CHAPTER 65

MADE VISIBLE

You must go! You’re not safe anywhere in this castle!" I Dustfinger kept saying it, again and again, and Mo kept shaking his head.

"I have to find the White Book."

"Let me look for it. I’ll write the three words. Even I can write well enough for that!"

"No, that wasn’t the bargain. Suppose Death comes for Meggie all the same? I bound the Book, I must rid the world of it. And the Adder wants to see you dead as much as me."

"I’ll simply slip out of my skin again."

"You only just found your way back into it last time."

How familiar the two of them sounded with each other. Like two sides of a coin, like two faces of the same man.

"What bargain are you talking about?"

They looked at Resa as if they both wished her far, far away. Mo was pale, but his eyes were dark with anger, and his hand kept going to his old wound. What had they done to him down in that terrible cell?

Dust lay like snow in the room where they were hiding. The plaster on the ceiling was so damp that it had crumbled away in places. The Castle in the Lake was sick, Perhaps it was already dying, but on its walls lambs still slept beside wolves, dreaming of a world that never was. The room had two narrow windows. A dead tree stood in the courtyard below.

Walls, parapets, oriel towers, bridges . . . a stony trap, and Resa wanted her wings back. How her skin was itching. As if the feathered quills were just waiting to pierce through again.

"Mo what kind of bargain?" She came between the two men.

When he told her she began crying. Now at last she understood. He was promised to Death whether he stayed or fled. Caught in a trap made of stone and ink. And so was their daughter.

He took her in his arms, but he wasn’t really with her. He was still down in the cell, drowning in hate and fear. His heart was beating so violently that she was afraid it might break in his breast.

"I’ll kill him," she heard him say as she wept into his shoulder. "I ought to have done it long ago. And after that I’ll look for the Book."

She knew only too well who he meant. Orpheus. He pushed her gently away from him and picked up his sword. It was covered with blood, but he wiped the blade clean on his sleeve. He still wore the black clothes of a bookbinder, although it was a long time since that had been his trade. He made for the door with determination, but Dustfinger barred his way.

"That’s your idea?!" he said. "Very well, so Orpheus read the words, but you are making them come true!" He raised his hands, and fire wrote the words in the air, terrible words, all speaking of only one thing. The Last Song of the Bluejay.

Mo stretched out his hand as if to extinguish them, but they scorched his fingers and burned his heart.

"Orpheus is just waiting for you to come to him!" said Dustfinger. "He’s going to serve you up to the Adderhead on a platter made of ink. Resist it! It’s not a pleasant feeling to read the words that guide your actions. No one knows that better than I do, but they didn’t come true for me, either. They have only as much power as you give them. You won’t go to Orpheus, I will. I don’t know much about killing. Even dying didn’t teach me that, but I can steal the books from which he takes the words. And once you can think straight again, we’ll look for the White Book together."

"Suppose the Adder’s soldiers find Mo here first?" Resa was still staring at the burning words. She read them again and again.

Dustfinger passed his hand over the picture fading on the walls of the room, and the painted wolf began to move. "I’ll leave you a watchdog, though not quite such a fierce one as Orpheus’s, but it will howl when the soldiers come, and I hope it can hold them off long enough to give you time to find another hiding place. Fire will teach the Adder’s men to fear every shadow."

The wolf with its burning coat leaped off the wall and followed Dustfinger out.

However, the words that had been written in the air were still there, and Resa read them again:

But when the Bluejay would not bow to the Adderhead, only one man knew what to do, a stranger who had come from far away to be the Adder’s adviser. He understood that the Bluejay could be broken by only one man, and that was himself So he summoned up all that the Bluejay didn’t dare to acknowledge: the fear that made him fearless, the anger that made him invincible. He had him thrown into darkness to fight himself there to fight the pain still inside him, never forgotten, never healed, all the fear that fetters and chains had given him, the anger that had sown the seeds of fear. He painted dreadful pictures in his heart, pictures of. . .

Resa read no more. The words were too terrible. But the fire had burned the last sentences into her memory.

. . . and the Bluejay, broken by his own darkness, pleaded with the Adderhead to be allowed to bind him a second Book, even more beautiful than the first. But as soon as the Silver Prince had the Book in his hands he condemned him to die the slowest of all deaths, and the minstrels sang the Last Song of the Bluejay.

Mo had turned his back on the words. He stood there with the dust of countless years around him like gray snow, looking at his hands as if he wasn’t sure whether they still did as he told them or obeyed the words burning behind him.

"Mo?" Resa kissed him. She knew that he wouldn’t like what she was about to do.

He looked at her absently, his eyes full of darkness.

"I will look for the White Book. I’ll find it and write the three words in it for you."

So that the Adderhead dies before Orpheus’s words come true, she added in her mind, and before the name Fenoglio gave you kills you.

By the time Mo understood what she had said, she was already lifting the seeds to her mouth. He tried to knock them out of her hand, but she already had them under her tongue.

"No, Resa!"

She flew through the fiery letters. Their heat singed her breast.

"Resa!"

No, this time he was the one who must wait. Stay where you are, she thought. Please, Mo.

CHAPTER 66

LOVE DISGUISED AS HATE

The Adderhead wanted fairy blood, a whole tub full, to bathe his itching skin.

Orpheus was writing fairies’ nests into the bare branches of the cherry trees growing under his window when he heard soft footsteps behind him. He dropped his pen so abruptly that it spattered Ironstone’s gray feet with ink. The Bluejay!

Orpheus thought he could already feel the sword between his shoulder blades: After all, he himself had stoked the Bluejay’s bloodlust, drowning him in anger and helpless rage. How had he managed to get past the guards? There were three outside his door, and Thumbling was waiting in the next room.

However, when Orpheus turned he found not Mortimer but Dustfinger standing behind him.

What was he doing here? Why wasn’t he outside the cage where his sobbing daughter sat, letting the Night-Mare eat him?

Dustfinger.

Less than a year ago the mere thought of seeing him would have made Orpheus drunk with happiness—in the bleak room where he was living at the time, surrounded by books that spoke of the longing in his heart but never satisfied it.

Longing for a world that bowed to his will, longing to escape his gray failure of a life at last, to become the Orpheus that slumbered inside him, the man whom those who mocked him never saw. Perhaps longing was the wrong word. It sounded too tame, too gentle and resigned. It was a raging desire that drove him, desire for everything he didn’t have.