"The new songs aren't very good," she went on, "but Balbulus makes up for that with his pictures. Now that my father's made the Milksop lord of this castle, Balbulus usually works on them at night, and I keep the books with me so that they don't get sold like all the others. I read them when the Milksop is making merry in the great hall. I read them out loud so that the words will drown out all that noise: the drunken bawling, the silly laughter, Tullio crying when they've been chasing him again… And every word fills my heart with hope, the hope that you will stand there in the hall someday, with the Black Prince at your side, and kill them all. One by one. While I stand beside you with my feet in their blood."
Violante's soldiers didn't move a muscle. They seemed to be used to hearing such words in their mistress's mouth.
She took a step toward him. "I've had people searching for you ever since I heard from my father's men that you were in hiding on this side of the forest. I wanted to find you before they did, but you're good at staying out of sight. No doubt the fairies and brownies hide you, as the songs say, and the moss-women heal your wounds…"
Mo couldn't help it. He had to smile. For a moment Violante's face had reminded him so much of Meggie's when she was telling one of her favorite stories.
"Why do you smile?" Violante frowned, and for a moment he glimpsed the Adderhead in her light eyes. Careful, Mortimer.
"Oh, I know. You're thinking: She's only a woman, hardly more than a girl. She has no power, no husband, no soldiers. You're right, most of my soldiers lie dead in the forest because my husband was in too much of a hurry to go to war against my father. But I'm not so stupid! 'Balbulus,' I said, spread word that you're looking for a new bookbinder. Perhaps we'll find the Bluejay that way. If what Taddeo said is true, he'll come just to see your pictures. And then, when he's in my castle, my prisoner, just as he was once a prisoner in the Castle of Night, I'll ask him to help me kill my immortal father."
Violante's lips smiled in amusement as Mo looked sideways at her soldiers. "Don't look so anxious! My soldiers are devoted to me. My father's men killed their brothers and fathers in the Wayless Wood!"
"Your father won't be immortal for very much longer." The words came from Mo's lips unthinkingly; he hadn't meant to speak them aloud. Idiot, he told himself. Have you forgotten who this is facing you, just because something about her reminds you of your daughter?
But Violante smiled. "Then what my father's librarian told me is indeed true," she said, as softly as if the dead could overhear her. "When my father began feeling unwell he thought at first that one of his maids had poisoned him."
"Mortola." Whenever Mo said her name he pictured her raising her gun.
"You know her?" Violante seemed as reluctant as he was to utter that name. "My father had her tortured to make her say what poison she'd given him, and when she didn't confess she was thrown into a dungeon under the Castle of Night, but she disappeared one day. I hope she's dead. They say she poisoned my mother." Violante stroked the black fabric of her dress as if she had been speaking of the quality of the silk and not her mother's death. "Whether or not that's true, my father knows by now who's to blame for the way his flesh is rotting on his bones. Soon after your flight, Taddeo noticed that the Book was beginning to smell strange. And the pages were swelling. The clasps concealed it for a while, which presumably was your intention, but now they can hardly hold the wooden covers together. Poor Taddeo almost died of fear when he saw the state the Book was in. Apart from my father himself, he was the only one who was permitted to touch it and who knew where it was hidden… He even knows the three words that would have to be written in it! My father would have killed anyone else for possessing that knowledge. But he trusts the old man more than anyone else in the world, perhaps because Taddeo was his tutor for many years and often protected him from my grandfather when he was a child. Who knows? Of course, Taddeo didn't tell my father what state the Book was in. He'd have hung even his old tutor on the spot for bringing him such bad news. No, Taddeo secretly summoned every bookbinder between the Wayless Wood and the sea to the Castle of Night, and when none of them could help him, he took Balbulus's advice to bind a second book looking just like the first, which he showed my father when he asked for it. But meanwhile my father was feeling worse every day. Everyone knows about it by now. His breath stinks like stagnant pond water, and he's freezing, as if the White Women's breath is already wrapping him in their deadly cold. What a revenge, Bluejay! Endless life with endless suffering. That doesn't sound like the doing of an angel, more like the work of a very clever devil. Which of the two are you?"
Mo didn't answer. Don't trust her, a voice inside him said. But his heart, strangely enough, told him something else.
"As I said, it was a long time before my father suspected anyone but Mortola," Violante went on. "His suspicions even made him forget his search for you. But a day came when one of the bookbinders Taddeo had summoned to his aid told him what was wrong with the Book, presumably hoping to be rewarded with silver for the news. My father had him killed – after all, no one must know about the threat to his immortality – but word soon spread. Now there's hardly a bookbinder left alive in Argenta. Every one of them who couldn't cure the book went to the gallows. And Taddeo has been thrown into the dungeons under the Castle of Night. 'So that your flesh will rot away slowly like mine,' my father's supposed to have said. I don't know if Taddeo is still alive. He's old, and the dungeons of the Castle of Night are enough to kill much younger men."
Mo felt sick, just as he had in the Castle of Night when he was binding the White Book to save Resa, Meggie, and himself. Even then he had guessed that he was buying their lives at the cost of many others. Poor, timid Taddeo. Mo saw him in his mind's eye, crouching in one of those windowless dungeons. And he saw the bookbinders, he saw them very clearly, desolate figures swaying back and forth high in the air… He closed his eyes.
"Well, imagine that. Just as it says in the songs," he heard Violante say. "'A heart more full of pity than any other beats in the Bluejay's breast.' You're really sorry that other people had to die for what you did. Don't be foolish. My father loves killing. If it hadn't been the bookbinders he'd have hung someone else! And in the end it wasn't a bookbinder but an alchemist who found a way to preserve the book. It's rumored to be a very unappetizing way, and it couldn't reverse the harm you'd already done, but at least the book isn't rotting anymore – and my father is looking for you harder than ever, because he still thinks only you can lift the curse you hid so skillfully between the empty pages. Don't wait for him to find you! Steal a march on him! Ally yourself with me. You and I, Bluejay – his daughter and the robber who has already tricked him once. We can be his downfall! Help me to kill him. Together we can do it easily!"
How she was looking at him – expectant as a child who has just told her dearest wish. Come with me, Bluejay, let's kill my father! What does a man have to do to his daughter, wondered Mo, to make her want something like that?
"Not all daughters love their fathers, Bluejay," said Violante, as if she had read his thoughts, just as Meggie so often did. "They say your daughter loves you dearly – and you love her. But my father will kill them, your daughter, your wife, everyone you love, and last of all he'll kill you, too. He won't let you go on making him a laughingstock to his subjects. He'll find you even if you go on hiding as cleverly as a fox in its den, because with every breath he draws, his own body reminds him of what you've done to him. Sunlight hurts his skin; his limbs are so bloated that he can't ride anymore. He even finds walking difficult. Day and night he pictures what he wants to do to you and yours. He's made the Piper write songs about your death, such terrible songs that anyone who hears them can't sleep, or so they say, and soon he'll send the silver-nosed man to sing them here as well – and to hunt you down. The Piper has been waiting a long time for that order, and he'll find you. His bait will be your pity for the poor. He'll kill so many of them that their blood will lure you out of the forest at last. But
if I help you -"
A voice interrupted Violante, a childish voice that was clearly used to getting a hearing from adults. It echoed down the endless stairway leading to the vault.
"He's bound to be with her, you just wait and see!" How excited Jacopo sounded! "Balbulus is a very good liar, especially when he's lying for my mother. But when he does it he plucks at his sleeves and looks even more pleased with himself than usual. My grandfather's taught me to notice that kind of thing."
The soldiers at the door looked inquiringly at their mistress, but Violante took no notice of them. She was listening to Jacopo outside the door, when another voice was heard and Mo saw, for the first time, a trace of fear in her fearless eyes. He knew the voice himself, and his hand went to the knife at his belt. Sootbird sounded as if the fire that he played with so clumsily had singed his vocal cords. "His voice is like a warning," Resa had once said of him, "a warning to be on guard against his pretty face and the eternal smile on it."
"What a clever lad you are, Jacopo!" Did the boy hear the sarcasm in his voice? "But why don't we go to your mother's rooms?"
"Because she wouldn't be stupid enough to have him taken there. My mother is clever, too, much cleverer than any of you!"
Violante went up to Mo and took his arm. "Put the knife away!" she whispered. "The Bluejay won't die in this castle. I refuse to hear that song. Come with me."
She beckoned to the soldier standing behind Mo – a tall, broad-shouldered young man who held his sword as if he hadn't used it very often – and made her purposeful way past the stone coffins, as if this wasn't the first time she had had to hide someone from her son. More than a dozen tombs stood in the vault. Sleeping stone figures lay on top of most of them, with swords on their breasts, dogs at their feet, pillows of marble or granite under their heads. Violante hurried past them without a glance until she stopped by a coffin with a plain stone lid cracked right down the middle, as if the dead man inside had once pushed it open.
"If the Bluejay isn't here we'll go and scare Balbulus a bit, shall we?" There was jealousy in Jacopo's voice when he uttered Balbulus's name, as if he were talking about an older brother whom his mother preferred to him. "We'll go back and you can make fire lick around those books of his!"
The soldier's young face flushed red with effort as he heaved the lower part of the coffin lid aside. Mo kept his knife in his hand as he climbed into the sarcophagus. There was no dead body in it, but all the same Mo felt he could hardly breathe as he stretched out in the cold, cramped space. The coffin had clearly been made for a smaller man. Had Violante thrown his bones away so that she could hide her spies inside it? The darkness was almost total when the soldier pushed the cracked lid back into place. A little light and air came in through a few holes forming a flower pattern. Breathe steadily, Mo, breathe calmly, he told himself. He still had the knife in his hand; it was a pity none of the stone swords the dead were holding would be any use. "Do you really think it's worth risking your own skin for a few painted goatskins?" Battista had inquired when he asked him to make the clothes and the belt. What a fool you are, Mortimer. Hasn't this world done enough to show you how dangerous it is? But Balbulus's painted goatskins had been very beautiful.
A knock. A bolt was pushed back. The voices came to his ears more distinctly now. Footsteps. Mo tried to peer through the holes, but he could see only another coffin, and the black hem of Violante's dress disappearing as she walked quickly away. His eyes weren't going to help him. He let his head sink back onto the cold stone and listened. How loud his breathing was. Could there be any sound more suspicious here among the dead?
Suppose it isn't just by chance that Sootbird has turned up now, something inside him whispered. Suppose Violante was only setting a trap for you? "Not all daughters love their fathers." Suppose Her Ugliness was planning to give her father a very special present all the same? "Look who I've caught for you. The Bluejay. He was disguised as a crow. I wonder who he thought he'd fool that way?"
"Your Highness!" Sootbird's voice echoed through the vault as if he were standing right beside the coffin where Mo lay. "Forgive us for disturbing you in your grief, but your son wants me to meet a visitor you received today. He insists on it. He thinks the man is an old and very dangerous acquaintance of mine."
"A visitor?" Violante's voice sounded as cool as the stone beneath Mo's head. "The only visitor down here is Death, and it's not much use warning anyone against Death, is it?"
Sootbird laughed uneasily. "No, certainly not, but Jacopo was talking about a flesh-and-blood visitor, a bookbinder, tall, dark hair…"
"Balbulus was interviewing a bookbinder today," Violante replied. "He's been looking for one for a long time now. Someone who knows his trade better than the bookbinders of Ombra."
What was that noise? Of course. Jacopo hopping about on the flagstones. Obviously, he sometimes acted like any other child after all. The hopping came closer. The temptation simply to stand up instead of lying there was very strong. It was difficult to keep your body as still as a corpse while you were still breathing. Mo closed his eyes so as not to see the stone around him. Keep your breath as shallow as you can, he told himself, breathe as quietly as the fairies.
The hopping stopped right beside him.
"You've hidden him!" Jacopo's voice reached Mo inside the sarcophagus as if he were speaking the words for Mo's ears alone. "Shall we look in the coffins, Sootbird?"
The boy seemed to find the notion very enticing, but Sootbird laughed nervously. "Oh, I'm sure that won't be necessary, if we tell your mother who she's dealing with. This bookbinder could be the very man your father is looking for so desperately, Highness."
"The Bluejay? The Bluejay, here in the castle?" Violante's voice sounded so incredulous that even Mo believed she was taken by surprise. "Of course! I've told my father time and again: One day that robber's own daring will be his downfall. You're not to say a word of this to the Milksop. I want to catch the Bluejay myself, and then at last my father will realize who ought to be on the throne of Ombra! Have you reinforced the guards at the gates? Have you sent soldiers to Balbulus's workshop?"
"Er… no." Sootbird was obviously confused. "I mean… he isn't with Balbulus anymore, he…"
"What? You fool!" Violante's voice was as sharp as her father's. "Lower the portcullis over the gateway. At once! If my father hears that the Bluejay was in this castle, in my library, and simply rode away again…" How menacing she made those words sound in the chilly air! She was indeed clever; her son was right.
"Sandro!" That must be one of her soldiers. "Tell the guards at the main gates to lower the portcullis. No one is to leave the castle. No one, do you hear? I only hope it's not too late already! Jacopo!"
"Yes?" There was fear and defiance in the high voice – and a trace of distrust.
"If he finds the gates closed, where could the Bluejay hide? You know every hiding place in this castle, don't you?"
"Of course!" Now Jacopo sounded flattered. "I can show you all of them."
"Good. Take three of the guards from outside the throne room upstairs and post them at the most likely hiding places you know. I'll go and talk to Balbulus. The Bluejay! In my castle!"
Sootbird stammered something. Violante brusquely interrupted him, ordering him to go with her. Their footsteps and voices moved away, but Mo thought he could still hear them for some time on the endless stairs leading up and away from the dead, back to the world of the living, to the daylight where you could breathe easily…
Even when all was perfectly still again, he lay there for a few more agonizing moments, listening until he felt as if he could hear the dead themselves breathing. Then he braced his hands against the stone lid – and hastily reached for his knife when he heard footsteps again.
"Bluejay!"
It was no more than a whisper. The cracked lid was pushed aside, and the soldier who had helped him into his hiding place reached out a hand to him.
"We must hurry!" he whispered. "The Mil
ksop has raised the alarm. There are guards everywhere, but Violante knows ways out of this castle that even Jacopo hasn't found yet. I hope," he added.
As Mo clambered out of the sarcophagus, legs stiff from lying in its cramped space, he still had the knife in his hand.
The boy stared at it. "How many have you killed?" His voice sounded almost awestricken. As if killing were a high art, like the painting of Balbulus. How old would the lad be? Fourteen? Fifteen? He looked younger than Farid.
How many? What was he to say to that? Only a few months ago the answer would have been so simple. Perhaps he'd even have laughed out loud at such a ridiculous question. Now he just said, "Not as many as those who lie here," although he wasn't sure that he was telling the truth.
The boy looked along the rows of the dead as if counting them. "Is it easy?"
Judging by the curiosity in his eyes, he really didn't seem to know the answer, despite the sword at his side and his shirt of chain mail.
Yes, thought Mo. Yes, it's easy… if you have a second heart beating in your breast, cold and sharp-edged as the sword you carry. A certain amount of hatred and anger, a few weeks of fear and helpless rage, and you'll have a heart like that. It beats time for you when you come to kill, a wild, fast rhythm. And only later do you feel your other heart again, soft and warm. It shudders in time with the other one at the thought of what you did. It trembles and feels pain… but that's only afterward.
The boy was still looking at him.
"Killing is too easy," said Mo. "Dying is harder."
Although Cosimo's stony smile claimed otherwise.
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