Perhaps he was right.”

“Was he?” Dustfinger spun around. Someone was clearing his throat in the darkness.

“Didn’t you say we must be gone before the sun rises?” Farid’s voice sounded reproachful.

By fire and fairies, he’d forgotten the boy! And Farid was right. Morning couldn’t be far away, and the shadow of the Castle of Night was not the best place to discuss dead husbands.

“Very well. Catch the martens!” Dustfinger whispered into the night. “But don’t, for heaven’s sake, scare me to death like that again, understand? Or I’ll never let you make yourself invisible again.”

Chapter 63 – The Badger’s Earth

“Oh, Sara. It is like a story.”

“It is a story … everything is a story. You are a story – I am a story. Miss Minchin is a story.”

– Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Little Princess

Farid followed Dustfinger and Roxane through the night with an expression that must surely be as dark as the sky above them. It hurt to leave Meggie behind in the castle, however sensible it was. And now here was Roxane coming with them, too. Although he had to admit that she seemed to know exactly where she was going. They soon came upon the first hiding place, well concealed behind thorny undergrowth, but it was deserted. In the next they found two men who distrustfully drew their knives and did not put them back in their belts until Roxane had spoken to them at length. Perhaps they sensed the presence of Dustfinger and Farid, in spite of their invisibility. Fortunately, Roxane had once cured a nasty ulcer for one of them, and he finally told her where she would find the Prince.

The Badger’s Earth. Farid thought he heard those words twice. “Their main hideout,” was all that Roxane said. “We must be there by daybreak. But they warned me that there are said to be soldiers on the move, a great many of them.”

From then on Farid sometimes thought he heard the clink of swords in the distance, the snorting of horses, voices, marching footsteps – but perhaps he was only imagining it. Soon the first rays of sunlight penetrated the leaf canopy above them, gradually turning their bodies visible again, like reflections on dark water. It was good not to have to keep looking for his own hands and feet, and to see Dustfinger again. Even if he was walking beside Roxane.

Now and then Farid sensed her looking at him, as if she were still searching his dark face for some similarity to Dustfinger. At her farm she had once or twice asked him questions about his mother. Farid would have liked to tell her that his mother had been a princess, much, much more beautiful than Roxane, and that Dustfinger had loved her so dearly that he stayed with her for ten years until death took her from him, leaving him only with their son, their dark-skinned, black-eyed son who now followed him like a shadow. But his age wasn’t quite right for this tale, and moreover Dustfinger would probably have been furious if Roxane had asked him for the truth behind it, so in the end Farid told her only that his mother was dead – which was probably correct. If Roxane was stupid enough to think Dustfinger had come back to her only because he had lost another woman, all the better. Every glance that Dustfinger cast her filled Farid’s heart to the brim with jealousy. Suppose he decided to stay with her forever, at the farm with the fragrant fields of herbs? Suppose he stopped wanting to go from one marketplace to the next but preferred to live with her, kissing her and laughing with her as he already did only too often, forgetting fire and Farid?

The forest became denser and denser, and the Castle of Night might have been only a bad dream, when they suddenly saw more than a dozen men standing among the trees around them. Armed men in ragged clothes. They appeared so silently that even Dustfinger hadn’t heard them. They surrounded them with hostile expressions on their faces, knives and swords in their hands, and stared at the two figures who were still almost transparent around the chests and arms.

“Hey, Snapper, don’t you know me?” asked Roxane, going up to one of them. “How are your fingers doing?”

The man’s face cleared. He was a heavily built fellow with a scar on his neck. “Ah, the herb-witch,” he said. “Of course. Why are you roaming the forest here so early? And what are those ghosts with you?”

“We’re not ghosts. We’re looking for the Black Prince.” As Dustfinger moved to Roxane’s side all the men’s weapons turned his way.

“What are you doing?” Roxane asked the men angrily. “Look at his face. Did you never hear of the fire-dancer? The Prince will set his bear on you if he hears that you threatened him.”

The men put their heads together and scrutinized Dustfinger’s scarred face uneasily.

“Three scars as pale as cobwebs,” whispered Snapper. “Oh yes, we’ve all heard about him, but only in songs. . ”

“Who says songs can’t be believed?” Dustfinger breathed into the cool morning air and whispered fire-words until a flame consumed his steaming breath. The robbers flinched back and stared at him, as if this only reinforced their certainty that he was a ghost. However, Dustfinger raised both hands in the air and put the flame out between them as if nothing could be easier. Then he bent down and cooled the palms of his hands on the dewy grass.

“Did you see that?” Snapper looked at the others. “That’s just what the Prince has always told us about him – he catches fire as you might catch a rabbit; he speaks to it like a lover.”

The robbers took the three into their midst. Farid looked uneasily at the men’s faces as he walked along beside them. They reminded him of other faces, faces from an earlier life, from a world that he did not like to remember, and he stayed as close as he could to Dustfinger’s side.

“Are you sure these are the Prince’s men?” Dustfinger asked Roxane in an undertone.

“Oh yes,” she whispered back. “He can’t choose who will follow him.”

Farid did not think this answer very reassuring.

The robbers in Farid’s old life had claimed caves full of treasure as their own, caverns more magnificent than the halls of the Castle of Night. The hideout where Snapper took them could not be compared with those caves. Its entrance, hidden in a crevice in the ground among tall beech trees, was so narrow that you had to squeeze your way in, and even Farid had to duck his head in the passage beyond it. The cave it led to was not much better. Other passages branched off, obviously leading even deeper underground. “Welcome to the Badger’s Earth!” said Snapper, while the men sitting on the floor of the cave looked at them suspiciously. “Who says that only the Adderhead can dig deep into the ground? There are several men among us who toiled in his mines for years. They found out how you can nest far down in the earth and not have it fall on your head.”

The Prince was alone in a cave to one side of the others, only the bear was with him, and he looked tired. But at the sight of Dustfinger his face brightened, and the news they brought was not so much of a surprise to him as they had expected.

“Ah yes, Sootbird!” he said, and Snapper drew a finger across his throat at the mention of that name. “I ought to have asked myself much sooner how he could afford the alchemists’ powders he uses in his fire-eating shows. The few coins he earns in marketplaces wouldn’t pay for it. But unfortunately I didn’t have him watched until after the attack on the Secret Camp. He soon parted from the other prisoners we freed and met the Adderhead’s informers on the border.