Inkspell

63. THE BADGER'S EARTH

Farid followed Dustfinger and Roxane through the night with an expression that must surely be as dark as the sky above them. It hurt to leave Meggie behind in the castle, however sensible it was. And now here was Roxane coming with them, too. Although he had to admit that she seemed to know exactly where she was going. They soon came upon the first hiding place, well concealed behind thorny undergrowth, but it was deserted. In the next they found two men who distrustfully drew their knives and did not put them back in their belts until Roxane had spoken to them at length. Perhaps they sensed the presence of Dustfinger and Farid, in spite of their invisibility. Fortunately, Roxane had once cured a nasty ulcer for one of them, and he finally told her where she would find the Prince.

The Badger's Earth. Farid thought he heard those words twice. "Their main hideout," was all that Roxane said. "We must be there by daybreak. But they warned me that there are said to be soldiers on the move, a great many of them."

From then on Farid sometimes thought he heard the clink of swords in the distance, the snorting of horses, voices, marching footsteps – but perhaps he was only imagining it. Soon the first rays of sunlight penetrated the leaf canopy above them, gradually turning their bodies visible again, like reflections on dark water. It was good not to have to keep looking for his own hands and feet, and to see Dustfinger again. Even if he was walking beside Roxane.

Now and then Farid sensed her looking at him, as if she were still searching his dark face for some similarity to Dustfinger. At her farm she had once or twice asked him questions about his mother. Farid would have liked to tell her that his mother had been a princess, much, much more beautiful than Roxane, and that Dustfinger had loved her so dearly that he stayed with her for ten years until death took her from him, leaving him only with their son, their dark-skinned, black-eyed son who now followed him like a shadow. But his age wasn't quite right for this tale, and moreover Dustfinger would probably have been furious if Roxane had asked him for the truth behind it, so in the end Farid told her only that his mother was dead – which was probably correct. If Roxane was stupid enough to think Dustfinger had come back to her only because he had lost another woman, all the better. Every glance that Dustfinger cast her filled Farid's heart to the brim with jealousy. Suppose he decided to stay with her forever, at the farm with the fragrant fields of herbs? Suppose he stopped wanting to go from one marketplace to the next but preferred to live with her, kissing her and laughing with her as he already did only too often, forgetting fire and Farid?

The forest became denser and denser, and the Castle of Night might have been only a bad dream, when they suddenly saw more than a dozen men standing among the trees around them. Armed men in ragged clothes. They appeared so silently that even Dustfinger hadn't heard them. They surrounded them with hostile expressions on their faces, knives and swords in their hands, and stared at the two figures who were still almost transparent around the chests and arms.

"Hey, Snapper, don't you know me?" asked Roxane, going up to one of them. "How are your fingers doing?"

The man's face cleared. He was a heavily built fellow with a scar on his neck. "Ah, the herb-witch," he said. "Of course. Why are you roaming the forest here so early? And what are those ghosts with you?"

"We're not ghosts. We're looking for the Black Prince." As Dustfinger moved to Roxane's side all the men's weapons turned his way.

"What are you doing?" Roxane asked the men angrily. "Look at his face. Did you never hear of the fire-dancer? The Prince will set his bear on you if he hears that you threatened him."

The men put their heads together and scrutinized Dustfinger's scarred face uneasily.

"Three scars as pale as cobwebs," whispered Snapper. "Oh yes, we've all heard about him, but only in songs…"

"Who says songs can't be believed?" Dustfinger breathed into the cool morning air and whispered fire-words until a flame consumed his steaming breath. The robbers flinched back and stared at him, as if this only reinforced their certainty that he was a ghost. However, Dustfinger raised both hands in the air and put the flame out between them as if nothing could be easier. Then he bent down and cooled the palms of his hands on the dewy grass.

"Did you see that?" Snapper looked at the others. "That's just what the Prince has always told us about him – he catches fire as you might catch a rabbit; he speaks to it like a lover."

The robbers took the three into their midst. Farid looked uneasily at the men's faces as he walked along beside them. They reminded him of other faces, faces from an earlier life, from a world that he did not like to remember, and he stayed as close as he could to Dustfinger's side.

"Are you sure these are the Prince's men?" Dustfinger asked Roxane in an undertone.

"Oh yes," she whispered back. "He can't choose who will follow him."

Farid did not think this answer very reassuring.

The robbers in Farid's old life had claimed caves full of treasure as their own, caverns more magnificent than the halls of the Castle of Night. The hideout where Snapper took them could not be compared with those caves. Its entrance, hidden in a crevice in the ground among tall beech trees, was so narrow that you had to squeeze your way in, and even Farid had to duck his head in the passage beyond it. The cave it led to was not much better. Other passages branched off, obviously leading even deeper underground. "Welcome to the Badger's Earth!" said Snapper, while the men sitting on the floor of the cave looked at them suspiciously. "Who says that only the Adderhead can dig deep into the ground? There are several men among us who toiled in his mines for years. They found out how you can nest far down in the earth and not have it fall on your head."

The Prince was alone in a cave to one side of the others, only the bear was with him, and he looked tired. But at the sight of Dustfinger his face brightened, and the news they brought was not so much of a surprise to him as they had expected.

"Ah yes, Sootbird!" he said, and Snapper drew a finger across his throat at the mention of that name. "I ought to have asked myself much sooner how he could afford the alchemists' powders he uses in his fire-eating shows. The few coins he earns in marketplaces wouldn't pay for it. But unfortunately I didn't have him watched until after the attack on the Secret Camp. He soon parted from the other prisoners we freed and met the Adderhead's informers on the border. While those he betrayed are in the dungeons of the Castle of Night, and there's nothing I can do for them! Here I am stuck in a forest swarming with soldiers. The Adderhead is assembling them up on the road that leads to Ombra."

"Cosimo?" It was Roxane who spoke the name, and the Prince nodded.

"Yes. I sent him three messengers with three warnings. One came back, but only to say that Cosimo laughed in his face. I'll admit I don't remember him as being quite so stupid. The year he spent away seems to have robbed him of his reason. He's planning to make war on the Adderhead with an army of peasants. It's as if we were to march against the Adderhead ourselves."

"We'd have a better chance," said Snapper.

"Yes, I expect we would." The Black Prince sounded so discouraged that Farid's heart failed him. Secretly, he had always put far more trust in the Prince than in Fenoglio's words, but what could this troop of ragged men digging themselves holes in the forest like rabbits do against the Castle of Night?

The men brought them something to eat, and Roxane looked at Dustfinger's leg. She treated the wound with an ointment that made it smell like spring in the cave for a moment. And Farid couldn't help thinking of Meggie. He remembered a story that he had heard by a fire on a cold night in the desert. It was the tale of a thief who fell in love with a princess; he still remembered it very well. The two were so deeply in love that they could speak to each other over a distance of many miles. Each could hear the other's thoughts even if walls separated them, each knew whether the other was sad or happy… but intently as Farid listened to his own feelings, he could sense nothing. He couldn't even have said whether Meggie was still alive. She seemed to have gone away, gone away from his heart, from the world. When he brushed the tears from his eyes, he felt Dustfinger looking at him.

"I'll have to rest this wretched leg or it will never heal," he said quietly. "But we'll go back. When the time comes…"

Roxane frowned, but she said nothing. The Prince and Dustfinger began talking so quietly that Farid had to move close to them to make out anything. Roxane put her head on Dustfinger's lap and was soon asleep. But Farid curled up like a puppy beside him, closed his eyes, and listened to the two men.

The Black Prince wanted to know all about Silvertongue – whether the day of the execution was fixed, where he was held prisoner, how his wound was doing. Dustfinger told him what he knew. And he told him about the book that Meggie had offered the Adderhead as a ransom for her father.

"A book to hold Death prisoner?" The Prince laughed incredulously. "Has the Adderhead taken to believing in fairy tales?"

Dustfinger did not reply to that. He said nothing about Fenoglio, he did not say they were all part of a story that an old man had written. In his place Farid wouldn't have said so, either. The Black Prince probably wouldn't believe there were words that could decide even his own fate, words like invisible paths from which you could not turn aside. The bear grunted in his sleep, and Roxane turned her head restlessly. She was holding Dustfinger's hand as if she wanted to take him into her dreams.

"You told the boy you'd go back," said the Prince. "You can come with us."

"Are you going to the Castle of Night? Why? Do you plan to storm it with these few men? Or tell the Adderhead that he's caught the wrong man? With this on your nose?" Dustfinger put his hand among the blankets lying on the floor and brought out a bird mask. Bluejay feathers sewn to cracked leather. He put the mask on his scarred face.

"Many of us have worn that mask before," said the Prince. "And now they're going to hang another innocent man for the deeds we've done. I can't allow that! This time it's a bookbinder. Last time, after we attacked one of the silver transports, they hanged a charcoal-burner just because he had a scar on his arm. His wife is probably still mourning him."

"It's not just the deeds you did. Fenoglio invented most of them!" Dustfinger sounded irritated. "Damn it, Prince, you can't save Silvertongue. You'll only die, too. Or do you seriously think the Adderhead will let him go just because you've turned yourself in?"

"No, I'm not such a fool as that. But I must do something." The Prince put his hand in his bear's mouth, as he so often did, and as always that hand, as if miraculously, came back intact from between the bear's teeth.

"Yes, yes, very well." Dustfinger sighed. "You and your unwritten rules. You don't even know Silvertongue! How can you want to die for someone you don't know?"

"Who would you die for?" the Prince asked in return.

Farid saw Dustfinger look at Roxane's sleeping face – and then turn to him. He quickly closed his eyes.

"You'd die for Roxane," he heard the Prince say.

"Perhaps," said Dustfinger, and through his lashes Farid saw him trace Roxane's dark brows with his finger. "Or perhaps not. Do you have many informers in the Castle of Night?"

"Yes, indeed. Kitchen maids, stable boys, even a few of the guards – although they come very expensive – and most useful of all, a falconer who sends me a message now and then by one of his clever birds. I shall hear at once when they've fixed the day of the execution. You know the Adderhead doesn't have such things done in a marketplace or in front of the common people in the castle courtyard anymore, not since you spoiled my punishment so thoroughly for him. He was never a friend of such spectacles, anyway. An execution is a serious matter to the Adderhead. The gallows outside the castle will do for a poor minstrel, there'll be no trouble about that, but the Bluejay will die inside the gate."

"Yes. If his daughter's voice doesn't open that gate for him," replied Dustfinger. "Her voice and a book – a book full of immortality."

Farid heard the Black Prince laugh. "That sounds almost like some new song by the Inkweaver!"

"Yes," replied Dustfinger in a husky voice. "It sounds just like him, doesn't it?"