Meggie couldn’t have said how much time had passed when, with a sigh, Fenoglio put down his pen. Rosenquartz was still snoring, stretched out straight as a ruler behind the sandbox.
Fenoglio reached into the box and sprinkled sand over the wet ink.
“Did you – did you think of something?” Meggie hesitantly asked.
“Yes, yes, but don’t ask me if I got it right.”
He handed her the parchment, and her eyes skimmed the words. There weren’t many of them, but if they were indeed the right words, they would be enough.
“I didn’t make him up, Meggie!” said Fenoglio in a soft voice. “Your father isn’t one of my characters, like Cosimo and Dustfinger and Capricorn. He doesn’t belong here. So don’t hope for too much, will you?”
Meggie nodded as she rolled up the parchment. “Dustfinger wants you to keep an eye on his daughter while he’s gone.”
“His daughter? Dustfinger has a daughter? Did I write that? Oh yes – indeed, weren’t there two of them?”
“You know one of them, anyway. She’s Brianna, Her Ugliness’s maid.”
“Brianna?” Fenoglio looked at her in astonishment.
“Yes.” Meggie picked up the leather bag that she had brought with her from the other world and went to the door. “Look after her. I’m to say that if you don’t, you’ll rue the day you ever thought up someone who can call on fire.”
“He said that?” Fenoglio pushed back his chair and laughed. “You know something? I like him better and better. I believe I’ll write another story about him, a story where he’s the hero, and he doesn’t –”
“Die?” Meggie opened the door. “I’ll tell him, but I think he’s had more than enough of being in one of your stories.”
“But he is in one. He came back into my story of his own free will!” Fenoglio called after her as she hurried down the steps. “We’re all in it, Meggie, up to our necks in it! When are you coming back? I want you to meet Cosimo!”
Meggie did not reply. How was she to know when she’d be coming back?
“You call that hurrying?” asked Dustfinger, when she was standing before him again, out of breath and putting Fenoglio’s parchment in her bag. “What’s that parchment for? Did the old man give you one of his songs for nourishment along the way?”
“Something like that,” replied Meggie.
“Just so long as my name’s not in it,” said Dustfinger, turning toward the road.
“Is it far?” called Meggie, as she hurried after him and Farid.
“We’ll be there by evening,” said Dustfinger, over his shoulder.
Chapter 36 – Screams
I want to see thirst
In the syllables,
Touch fire
In the sound;
Feel through the dark
For the scream.
– Pablo Neruda, “Word”, Five Decades
The White Women were still there. Resa didn’t seem to see them anymore, but Mo felt their presence like shadows in sunlight. He didn’t tell her about them. She looked so tired. The one thing that still kept her going was her hope that Dustfinger would soon arrive – with Meggie.
“You wait and see, he’ll find her,” Resa kept whispering to him when he shook with fever. How could she be so sure? As if Dustfinger had never let them down, never stolen the book, never betrayed them .. Meggie. The need to see her once again was even stronger than the enticing whispers of the White Women, stronger than the pain in his breast .. and who could say, perhaps this accursed story might yet take a turn for the better? Although Mo remembered Fenoglio’s preference for unhappy endings only too well.
“Tell me what it looks like outside,” he sometimes whispered to Resa. “It’s ridiculous to be in a whole different world and see nothing of it but a cave.” And Resa described what he couldn’t see
– the trees, so much taller and older than any trees he had ever set eyes on, the fairies like swarms of gnats among the branches, the glass men in the tall bracken, and the nameless terrors of the night. Once she caught a fairy – Dustfinger had told her how to do it – and took it to him.
She held the little creature in the hollow of her hands and put it close to his ear, so that he could hear the fairy’s chirping, indignant voice.
It all seemed so real, however often he told himself it was made of nothing but paper and ink.
The hard ground where he lay, the dry leaves that rustled when he tossed and turned in his fever, the bear’s hot breath – and the Black Prince, whom he had last seen in the pages of a book.
Now the man himself sometimes sat beside him, cooling his brow and talking quietly to Resa. Or was it all just a fevered dream?
Death felt real in this Inkworld, too. Very real. It was strange to encounter death here in a world out of a book. But even if the dying was made only of words – even if, perhaps, it was nothing but a game played by the letters on the page – his body thought it was real. His heart felt fear, his flesh felt pain. And the White Women had not gone away, even if Resa couldn’t see them. Mo felt them near him, every minute, every hour, every day, and every night. Fenoglio’s angels of death.
Did they make dying easier than it was in the world he came from? No. Nothing could make it easier. You lost what you loved. That was death, here as well as there.
It was light outside when Mo heard the first scream. At first he thought the fever was taking hold of him again. But then he saw from Resa’s face that she could hear it, too: the clash of weapons and screaming. Cries of fear – death cries. Mo tried to sit up, but the pain pounced on him like an animal digging its teeth into his chest. He saw the Black Prince standing outside the cave, his sword drawn; he saw Resa jump up. Fever made her face blur before his eyes, but then Mo suddenly saw another picture: He saw Meggie sitting in Fenoglio’s kitchen staring at the old man in horror as, full of pride, he told her of the fine death scene he had written for Dustfinger. Oh yes, Fenoglio liked sad stories. And perhaps he had just written another.
“Resa!” Mo cursed the way his tongue felt, heavy with fever, “Resa, go and hide – hide somewhere in the forest.”
But she stayed with him as she always had – except for that one day, the day when his own voice had banished her.
Chapter 37 – Bloodstained Straw
Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.
– Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built
Meggie had often felt frightened in the Wayless Wood with Farid, but it was different with Dustfinger. The trees seemed to rustle more loudly when he passed them, the bushes seemed to reach their branches out to him. Fairies settled on his backpack like butterflies on a flower, pulling his hair until he brushed them away, talking to them. Other creatures, too, appeared and disappeared, beings whose names Meggie didn’t know either from Resa’s stories or from any other source, some of them no more than a pair of eyes among the trees.
Dustfinger led them as purposefully as if he could see their road laid out like a red guideline before him. He never even stopped to rest, but took them on and on, uphill and downhill, going deeper into the forest every hour. Away from human beings. When at last he stopped, Meggie’s legs were shaking with exhaustion. It must be late in the afternoon. Dustfinger passed his hand over the snapped twigs of a bush, bent down, examined the damp ground, and picked up a handful of berries that had been trodden underfoot.
