured her name.
Violante. The Adderhead's daughter. She was still known as Her Ugliness, although the birthmark that had earned her the name was only a faint shadow on her cheek now – it had begun to fade, people said, on the day when Cosimo came back from the dead. Only to return there soon.
Her Ugliness.
What a nickname. How did she live with it? But Violante's subjects used it with affection. Rumor had it that she secretly had leftovers from the princely kitchen taken to the starving villages by night, and fed those in need in Ombra by selling silverware and horses from the princely stables, even when the Milksop punished her for it by shutting her up in her rooms for days on end. She spoke up for those condemned to death and taken off to the gallows and for those who vanished into dungeons – even though no one listened to her. Violante was powerless in her own castle, as the Black Prince had told Mo often enough. Even her son didn't do as she told him, but the Milksop was afraid of her all the same, for she was still his immortal brother-in-law's daughter.
Why had they brought him to her, here in the place where her dead husband lay at rest? Did she want to earn the price put on the Bluejay's head before the Milksop could claim it?
"Does he have the scar?" She didn't take her eyes off his face.
One of the soldiers took an awkward step toward Mo, but he pushed up his sleeve, just as the little girl had the night before. The scar left by the teeth of Basta's dogs long ago, in another life – Fenoglio had made a story out of it, and sometimes Mo felt as if the old man had drawn the scar on his skin with his own hands, in pale ink.
Violante came up to him. The heavy fabric of her dress trailed on the stone floor. She was really small, a good deal smaller than Meggie. When she put her hand to the embroidered pouch at her belt Mo expected to see the beryl that Meggie had told him about, but Violante took out a pair of glasses. Ground glass lenses, a gold frame – Orpheus's glasses must have been the model for this pair. It couldn't have been easy to find a master capable of grinding such lenses.
"Yes, indeed. The famous scar. A giveaway." The glasses enlarged Violante's eyes. They were not like her father's. "So Balbulus was right. Do you know that my father has raised the price on your head yet again?"
Mo hid the scar under his
sleeve once more. "Yes, I heard about that."
"But you came here to see Balbulus's pictures all the same. I like that. Obviously, what the songs say about you is true: You don't know what fear is; maybe you even love danger."
She looked him up and down as thoroughly as if she were comparing him with the man in the pictures. But when he returned her glance she blushed – whether out of embarrassment or anger because he ventured to look her in the face, Mo couldn't have said. She turned abruptly, went over to her husband's tomb, and ran her fingers over the stone roses as delicately as if she were trying to bring them to life.
"I would have done exactly the same in your place. I've always thought we were like each other. Ever since I heard the first song about you from the strolling players. This world breeds misfortune like a pond breeds midges, but it's possible to fight back. We both know that. I was already stealing gold from the taxes in the treasury before anyone sang those songs about you. For a new infirmary, a beggars' refuge, or somewhere for orphans to go… I just made sure that one of the administrators was suspected of stealing the gold. They all deserve to hang anyway."
How defiantly she tilted her chin as she turned back to him. Almost the way Meggie sometimes did. She seemed very old and very young at the same time. What was she planning? Would she hand him over to her father, to feed the poor with the price on his head, or so that she could buy enough parchment and paints for Balbulus at last? Everyone knew that she had even pawned her wedding ring to buy him brushes. Well, what could be more suitable? thought Mo. A bookbinder's skin, sold for new books.
One of the soldiers was still standing right behind him. The other two were guarding the door, obviously the only way out of the vault. Three. There were only three of them.
"I know all the songs about you. I had them written down." The eyes behind the lenses in her glasses were gray and curiously light. As if you could see that they weren't very strong. They certainly didn't resemble the Adderhead's lizardlike eyes. She must have inherited them from her mother. The book in which Death was held captive had been bound in the room where she and her ugly little daughter used to live after they fell into disfavor. Did Violante still remember that room? Surely she did.
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