Inkdeath

41. PICTURES FROM THE ASHES

The cave that Mo and the Black Prince had found, long before Sootbird staged his show, was two hours' journey north of Ombra on foot. That was a long way for children to walk, and winter had come to the Inkworld, with rain that turned to snow more and more often. White moths were suddenly hanging from the bare branches like leaves made of ice, and gray-feathered owls had begun hunting the fairies.

"My own fairies sleep at this time of year," Fenoglio had said in self-defense, when Despina began crying because an owl had torn two of the tiny creatures to pieces before her eyes. "But the silly creatures Orpheus has made flutter around as if they'd never heard of winter!"

The Black Prince led them uphill and downhill, through thickets and stony debris, along such overgrown paths that they usually had to carry the smaller children. Meggie's back was soon aching, but Elinor strode on as if she couldn't wait to see as much as possible of this strange world – although she went to a great deal of trouble to conceal her delight from the creator of the whole thing. Fenoglio was walking right behind them most of the time, with Resa and Darius. The little girl Resa was carrying looked so like Meggie that, whenever Meggie herself turned around to her mother, it was like looking back to a time that had never been. Mo used to carry her when she was little, always Mo. But when she saw Resa pressing her face into the little girl's hair Meggie wished it had been different. Perhaps then Mo's absence wouldn't have hurt her quite so much.

When Resa felt sick halfway to the cave, Roxane told her not to carry any of the children anymore. "Be careful!" Meggie heard her say. "You don't want to be telling your husband you've lost his child when he comes back, do you?"

It was obvious now that Resa was pregnant, and sometimes Meggie wanted to put her hand on the place where the child was growing, but she didn't. Tears had sprung to Darius's eyes when he heard about the pregnancy, and Elinor had cried, "Well, everything has to turn out all right now," hugging Resa so hard that she must almost have squashed the unborn child. But Meggie kept catching herself thinking, I don't need any sister. Or any brother, either. I just want my father back! However, when one of the little boys she had been carrying on her back thanked her with a smacking kiss on her cheek, she felt – for the first time, and quite unexpectedly – that she was looking forward to the new baby, and she began imagining what it would be like to have a brother or sister putting small fingers into her own hand.

They were all glad that Roxane had come with them. Her son had not been among the children taken captive by the Piper and Sootbird, but she had brought Jehan along all the same. Roxane was wearing her long black hair loose again, as the minstrel women did. She smiled more often these days, too, and when some of the children started crying because it was such a long way, Meggie heard her sing for the first time. She sang very quietly, but it was enough for Meggie to understand what Battista had once said: "When Roxane sings she takes all the sadness from your heart and makes music out of it." How could she be so happy when Dustfinger wasn't with her? "Because now she knows that he will always come back to her," Battista said. Did Resa know the same of Mo?

Meggie didn't see the entrance to the cave until she was very close to it. Tall fir trees hid it, thorn apple, and bushes with white down hanging from their branches, long and soft as human hair. Meggie's skin was still itching hours after she had followed Doria through the dense thickets.

The crack in the rock leading to the cavern inside was so narrow that the Strong Man had to duck his head and squeeze through it sideways, but the cave itself was tall as a church inside, and the children's voices echoing back from the rock walls were so loud that it seemed to Meggie as if they could be heard all the way to Ombra.

The Black Prince posted six guards outside. They climbed high into the tops of the surrounding trees. He sent four more men back to obliterate their tracks. Doria went as well, and sitting on his shoulder was Jasper, who had attached himself to Doria now that Farid had gone. It was an almost hopeless task to hide the prints of so many small feet, and Meggie could see from the Prince's face how much he would have liked to take the children even farther away, far from the Piper and the Milksop's hounds.

The Black Prince had let half a dozen women come with their children as he knew his men well enough to realize that they weren't much use as foster mothers. Roxane, Resa, and Minerva helped the women to make the cave more comfortable, laying blankets and lengths of cloth between the rocky walls, bringing in more dry leaves so that everyone could sleep more easily, spreading furs over the leaves and piling up stones to make separate niches where the smallest children could bed down. They made a hearth to cook on, took stock of the provisions the robbers had brought – and kept straining their ears for noises outside, terrified of suddenly hearing the barking of dogs or soldiers' voices.

"See how greedily they're stuffing their little mouths!" grunted Snapper when the Black Prince first had food served to the children. "Our provisions are hardly going to last a week at this rate. And then what?"

"By then the Adderhead will be long dead," replied the Strong Man, his tone defiant, but Snapper just laughed scornfully.

"Oh yes? And the Bluejay will kill the Piper at the same time, will he? He'll need more than three words for that. And what about the Milksop and his men-at-arms?"

Yes, what about them? No one knew the answer to that. "Violante will throw them all out once her father's dead!" said Minerva. But Meggie still found it hard to trust Her Ugliness.

"He'll be all right, Meggie!" Elinor kept saying. "Don't look so sad. If I get the hang of this whole story – which isn't so easy, since our good friend the author there likes making things complicated," she added with a reproachful glance at Fenoglio, "then they won't touch a hair of your father's head, because he has to cure that Book for the Adderhead. Which presumably he can't do, but that's another problem. Anyway, you wait and see. Everything will end well!"

If only Meggie could have believed her, as she used to believe Mo. "It will be all right, Meggie!" That was all he had to say, and she would lay her head against his shoulder in the certain knowledge that he would fix everything. How long ago that was. So very long ago.

The Black Prince had sent Gecko's tame crows to Ombra – to the Barn Owl and his informers in the castle – and Resa stood outside the cave for hours on end, searching the sky for black feathers. But the only bird Gecko brought into the cave on the second day was a bedraggled magpie, and in the end it was Farid, not one of the crows, who brought them news of the Bluejay.

He was shaking with cold when one of the guards took him to the Black Prince, and his face had the forlorn expression it wore every time Dustfinger had sent him away. Meggie took Elinor's hand as he stammered out his news: Violante was taking Mo to her mother's castle as her prisoner. Dustfinger would follow them. The Piper had hit and threatened Mo… Violante had been afraid he would kill him. Resa buried her face in her hands, and Roxane put an arm around her.

"Her mother's castle? But Violante's mother is dead!" By now Elinor knew her way around Fenoglio's story better than its author himself. She moved among the robbers as if she had always been one of them, got Battista to sing her minstrel songs, asked the Strong Man to show her how to talk to the birds, and made Jasper explain how many different kinds of glass men there were. She kept tripping on the hem of her peculiar dress, she had smudges on her forehead and spiders in her hair, but Elinor looked happier than she had ever been before.

"It's the castle where her mother grew up. Dustfinger knows it." Farid took a bag from his belt and wiped some soot off the leather. Then he looked at Meggie. "We made spiders and wolves out of fire to protect your father!" There was no mistaking the pride in his voice.

"But all the same Violante thought he wasn't safe in the castle." Resa's voice sounded accusing: You can't protect him; in fact, none of you can protect him. He's on his own.

"The Castle in the Lake." The Black Prince spoke its name as if he did not particularly like Violante's idea, either. "There are many songs about that castle."

"Dark songs," added Gecko. The magpie had flown to him and was perching on his shoulder. It was a skinny bird, and it stared at Meggie as if it would like to peck out her eyes.

"What kind of songs?" Resa's voice was husky with fear.

"Oh, ghost stories, that's all. Fanciful nonsense!" Fenoglio pushed past Resa. Despina was clinging to his hand. "The Castle in the Lake was abandoned long ago, so people fill it with stories, but that's all they are."

"How reassuring!" The glance that Elinor cast Fenoglio made his face turn red.

He was in a gloomy mood. Since their arrival at the cave he had been complaining nonstop about the cold, the crying children, or the stench of the bear. Most of the time he sat behind a wall of stones he had built in the darkest corner of the cave, quarreling with Rosenquartz. Only Ivo and Despina could get a smile out of him – and Darius, who had joined the old man as soon as they had arrived at the cave and, as he helped Fenoglio to build his wall, started timidly asking him about the world he had created. Where do the giants live? Do water-nymphs live longer than human beings? What kind of country lies beyond the mountains? Darius obviously asked the right questions, for Fenoglio didn't lose patience with him as he had with Orpheus.

The Castle in the Lake.

Fenoglio shook his head when Meggie went to him to find out more about the place to which Her Ugliness was taking her father. "It wasn't among the main scenes of the story" was all he would say, grumpily. "One of many settings. Just scenery! Read my book if you want to know more about it – if Dustfinger ever lets it out of his hands again, that is! If you ask me, he ought really to have given it to me, although we still don't seem to be on speaking terms. After all, I wrote it! But there we are. At least Orpheus doesn't have it anymore."

The book.

In fact, Dustfinger had passed on Inkheart long ago, but Meggie kept that knowledge to herself, for Farid had asked her to.

He had handed it over to her mother as swiftly as if Basta might emerge behind him to steal it, just as he had back in the other world. "Dustfinger says it will be safest with you, because you know how powerful the words in it are," he had murmured. "The Black Prince doesn't understand that. But keep it hidden and let nobody know you have it! Orpheus mustn't get it back. Dustfinger is fairly sure, though, that he won't look for it in your hands."

Resa had taken the book only with some reluctance, and finally she hid it in the place where she slept. Meggie's heart beat faster as she took it out from under the blanket. She hadn't held Fenoglio's book in her hands since Mortola had given it to her in Capricorn's arena to read the Shadow into being. It was a strange feeling to open it now that she was in the world it described, and for a moment Meggie feared the pages might suck in everything around her. The rocky ground where she was sitting, the blanket under which her mother slept, the white ice-moth that had lost its way in the cave, the children laughing as they ran after it… had all that really come into existence between these covers? The book seemed so meaningless compared to the marvels it described, just a few hundred printed pages and a dozen pictures not half as good as those that Balbulus painted, all in a silvery-green linen binding. Yet it wouldn't have surprised Meggie to find her own name on the pages, or the names of her mother, Farid, or Mo – although, no, her father bore another name in this world.

Meggie had never had the chance to read Fenoglio's whole story. Where was she to begin now? Was there a picture of the Castle in the Lake? She was quickly leafing through the pages when she suddenly heard Farid's voice behind her. "Meggie?"

She closed the book guiltily, as if every word in it were a secret. How stupid of her. This book didn't know anything about all her fears, it knew nothing of the Bluejay, nor even of Farid…

She didn't think of him now as often as she used to. It was almost as if, with Dustfinger's return, the chapter about Farid and herself had ended, and the story was beginning again, extinguishing part of the tale it had told before with every new word.

"Dustfinger gave me something else to bring back here." Farid glanced at the book on her lap as if it were a snake. But then he kneeled down beside her and took from his belt the soot-blackened bag that his fingers had been caressing while he delivered his news to the Prince.

"He gave it to me for Roxane," said Farid quietly as he sprinkled a fine circle of ashes on the rocky ground. "But you looked really upset, so…"

He didn't finish his sentence. Instead he whispered words that only he and Dustfinger understood – and the fire suddenly licked up from the ashes as if it had been sleeping there. Farid lured it out, praised and enticed it, until it burned with such heat that the heart of the flames became white as paper, and a picture appeared, difficult to make out at first, then more and more distinct.

Hills, densely wooded… soldiers on a narrow path, many soldiers… two women riding among them. Meggie recognized Brianna at once by her hair. The woman in front of her must be Her Ugliness, and there – with Dustfinger beside him – rode Mo. Meggie instinctively put her hand out to him, but Farid held her fingers fast.

"He has blood on his face," she whispered.

"The Piper." Farid spoke to the flames again, and the picture spread out, showing the path turning toward mountains that Meggie had never seen before, much higher than the hills around Ombra. Snow lay on the way ahead, as it did on the slopes in the distance, and Meggie saw Mo breathing into his cold hands. He looked so strange in the fur-trimmed cloak he wore – like a character in a fairy tale. He is a character in a fairy tale, Meggie, a voice inside her whispered. The Bluejay… was he still her father, too? Had Mo ever looked so serious? Her Ugliness turned to him, of course it was Her Ugliness, who else? They were talking, but the fire showed only silent images.

"You see? He's all right. Thanks to Dustfinger." Farid stared into the fire with longing, as if that could take him back to Dustfinger's side. Then he heaved a sigh and blew gently on the flames until they turned dark red as if blushing at the pet names he soothed them with.

"Will you follow him?"

Farid shook his head. "Dustfinger wants me to look after Roxane." Meggie could sense his bitterness for herself. "What

will you do?" He looked at her with the question in his eyes.

"What am I supposed to do?"

Whisper words, that's all I can do, she added in her mind. All the words the minstrels sing about the Bluejay: how he calms the waves with his voice, how he is invulnerable and fast as the wind, how the fairies protect him and the White Women watch over his sleep. Words. They were the only means she had of protecting Mo, and she whispered them day and night, in every private moment, sending them after him like the crows that the Black Prince had sent to Ombra.

The flames had gone out, and Farid was heaping up the warm ashes with his hands when a shadow fell on him. Doria stood behind them, holding hands with two children. "Meggie, the woman with the loud voice is looking for you."

The robbers had many names for Elinor. Meggie couldn't help smiling, but Farid cast a none-too-friendly glance at Doria. He carefully put the ashes back in his bag and rose to his feet. "I'll be with Roxane," he said, kissing Meggie on the mouth. He hadn't done that for weeks. Then he pushed past Doria and strode away without looking back once.

"He kissed her!" one of the children whispered to Doria, just loud enough for Meggie to hear. The child was a girl, and she blushed when Meggie returned her gaze and hastily hid her face in Doria's side.

"So he did," Doria whispered back. "But did she kiss him back?"

"No!" said the boy on his right, sizing up Meggie as if wondering whether kissing her would be fun.

"That's a good thing, then," said Doria. "A very good thing.