Inkdeath (38 page)

Near him.

Farid looked at the tent where Meggie slept. He thought he could hear her crying, but he dared not go to her. She hadn’t yet forgiven him for persuading her father to do that deal with Orpheus, and Doria was sitting outside her tent. He was to be found near Meggie a good deal too often for Farid’s liking, but luckily he appeared to understand as little about girls as his strong brother. The men back from Ombra were sitting around the fire, heads bent. Some of them didn’t even take off the women’s clothes they had been wearing, but the Black Prince gave them no time to drown their fears for the future in wine. He sent them out hunting. They would need good stocks of provisions if they were to hide the children of Ombra from the Piper: dried meat, warm furs.

But that didn’t interest Farid. He no more belonged to the robbers than he had to Orpheus. He didn’t even belong to Meggie. He belonged with only one person, and he had to keep away from him, for fear of bringing him to his death.

Darkness was just falling, and the robbers were still smoking meat and stretching skins between the trees, when Gwin came scurrying out of the forest. Farid thought the marten was Jink until he saw the graying muzzle. Yes, it was Gwin all right.

Since Dustfinger’s death he had looked at Farid like an enemy, but tonight he nibbled his calves the way he used to when he wanted to play, and chattered until Farid followed him.

The marten was quick, too quick even for Farid, who could Outrun most people, but Gwin kept stopping to wait for him with his tail twitching impatiently, leaving Farid to follow as fast as the darkness allowed, because he knew who had sent the marten.

They found Dustfinger where the castle walls became the city boundary of Ombra and the mountainside on which the city stood rose so steeply that no other houses could stand there. Nothing but thorny bushes covered the slope, and the castle wall towered up without any windows, forbidding as a clenched fist, broken by only a few barred slits that let just enough air into the dungeons for the prisoners not to stifle to death before they were executed. No one stayed long in the castle dungeons of Ombra. Sentences were quickly passed and executions quickly carried out. Why feed someone for long if you were going to hang him anyway? The date of the Bluejay’s death depended only on the judge who was coming from the far side of the forest especially for him. Five days, so the whisper went, it would take the Adderhead five days to reach Ombra in his black-draped coach—and no one knew whether the Bluejay would live as long as a single day after his arrival.

Dustfinger stood with his shoulders back against the wall and his head bent, as if he were listening. The deep shadows cast by the castle made him invisible to the guards pacing back and forth on the battlements.

Dustfinger turned only when Gwin bounded toward him. Farid looked anxiously up at the guards before running to him, but they weren’t looking for a boy, or a man on his own. One man wouldn’t be able to set the Bluejay free. No, the Milksop’s soldiers were watching for the arrival of many men, men coming out of the nearby forest or using ropes to help them down the steep slope above the castle — although the Piper must know that even the Black Prince wouldn’t venture to storm Ombra Castle.

The sky above the towers shone with the dark green Of Sootbird’s fire. The Milksop was celebrating. The Piper had ordered all the minstrels among the strolling players to compose songs about his own cunning and the defeat of the Bluejay, but very few had obeyed. Most of them kept silent, and their silence sang another song — a song of the sadness in Ombra and the tears of the women who had their children back but had lost their hope.

"Well, what do you think of Sootbird’s fire?" Dustfinger whispered as Farid came to lean against the castle wall beside him. "Our friend has learned a few things, wouldn’t you say?"

"He’s still useless!" Farid whispered back, and Dustfinger smiled, but his face grew grave again as he looked up at the windowless walls.

"It’s nearly midnight," he said quietly. "At this time the Piper likes to show prisoners his hospitality with fists, clubs, and boots." He laid his hands on the wall and passed them over it, as if the stones could tell him what was going on in the cells behind them. "He’s not with him yet," he whispered. "But it won’t be long now."

"How do you know?" Sometimes it seemed to Farid as if someone else had come back from the dead, not the man he had known.

"Well, Silvertongue, Bluejay, whatever you like to call him. . . "

Dustfinger whispered. "Since his voice brought me back I’ve known what he feels as if Death had transplanted his heart into my breast. Now, catch me a fairy, or the Piper will half kill him before sunrise. Bring me one of the rainbow-colored kind. Orpheus has given them his own vanity, which comes in handy. You can get them to do anything for a few compliments."

The fairy was soon found. Orpheus’s fairies were all over the place, and although winter didn’t make them as drowsy as Fenoglio’s blue fairies, it was child’s play to pluck one from her nest at this hour of the night. She bit Farid, but he blew in her face as Dustfinger had taught him, until she was gasping for air and forgot all about biting. Dustfinger whispered something to her, and next moment the tiny thing was fluttering up to the barred slits in the wall and disappearing through one of them.

"What did you tell her?" Above them, Sootbird’s venomous fire went on devouring the night. It swallowed up the sky, the stars, and the moon, and the smoke hanging in the air was so acrid that Farid’s eyes were streaming.

"Oh, just that I promised the Bluejay I’d send the most beautiful fairy of all to visit him in his dark dungeon. And by way of thanks she’ll whisper him the news that the Adderhead will reach Ombra in five days’ time, even if the moss-women pave his way here with curses and that, meanwhile, we’ll try to keep the Piper’s mind occupied, so that he can’t spend too much time beating up his prisoners." Dustfinger clenched his left hand into a fist. "You haven’t yet asked me why I sent for you," he said, blowing gently into the fist he had made. "I thought you might like to see this."

He laid his fist against the castle wall, and fiery spiders scuttled out from between his fingers. They hurried up the stones, more and more of them, as many as if they had been born there in Dustfinger’s hand.

"The Piper’s afraid of spiders," he whispered. "He fears them more than swords and knives, and if these creep into his fine clothes he may forget, just for a while, how much he enjoys beating his prisoners at night."

Farid clenched his own fist. "How do you make them?"

"I don’t know—which, I’m afraid, means I can’t teach you. Any more than I can teach you this." Dustfinger placed his hands together. Farid heard him whispering, but he couldn’t make out the words. When a fiery blue jay flew out of Dustfinger’s hands and soared into the night sky on wings of blue-and-white fire, he felt a pang of envy like a wasp sting.

"Oh, show me!" he whispered. "Please! Let me try, at least!"

Dustfinger looked at him thoughtfully. One of the guards above them was raising the alarm. The fiery spiders had reached the castle battlements. "Death taught me the trick of it, Farid," he said softly.

"Well? So I was dead, too, like you, although not for so long!"

Dustfinger laughed. He laughed so loudly that a sentry looked down, and he quickly drew Farid back with him into the blackest shadows.

"You’re right. I’d quite forgotten!" he whispered as the guards on the wall shouted in confusion and shot arrows at the fiery jay. The arrows smoldered and went out among its feathers. "Very well, copy me! Try this."

Farid quickly curved his fingers, feeling the excitement he always felt when he was going to learn something new about fire. It wasn’t easy to repeat the strange words that Dustfinger whispered, and Farid’s heart leaped when he really did feel a fiery tingling between his fingers. Next moment spiders were swarming all over the wall from his hand, too, their burning bodies hurrying up the stones like an army of sparks. He smiled proudly at Dustfinger. But when he tried the blue jay, only a few pale moths fluttered out from between his fingers.

"Don’t look so disappointed!" whispered Dustfinger as he sent two more blue jays flying into the night. "There’s plenty more to learn But we’d better hide from our silver-nosed friend now."

Ombra Castle wore a burning coat as they made their way through the trees, and Sootbird’s fire had gone out. The sky belonged to the fire conjured up by Dustfinger.

The Piper sent out patrols, but Dustfinger made the flames give birth to wolves and big cats, snakes slithering out of the branches, fiery moths that flew in the faces of the men-at-arms. The forest at the foot of the castle seemed to be all aflame, but the fire did not take hold, and Farid and his master were shadows among all the red, untouched by the fear they were spreading.

Finally, the Piper had water poured from the battlements. It froze to ice in the branches of the trees, but Dustfinger’s fire burned on, shaping new creatures all the time, and died down only in the morning, like a specter of the night. The fiery blue jays, however, went on circling in the air above Ombra, and when the Milksop sent his hounds into the forest where the flames were now extinguished, fiery hares threw them off any track they found. But Farid sat with Dustfinger in a thicket of thorn apple and brownie-thorn, feeling happiness warm his heart. It was so good to be near Dustfinger again, as he had been in the old days, during all the nights when he had watched over him or kept him from bad dreams. Now, however, there didn’t seem to be anything he had to protect him from. Except yourself, Farid, he thought, and his happiness was gone like the fiery creatures that Dustfinger had conjured up to protect the Bluejay.

"What’s the matter?" Dustfinger looked at him as if it wasn’t only Silvertongue’s thoughts he could read.

Then he took Farid’s hand and blew gently into it, until a woman made of white fire rose from his fingers. "They’re not as bad as you think," Dustfinger whispered to him, "and if they come for me again it won’t be because of you. Understand?"

"What do you mean?" Farid’s heart missed a beat. "Are they going to come for you again? Why? Soon?" The White Woman on his hand changed into a moth, fluttered away, and dissolved in the gray light of dawn.

"That depends on the Bluejay."

"What does?"

Dustfinger placed a warning hand over his mouth and pushed the thorny tendrils aside. Soldiers had taken up positions under the window slits of the dungeons. They were staring at the forest, eyes wide with fear. Sootbird was with them. He was examining the castle wall as if he could read in the stones how Dustfinger had set the night on fire. "Look at him!" Dustfinger whispered. "He hates the fire, and the fire hates him."

But Farid didn’t want to talk about Sootbird. He reached for Dustfinger’s arm. "They mustn’t come to take you away again! Please!"

Dustfinger looked at him. His eyes were so different since he had come back. There was no fear in them now, only the old watchfulness. "I’ll say it again. It all depends on the Bluejay. So help me to protect him, because he’s going to need protection.

Five days and nights in the Piper’s power — that’s a long time. I think we’ll all be glad when the Adderhead finally arrives.

Farid wanted to ask more questions, but he saw in Dustfinger’s face that he would get no further answers. "How about Her Ugliness? Don’t you believe she can protect him?"

"Do you?" Dustfinger asked back.

A fairy was struggling through the thorny undergrowth. She almost tore her wings on the branches, but finally, exhausted, she perched on Dustfinger’s knee. It was the fairy he had sent out to look for the Bluejay. She had found him and was bringing back his thanks. Nor did she forget to mention that he had assured her that she was indeed the most beautiful fairy he had ever set eyes on.

It was snowing, tiny icy flakes, and Meggie wondered whether her father could see the snowflakes falling from wherever he was held captive. No, she told herself, the dungeons of Ombra lie too deep under the castle, and the idea that Mo was missing his first sight of snow in the Inkworld made her almost as sad as knowing that he was a prisoner.

Dustfinger was protecting him, as the Black Prince had so often assured her. Battista and Roxane kept saying so as well. But Meggie could think of nothing but the Piper, and how frail and young Violante had looked beside him.

The Adderhead was only two days’ journey away now, so Nettle had said yesterday.

Two days, and everything would be decided. Two days.

The Strong Man drew Meggie to his side and pointed through the trees. Two women were looking for a way through the snow-covered thickets. They had a couple of boys and a girl with them. The children of Ombra had been disappearing one by one ever since the Bluejay gave himself up. Their mothers took them out into the fields, down to the river to do their laundry, into the forest to look for firewood and came back alone. There were four places where the Prince’s men waited for the children.

News of their whereabouts was passed on from mouth to mouth, and there was a woman as well as a robber waiting at each of those places, so that it wouldn’t be too hard for the children to let go of their mothers’ hands.

Resa, Battista, and Gecko were receiving them at the infirmary run by the Barn Owl.

Roxane and Elfbane waited at the place where the healers gathered the bark of oak trees. Two more women met children by the river and Meggie, with Doria and the Strong Man, waited for them in a charcoal-burner’s abandoned hut not far from the road to Ombra.

The three children hesitated when they saw the Strong Man, but their mothers led them on, and when Doria caught a couple of snowflakes on his outstretched tongue the youngest, a girl of about five, began giggling.

"Suppose we just make the Piper angry again by hiding them with you?" asked the child’s mother. "Suppose he’s given up any idea of taking the children away now the Bluejay is his prisoner? It was all about the Bluejay, wasn’t it?"