Inkspell

51. THE RIGHT WORDS

The groom was a fool and took forever to saddle up the wretched horse. I never invented a character like that, thought Fenoglio. Lucky that I'm in a good mood. For lie was indeed in the best of moods. He had been whistling quietly to himself for hours, because he had done it. He had found the solution! Yes, at last the words had flowed onto the parchment as if they'd just been waiting for him to fish them out of the sea of letters. The right words. The only right words. Now the story could go on and all would end well. He was an enchanter, after all, a conjuror with words, one of the very first quality. No one could hold a candle to him – well, one or two, maybe, but in his own world, not this one. If only this dolt of a groom would hurry up! It was high time he went to Roxane's house or she would ride away without the letter – and then how was he going to get it to Meggie? For there was still no sign of life from the young hot-head he had sent after her. That callow youth had probably gotten lost in the Wayless Wood.

He felt for the letter under his cloak. A good thing that words weighed light, light as a feather, even the most important of them. Roxane wouldn't have a heavy load to carry when she took Meggie the Adderhead's death warrant. And she would take something else to the principality by the sea with her – the certainty of Cosimo's victory.

Just so long as Cosimo didn't set out before Meggie even had a chance to read his words! Cosimo was burning with impatience, longing for the day when he would lead his soldiers to the other side of the forest. "Because he wants to find out who he is!" whispered the quiet voice in Fenoglio's head (or was it in his heart?). "Because your fine avenging angel is empty, like a box with nothing inside it. A few borrowed memories, a few stone statues – that's all the poor lad has, and your stories of his heroic deeds. He searches his empty heart in desperation for some echo of them. You ought to have tried to bring back the real Cosimo, after all, straight back from the realm of the dead, but you didn't dare!" Hush! Fenoglio shook his head in annoyance. Why did these troublesome thoughts keep returning? Everything would be all right once Cosimo sat on the Adderhead's throne. Then he'd have memories of his own, and he'd gather more of them every day. And soon the emptiness would be forgotten.

His horse was saddled at last. The groom helped him to mount, his mouth twisted in a mocking smile. The fool! Fenoglio knew he didn't cut a very good figure on a horse, he'd never get used to riding – but so what? These horses were alarming beasts, much too strong for his liking, but a poet living at his prince's court didn't travel on foot like a peasant. And he would go much faster on horseback – assuming the animal wanted to go the same way as he did. What a business it was to get the creature moving!

The hooves clattered over the paved courtyard, past the barrels of pitch and iron spikes that Cosimo was having set on the walls. The castle still resounded at night to the hammering of the smiths, and Cosimo's soldiers slept in the wooden huts along the wall, crammed close together like larvae in an ants' nest. He had certainly brought a warrior angel into being, but hadn't angels always been warlike? The fact is, I'm just no good at making up peaceful characters, thought Fenoglio as he trotted across the yard. The good ones either have bad luck like Dustfinger or they fall among thieves like the Black Prince. Could he ever have made up a character like Mortimer? Probably not.

As Fenoglio was riding toward the Outer Gate it swung open, so that for a moment he actually assumed the guards were finally showing a little respect for their prince's poet. But when he saw how low they bent their heads he realized that it couldn't possibly be for him.

Cosimo came riding toward him through the wide gateway, on a horse so white that it looked a little unreal. In the dark he looked almost more beautiful than by day, but wasn't that the case with all angels? Only seven soldiers followed him; he never took more as guards on his nocturnal rides. But someone else rode at his side, too: Brianna, Dustfinger's daughter, no longer wearing a dress that had belonged to her mistress, poor Violante, as so often in the past, but in one of the gowns that Cosimo had given her. He heaped presents upon her, while he no longer allowed his wife even to leave the castle, or their son, either. But in spite of all these proofs of love, Brianna didn't look particularly happy. And why should she? What girl would be cheerful if her lover was planning to go to war? The prospect didn't seem to cloud Cosimo's mood. Far from it; he looked as light at heart as if the future could bring nothing but good. He went riding every night. He seemed to need very little sleep, and Fenoglio had heard he rode at such a breakneck pace that hardly any of his bodyguards could keep up – like a man who had been told that death had no power over him. What difference did it make, anyway, when he could remember neither his death nor his life?

Day and night, Balbulus was painting the most wonderful pictures to illustrate stories about that lost life. More than a dozen scribes supplied him with the handwritten pages. "My husband still won't enter the library," Violante had commented bitterly, last time Fenoglio saw her. "But he fills all the reading desks with books about himself."

Unfortunately, it was only too clear that the words from which Fenoglio and Meggie had made him did not satisfy Cosimo. There were simply not enough of them. Everything he heard about himself seemed to have to do with another man. Perhaps that was why he loved Dustfinger's daughter so much: because she had nothing to do with the man he seemed to have been before his death. Fenoglio had to keep writing new and ardent love songs to Brianna for him. He generally stole them from other poets; he had always had a good memory for verse, and Meggie wasn't here now to catch him in the act of theft. Tears always came to Brianna's eyes when one of the minstrels, who were now welcomed to the castle again, sang her one of those songs.

"Fenoglio!" Cosimo reined in his horse, and Fenoglio bent his head in the most natural way in the world, as he did only for the young prince. "Where are you going, poet? Everything's ready for us to march out!" He sounded as impatient as his horse, which was prancing back and forth, and threatened to infect Fenoglio's horse with its restlessness. "Or would you rather stay here and sharpen your pens for all the songs you'll have to write about my victory?"

March out? Ready?

Fenoglio looked around in confusion, but Cosimo laughed. "Do you think I'd assemble the troops here in the castle? There are far too many for that. No, they're encamped down by the river. I'm only waiting for one more company of mercenaries recruited for me in the north. They may arrive tomorrow!"

As soon as that? Fenoglio cast Brianna a quick glance. So that was why she looked so sad. "Please, Your Grace!" Fenoglio could not conceal the anxiety in his voice. "It's much too soon! Wait a little longer!"

But Cosimo only smiled. "The moon is red, poet! The soothsayers think that's a good sign. A sign that we mustn't miss the moment, or all may come to grief."

What nonsense! Fenoglio bowed his head to keep Cosimo from seeing the annoyance in his face. Cosimo knew, anyway, that his love of soothsayers and fortune-tellers irritated Fenoglio, who thought them all a set of avaricious frauds. "Let me say it once again. Your Grace!" He had repeated this warning so often that it was beginning to sound flat. "The only thing that will bring you bad luck is setting out too soon!"

But Cosimo merely shook his head indulgently.

"You're an old man, Fenoglio," he said. "Your blood flows slowly, but I'm young! What should I wait for? For the Adderhead to recruit mercenaries, too, and barricade himself in the Castle of Night?"

He probably did that long ago, thought Fenoglio. And that's why you must wait for the words, my words, and for Meggie to read them, the way she read you here. Wait for her voice! "Just one or two weeks more. Your Grace!" he said urgently. "Your peasants must bring in their harvest. What else will they have to live on in winter?"

But Cosimo didn't want to hear about such things. "That truly is old man's talk!" he said angrily. "Where are your fiery words now? They'll live on the Adderhead's stores of provisions, on the good fortune of our victory, on the silver from the Castle of Night. I'll have it distributed in the villages!"

They can't eat silver, Your Grace, thought Fenoglio, but he did not say so aloud. Instead, he looked up at the sky. Dear God, how high the moon had risen already! But Cosimo still had something on his mind.

"There's a question I've been meaning to ask you for some time," he said, just as Fenoglio was about to take his leave with some stammered excuse. "You're so friendly with the strolling players. Everyone's talking about that fire-eater, the one they say can talk to the flames…"

Out of the corner of his eye, Fenoglio saw Brianna bend her head.

"You mean Dustfinger?"

"Yes, that's his name. I know he's Brianna's father," said Cosimo, casting her a loving glance, "but she won't talk about him. And she says she doesn't know where he is now. But perhaps you do?" Cosimo patted his horse's neck. His face seemed to burn with beauty.

"Why? What do you want of him?"

"Isn't that obvious? He can talk to fire! They say he can make the flames grow to a great height without burning him."

Fenoglio understood even before Cosimo explained. "You want Dustfinger for your war." He couldn't help it, he laughed aloud.

"What's so funny about that?" Cosimo frowned.

Dustfinger the fire-dancer as a weapon. Fenoglio shook his head. "Oh no," he said. "I know Dustfinger very well" – he saw Brianna give him a look of surprise as he said so – "and he is many things but certainly not a warrior. He'd laugh in your face."

"He had better not." There was no mistaking the anger in Cosimo's voice. But Brianna was looking at Fenoglio as if she had a thousand questions on the tip of her tongue. Well, this was no time for them! "Your Highness," he said hastily, "please excuse me now! One of Minerva's children is ill, and I promised to get a few herbs from Brianna's mother for her."

"Oh, I see. Of course. Yes, of course, ride on, and we'll talk later." Cosimo gathered up his reins again. "If the child doesn't improve let me know, and I'll send a physician."

"Thank you," said Fenoglio, but before he finally went on his way there was one question he himself had to ask. "I've heard your wife isn't well, either?" Balbulus, who at present was the only visitor allowed to see Violante, had told him so.

"Oh, she's just in a temper." Cosimo took Brianna's hand as if to comfort her for the fact that they were talking about his wife. "Violante loses her temper easily. She gets it from her father. She simply will not understand why I won't let her leave the castle, yet it's obvious that her father's informers are everywhere, and who would they try to pump for information first? Violante and Jacopo." It was hard not to believe every word that those beautiful lips uttered, particularly when they spoke with so much genuine conviction.

"Well, I expect you're right! But please don't forget that your wife hates her father."

"You can hate someone and obey him all the same. Isn't that so?" Cosimo looked at Fenoglio with that naked expression in his eyes, like the eyes of a very young baby.

"Yes, yes, probably," he replied uncomfortably. Every time

Cosimo looked at him like that, Fenoglio felt as if he had found an empty page in a book, a moth hole in the finely woven carpet of words.

"Your Highness!" he said, bowing his head again, and he finally, if not very elegantly, got his horse to trot out of the gateway.

Brianna had given him a good description of the way to her mother's farmhouse. He had asked her about it after Roxane's visit, apparently in all innocence, saying that he was plagued by aching bones. Dustfinger's daughter was a strange child. She wanted nothing to do with her father and obviously not much with her mother, either. Luckily, she had warned him about the goose, so he was holding the horse's reins firmly when the cackling bird came toward him. Roxane was sitting outside her house when he rode into the yard. It was a poor place. Her beauty seemed to fit into it as little as a jewel in a beggar's hut. Her son was sleeping in the doorway beside her, curled up like a puppy, his head on her lap.

"He wants to come with me," she said as Fenoglio slid clumsily off the horse. "The little girl cried, too, when I told her I had to go away. But I can't take them, not to Argenta. The Adderhead's had children hanged before now. A friend is going to look after the girl for me, and Jehan, and the plants and animals, too."

She stroked her son's dark hair, and for a moment Fenoglio didn't want her to ride away. But what would become of his words then? Who else would find Meggie? Should he ask Cosimo for another horseman who might not come back, either? "Well, who knows, maybe Roxane won't come back," the insidious voice inside him whispered. "And then your precious words will be lost." "Nonsense!" he said angrily, out loud. "I made a copy, of course."

"What did you say?" Roxane looked at him in surprise.

"Oh, nothing, nothing!" Heavens above, now he was talking to himself. "There's something else I have to tell you – don't ride to the mill! A minstrel who sings for Cosimo has brought me news from the Black Prince."

Roxane pressed her hand to her mouth.

"No, no. It's not so bad!" Fenoglio quickly reassured her. "The fact is, Meggie's father has obviously been taken prisoner by the Adderhead, but to be honest I feared as much. As for Dustfinger and Meggie – well, to be brief, the mill where Meggie was going to wait for my letter seems to have burned down. Apparently, the miller is telling everyone that a marten made fire rain down from the roof, while a wizard with a scarred face spoke to the flames. It seems this wizard had a demon with him in the shape of a dark-skinned boy who saved him when he was wounded and helped him and a girl to escape."

Roxane looked at him with a thoughtful expression, as if she had to search for the meaning of what he said. "Wounded?"

"Yes, but they escaped! That's the main thing. Roxane, do you really think you can find them?"

She passed a hand over her forehead. "I'll try."

"Don't worry," said Fenoglio. "You heard what they're saying. Dustfinger has a demon protecting him now. In any case, hasn't he always managed very well on his own?"

"Oh yes, indeed he has!"

Fenoglio cursed every wrinkle on his old face, she was so beautiful. Why didn't he have Cosimo's good looks? Although would she like that? She liked Dustfinger, who ought to have been dead by now if the story had gone the way he had once written it. Fenoglio, he told himself, this is going too far. You're behaving like a jealous lover!

But Roxane was taking no notice of him, anyway. She looked down at the boy sleeping in her lap. "Brianna was furious when she heard I was going to ride after her father," she said. "I only hope Cosimo will look after her and won't begin his war before I get back."

Fenoglio made no reply to that. Why tell her about Cosimo's plans? To make her even more anxious? No. He took out the letter for Meggie from under his cloak. Written words that could become sound, a mighty sound… He had never before made Rosenquartz seal a letter so carefully.

"This letter can save Meggie's parents," he said urgently. "It can save her father. It can save us all, so take good care of it!"

Roxane turned the sealed parchment this way and that, as if it seemed to her too small for such great claims. "I never heard of a letter that could open the dungeons of the Castle of Night," she said. "Do you think it's right to give the girl false hopes?"

"They aren't false," said Fenoglio, rather hurt to find that she had so little faith in his words.

"Very well. If I find Dustfinger, and the girl is still with him, she'll get your letter." Roxane stroked her son's hair again, very gently, as if to brush away a leaf. "Does she love her father?"

"Yes. Yes, she loves him very much."

"My daughter loves hers, too. Brianna loves him so much that she won't speak a word to him now. When he went away in the old days, when he just used to go into the forest or down to the sea, anywhere that fire or the wind happened to lure him, she would try to run after him on her little feet. I don't think he even noticed, he always disappeared so fast, quick as a fox that has stolen a chicken. But she loved him all the same. Why? That boy loves him, too. He even thinks Dustfinger needs him, but he needs no one, only fire."

Fenoglio looked thoughtfully at her. "You're wrong," he said.

"He was wretchedly unhappy when he was away. You should have seen him."

She eyed him incredulously. "You know where he was?"

Now what? Old fool that he was, what had he said this time? "Well, yes," he stammered. "Yes. Yes, I was there myself." He needed some lies, and where were they? The truth wasn't going to be much use this time. A few good lies were needed to explain everything. Why shouldn't he find a few good words for Dustfinger for a change – even if he envied him his wife?

"He says he couldn't come back." She didn't believe it, but you could tell from Roxane's voice how much she wished she did.

"That's exactly how it was! He had a bad time! Capricorn set Basta on him, they took him far, far away and tried to make him tell them how to talk with fire." Here came the lies now, and they might even be close to the truth, who could say? "Believe me, Basta took his revenge for your preference for Dustfinger! They shut him away for years, and he finally escaped, but they soon found him and beat him half to death." Meggie had told him that part. A little of the truth couldn't hurt, and Roxane didn't have to know that it was because of Resa. "It was dreadful, dreadful!" Fenoglio felt the pleasure of storytelling run away with him, the pleasure of watching Roxane's eyes widen as she hung on his lips, waiting eagerly for his next words. Should he make Dustfinger a little villainous after all? No, he'd killed him once already, he'd do him a favor today. He would make his wife forgive him, once and for all, for staying away those ten years. Sometimes I can be a truly benevolent person, thought Fenoglio.

"He thought he'd die. He thought he'd never see you again, and that was the worst of it for him." Fenoglio had to clear his throat. He was moved by his own words – and so was Roxane. Oh yes, he saw the distrust disappear from her eyes, he saw them soften with love. "After that he wandered in strange lands, like a dog turned out of doors, looking for a way that would take him not to Basta or Capricorn but to you." The words were coming as if of their own accord now. As if he really knew what Dustfinger had felt all those years. "He was forlorn, truly forlorn, his heart was cold as a stone from loneliness. There was no room in it for anything but longing – longing for you. And for his daughter."

"He had two daughters." Roxane's voice was almost inaudible.

Damn it, he'd forgotten that. Two daughters, of course! But Roxane was so rapt with his words that his mistake didn't break the spell.

"How do you know all this?" she asked. "He never told me you knew each other so well."

Oh, no one knows him better, thought Fenoglio. I can assure you, my beauty, no one knows him better.

Roxane pushed her black hair back from her face. Fenoglio saw a trace of gray in it, as if she had combed it with a dusty comb. "I shall ride early in the morning," she said.

"Excellent." Fenoglio drew his horse to his side. Why was it so difficult to get onto these creatures with anything like elegance? "Look after yourself," he said, when he was finally on the horse's back. "And the letter, too. And give Meggie my love. Tell her everything will be all right. I promise."

As he rode away she stood beside her sleeping son, looking thoughtful, and watched him go. He really did hope she would find Dustfinger, and it wasn't just that he wanted Meggie to get his words. No. A little happiness in this story couldn't hurt, and Roxane was not happy without Dustfinger. That was the way he'd fixed it.

He doesn't deserve her, all the same, thought Fenoglio again as he rode toward the lights of Ombra, which were neither as bright nor as many as the lights of his old world but were at least equally inviting. Soon the houses behind the protecting walls would be without their menfolk. They would all be going with Cosimo, including Minerva's husband – although she had begged him to stay – and the cobbler whose workshop was next to his. Even the rag-collector who went around every Tuesday was going to fight the Adderhead. Would they follow Cosimo as willingly if I'd made him ugly? Fenoglio wondered. Ugly as the Adderhead with his butcher's face? No, people find it easier to believe that a man with a handsome face has good intentions, so he had done well to put an angel on the throne. Yes, that was clever, extremely clever. Fenoglio caught himself humming quietly as the horse carried him past the guards. They let him in without a word, their prince's poet, the man who put their world into words and had made it out of words. Bow your heads to Fenoglio!

The guards would go with Cosimo, too, and the soldiers up in the castle, and the grooms who were hardly as old as the boy who went around with Dustfinger. Even Minerva's son Ivo would have gone if she had let him. They'll all come back, thought Fenoglio, as he rode toward the stables. Or most of them, at least. It will end well, I know it will. Not just well, but very well indeed!