CHAPTER 41

PICTURES FROM THE ASHES

The cave that Mo and the Black Prince had found, long before Sootbird staged his show, was two hours’ journey north of Ombra on foot. That was a long way for children to walk, and Winter had come to the Inkworld, with rain that turned to snow more and more often. White moths were suddenly hanging from the bare branches like leaves made of ice, and gray-feathered owls had begun hunting the fairies.

"My own fairies sleep at this time of year," Fenoglio had said in self-defense, when Despina began crying because an owl had torn two of the tiny creatures to pieces before her eyes. "But the Silly creatures Orpheus has made flutter around as if they’d never heard of winter!"

The Black Prince led them uphill and downhill, through thickets and stony debris, along such overgrown paths that they usually had to carry the smaller children.

Meggie’s back was soon aching, but Elinor strode on as if she couldn’t wait to see as much as possible of this strange world -- although she went to a great deal of trouble to conceal her delight from the creator of the whole thing. Fenoglio was walking right behind them most of the time, with Resa and Darius. The little girl Resa was carrying looked so like Meggie that, whenever Meggie herself turned around to her mother, it was like looking back to a time that had never been. Mo used to carry her when she was little, always Mo. But when she saw Resa pressing her face into the little girl’s hair Meggie wished it had been different. Perhaps then Mo’s absence wouldn’t have hurt her quite so much.

When Resa felt sick halfway to the cave, Roxane told her not to carry any of the children anymore. "Be careful!" Meggie heard her say. "You don’t want to be telling your husband you’ve lost his child when he comes back, do you?"

It was obvious now that Resa was pregnant, and sometimes Meggie wanted to put her hand on the place where the child was growing, but she didn’t. Tears had sprung to Darius’s eyes when he heard about the pregnancy, and Elinor had cried, "Well, everything has to turn out all right now," hugging Resa so hard that she must almost have squashed the unborn child. But Meggie kept catching herself thinking, I don’t need any sister. Or any brother, either. I just want my father back! However, when one of the little boys she had been carrying on her back thanked her with a smacking kiss on her cheek, she felt — for the first time, and quite unexpectedly that she was looking forward to the neW baby, and she began imagining what it would be like to have a brother or sister putting small fingers into her own hand.

They were all glad that Roxane had come with them. Her son had not been among the children taken captive by the Piper and Sootbird, but she had brought Jehan along all the same. Roxane was wearing her long black hair loose again, as the minstrel women did. She smiled more often these days, too, and when some of the children started crying because it was such a long way, Meggie heard her sing for the first time. She sang very quietly, but it was enough for Meggie to understand what Battista had once said: "When Roxane sings she takes all the sadness from your heart and makes music out of it." How could she be so happy when Dustfinger wasn’t with her? "Because now she knows that he will always come back to her," Battista said.

Did Resa know the same of Mo?

Meggie didn’t see the entrance to the cave until she was very close to it. Tall fir trees hid it, thorn apple, and bushes with white down hanging from their branches, long and soft as human hair. Meggie’s skin was still itching hours after she had followed Doria through the dense thickets.

The crack in the rock leading to the cavern inside was so narrow that the Strong Man had to duck his head and squeeze through it sideways, but the cave itself was tall as a church inside, and the children’s voices echoing back from the rock walls were so loud that it seemed to Meggie as if they could be heard all the way to Ombra.

The Black Prince posted six guards outside. They climbed high into the tops of the surrounding trees. He sent four more ‘lien back to obliterate their tracks. Doria went as well, and Sitting on his shoulder was Jasper, who had attached himself to Doria now that Farjd had gone. It was an almost hopeless task to hide the prints of so many small feet, and Meggie could see from the Prince’s face how much he would have liked to take the children even farther away, far from the Piper and the Milksop’s hounds.

The Black Prince had let half a dozen women come with their children as he knew his men well enough to realize that they weren’t much use as foster mothers. Roxane, Resa, and Minerva helped the women to make the cave more comfortable, laying blankets and lengths of cloth between the rocky walls, bringing in more dry leaves so that everyone could sleep more easily, spreading furs over the leaves and piling up stones to make separate niches where the smallest children could bed down. They made a hearth to cook on, took stock of the provisions the robbers had brought and kept straining their ears for noises outside, terrified of suddenly hearing the barking of dogs or soldiers voices.

"See how greedily they’re stuffing their little mouths!" grunted Snapper when the Black Prince first had food served to the children. "Our provisions are hardly going to last a week at this rate. And then what?"

"By then the Adderhead will be long dead," replied the Strong Man, his tone defiant, but Snapper just laughed scornfully.

"Oh yes? And the Bluejay will kill the Piper at the same time, will he? He’ll need more than three words for that. And what about the Milksop and his men-at-arms?"

Yes, what about them? No one knew the answer to that. "Violante will throw them all out once her father’s dead!" said Minerva. But Meggie still found it hard to trust Her Ugliness.

"He’ll be all right, Meggie!" Elinor kept saying. "Don’t look so sad. If I get the hang of this whole story which isn’t 50 easy, since our good friend the author there likes making things complicated," she added with a reproachful glance at Fenoglio "then they won’t touch a hair of your father’s head, because he has to cure that Book for the Adderhead. Which presumably he can’t do, but that’s another problem. Anyway, you wait and see.

Everything will end well!"

If only Meggie could have believed her, as she used to believe Mo. "It will be all right, Meggie!" That was all he had to say, and she would lay her head against his shoulder in the certain knowledge that he would fix everything. How long ago that was. So very long ago.

The Black Prince had sent Gecko’s tame crows to Ombra to the Barn Owl and his informers in the castle—and Resa stood outside the cave for hours on end, searching the sky for black feathers. But the only bird Gecko brought into the cave on the second day was a bedraggled magpie, and in the end it was Farid, not one of the crows, who brought them news of the Bluejay.

He was shaking with cold when one of the guards took him to the Black Prince, and his face had the forlorn expression it wore every time Dustfinger had sent him away.

Meggie took Elinor’s hand as he stammered out his news: Violante was taking Mo to her mother’s castle as her prisoner. Dustfinger would follow them. The Piper had hit and threatened Mo. . . . Violante had been afraid he would kill him. Resa buried her face in her hands, and Roxane put an arm around her.

"Her mother’s castle? But Violante’s mother is dead!" By now Elinor knew her way around Fenoglio’s story better than its author himself. She moved among the robbers as if she had always been one of them, got Battista to sing her minstrel songs, asked the Strong Man to show her how to talk to the birds, and made Jasper explain how many different kinds of glass men there were. She kept tripping on the hem of her peculiar dress, she had smudge5 on her forehead and spiders in her hair, but Elinor looked happier than she had ever been before.