"You’re dreadful!" Meggie’s indignant voice woke Rosenquartz again.

"Why? I’m only explaining what would have to be taken into account if I were really to try bringing this story to a good end, although it may have had different ideas itself for some time. Suppose I’m right? Suppose Violante loves the Bluejay and your father rejects her? Will she protect him from the Adderhead all the same? What role will Dustfinger take? Will the Piper see what game Violante is playing? Questions, nothing but questions! Believe you me, this story is a labyrinth! It looks as if there were several ways to go, but only one is right, and there’s a nasty surprise ready to punish you for every false step. This time, though, I’ll be prepared. This time I’ll see the traps it’s setting me, Meggie — and I’ll find the right way out. But for that I have to ask questions. For instance: Where’s Mortola? I can’t get that question out of my mind. And what, by all inky devils, is Orpheus up to? Questions, more and more questions. . . but Fenoglio is back in the game again! And he’s saved the Black Prince!"

Every wrinkle in his old face expressed self-satisfaction. Oh, he really was a terrible old man!

CHAPTER 46

THE CASTLE IN THE LAKE

They rode north, farther and farther north. On the morning of the second day, Violante had Mo’s hands, bound until now for fear of her father’s spies, loosened after one of her soldiers told her that otherwise the Bluejay would soon lose the use of them. More than fifty soldiers had been waiting for them barely a mile out of Ombra. Hardly any of them were older than Farid, and they all looked as determined as if they would follow Violante to the end of the world.

With every mile they put behind them the woods were darker and the valleys deeper.

The hills became mountains. Snow already lay on some of the passes, so that they had to dismount and lead their horses, and on the second night rain fell, covering the white snow with treacherous ice. The mountain range through -which they were riding seemed almost uninhabited. Only very occasionally did Mo see a village in the distance, an isolated farmhouse, or a charcoal-burner’s hut. It was almost as if Fenoglio had forgotten to populate this part of his world.

Dustfinger joined them when they first stopped to rest. He did it as naturally as if nothing were simpler than to pick up the trail that Violante’s soldiers were so carefully obliterating. The soldiers looked at him in the same respectful but wary way as they looked at Mo. Bluejay. . . Fire-Dancer. . . of course they knew the songs, and their eyes asked: Are these men made of the same flesh as us?

For himself, Mo knew the answer — although he sometimes wondered whether by now ink, rather than blood, flowed through his veins. He wasn’t so sure about Dustfinger. The horses shied when they saw the Fire-Dancer, although he could calm them with a whisper. He hardly slept or ate, and he plunged his hands into fire as if it were water. But when he talked about Roxane or Farid, there was human love in his words, and when he looked around for his daughter surreptitiously, as if he were ashamed of it, it was with the eyes of a mortal father.

It was good to ride, just to ride on while the Inkworld unfurled before them like elaborately folded paper. And with every mile Mo doubted more and more that all this had really been made by Fenoglio’s words. Wasn’t it more likely that the old man had simply been a reporter describing a tiny part of this world, a fraction of it that they had long ago left behind? Strange mountains rimmed the horizon, and Ombra was far away. The Wayless Wood seemed as distant as Elinor’s garden, the Castle of Night nothing but a dark dream.

"Have you ever been in these mountains before?" he once asked Dustfinger, who rode beside him in silence most of the time. Sometimes Mo thought he could hear the other man’s thoughts. Roxane, they whispered. And Dustfinger’s eyes kept wandering to his daughter, who was riding at Violante’s side and didn’t deign to give her father a glance.

"No, I don’t think so," replied Dustfinger, and it was the same as every time Mo spoke to him: It seemed as if he were calling him back from that place for which there were no words. Dustfinger didn’t talk about it, and Mo asked no questions. He knew what the other man was thinking. The White Women had touched them both, sowing in their hearts a longing for that place, a constant, wordless, bittersweet longing.

Dustfinger looked over his shoulder as if in search of a familiar view. "I never rode north in the old days. The mountains frightened me," he said, and smiled as if he were smiling at his old self, who had known so little of the world that a few mountains could scare him. "I was always drawn to the sea. The sea and the south."

Then he fell silent again. Dustfinger had never been very talkative, and his journey to the land of Death hadn’t changed that. So Mo left him to his silence and wondered, once more, whether the Black Prince had heard yet from Farid that the Bluejay was no longer in Ombra, and how Meggie and Resa had taken the news. It was so hard to leave them farther behind with every step his horse took, even if he did it knowing that the farther away he was, the safer they were. Don’t think about them, he told himself. Don’t wonder when or whether you’ll see them again. Tell yourself the Bluejay never had a wife or a daughter. Just for a while.

Violante turned in the saddle as if to make sure she hadn’t lost him. Brianna whispered something to her, and Violante smiled. Her Ugliness had a beautiful smile, although you seldom saw it. It showed how young she still was.

They were riding up a densely wooded hill. Sunlight fell through the branches of the almost leafless trees, and in spite of the snow covering the moss and roots farther up the slopes, there was still a smell of autumn here, of rotting leaves and the last fading flowers. Fairies, drowsy with the onset of winter, flitted through the grass, which was yellow now and stiff with frost Brownie tracks crossed their path, and Mo thought he heard wild glass men scurrying about under the bushes that grew on the slope above them. One of Violante’s soldiers began to sing quietly, and the sound of his young voice made Mo feel as if everything he had left behind were fading: his concern for Resa and Meggie, the Black Prince, the children of Ombra and the threat of the Piper, even his bargain with Death. There was only the path, the endless path winding up into the strange mountains, and the desire in his heart that he couldn’t tame, a wish to ride farther and farther on into this bewildering world. What did the castle to which Violante was leading them look like? Were there really giants in the mountains?

Where did the path end? Did it ever end at all? Not for the Bluejay, a voice inside him whispered, and for a moment his heart beat like the heart of a ten-year-old boy, as fearless and as fresh.

He sensed Dustfinger’s eyes resting on him. "You like this world of mine."

"Yes. Yes, I do." Mo himself could hear the guilt in his voice.

Dustfinger laughed louder than Mo had ever heard him laugh before. He looked so different without the scars — as if the White Women had healed his heart as well as his face. "And you’re ashamed of it!" he said. "Why? Because you still think everything here is just made of words? It is indeed a strange thing: Look at you! Anyone might think you belonged here as much as me. Are you sure someone didn’t just read you over into that other world of yours?"

Mo didn’t know whether or not he liked that idea. "Fairly sure," he answered.