While those he betrayed are in the dungeons of the Castle of Night, and there’s nothing I can do for them! Here I am stuck in a forest swarming with soldiers. The Adderhead is assembling them up on the road that leads to Ombra.”

“Cosimo?” It was Roxane who spoke the name, and the Prince nodded.

“Yes. I sent him three messengers with three warnings. One came back, but only to say that Cosimo laughed in his face. I’ll admit I don’t remember him as being quite so stupid. The year he spent away seems to have robbed him of his reason. He’s planning to make war on the Adderhead with an army of peasants. It’s as if we were to march against the Adderhead ourselves.”

“We’d have a better chance,” said Snapper.

“Yes, I expect we would.” The Black Prince sounded so discouraged that Farid’s heart failed him.

Secretly, he had always put far more trust in the Prince than in Fenoglio’s words, but what could this troop of ragged men digging themselves holes in the forest like rabbits do against the Castle of Night?

The men brought them something to eat, and Roxane looked at Dustfinger’s leg. She treated the wound with an ointment that made it smell like spring in the cave for a moment. And Farid couldn’t help thinking of Meggie. He remembered a story that he had heard by a fire on a cold night in the desert. It was the tale of a thief who fell in love with a princess; he still remembered it very well. The two were so deeply in love that they could speak to each other over a distance of many miles. Each could hear the other’s thoughts even if walls separated them, each knew whether the other was sad or happy .. but intently as Farid listened to his own feelings, he could sense nothing. He couldn’t even have said whether Meggie was still alive. She seemed to have gone away, gone away from his heart, from the world. When he brushed the tears from his eyes, he felt Dustfinger looking at him.

“I’ll have to rest this wretched leg or it will never heal,” he said quietly. “But we’ll go back. When the time comes .. ”

Roxane frowned, but she said nothing. The Prince and Dustfinger began talking so quietly that Farid had to move close to them to make out anything. Roxane put her head on Dustfinger’s lap and was soon asleep. But Farid curled up like a puppy beside him, closed his eyes, and listened to the two men.

The Black Prince wanted to know all about Silvertongue whether the day of the execution was fixed, where he was held prisoner, how his wound was doing. Dustfinger told him what he knew.

And he told him about the book that Meggie had offered the Adderhead as a ransom for her father.

“A book to hold Death prisoner?” The Prince laughed incredulously. “Has the Adderhead taken to believing in fairy tales?”

Dustfinger did not reply to that. He said nothing about Fenoglio, he did not say they were all part of a story that an old man had written. In his place Farid wouldn’t have said so, either. The Black Prince probably wouldn’t believe there were words that could decide even his own fate, words like invisible paths from which you could not turn aside. The bear grunted in his sleep, and Roxane turned her head restlessly. She was holding Dustfinger’s hand as if she wanted to take him into her dreams.

“You told the boy you’d go back,” said the Prince. “You can come with us.”

“Are you going to the Castle of Night? Why? Do you plan to storm it with these few men? Or tell the Adder head that he’s caught the wrong man? With this on your nose?” Dustfinger put his hand among the blankets lying on the floor and brought out a bird mask. Blue jay feathers sewn to cracked leather. He put the mask on his scarred face.

“Many of us have worn that mask before,” said the Prince. “And now they’re going to hang another innocent man for the deeds we’ve done. I can’t allow that! This time it’s a bookbinder.

Last time, after we attacked one of the silver transports, they hanged a charcoal-burner just because he had a scar on his arm. His wife is probably still mourning him.”

“It’s not just the deeds you did. Fenoglio invented most of them!” Dustfinger sounded irritated.

“Damn it, Prince, you can’t save Silvertongue. You’ll only die, too. Or do you seriously think the Adderhead will let him go just because you’ve turned yourself in?”

“No, I’m not such a fool as that. But I must do something.” The Prince put his hand in his bear’s mouth, as he so often did, and as always that hand, as if miraculously, came back intact from between the bear’s teeth.

“Yes, yes, very well.” Dustfinger sighed. “You and your unwritten rules. You don’t even know Silvertongue! How can you want to die for someone you don’t know?”

“Who would you die for?” the Prince asked in return.

Farid saw Dustfinger look at Roxane’s sleeping face – and then turn to him. He quickly closed his eyes.

“You’d die for Roxane,” he heard the Prince say.

“Perhaps,” said Dustfinger, and through his lashes Farid saw him trace Roxane’s dark brows with his finger. “Or perhaps not. Do you have many informers in the Castle of Night?”

“Yes, indeed. Kitchen maids, stable boys, even a few of the guards – although they come very expensive – and most useful of all, a falconer who sends me a message now and then by one of his clever birds. I shall hear at once when they’ve fixed the day of the execution. You know the Adderhead doesn’t have such things done in a marketplace or in front of the common people in the castle courtyard anymore, not since you spoiled my punishment so thoroughly for him. He was never a friend of such spectacles, anyway. An execution is a serious matter to the Adderhead. The gallows outside the castle will do for a poor minstrel, there’ll be no trouble about that, but the Bluejay will die inside the gate.”

“Yes. If his daughter’s voice doesn’t open that gate for him,” replied Dustfinger. “Her voice and a book – a book full of immortality.”

Farid heard the Black Prince laugh. “That sounds almost like some new song by the Inkweaver!”

“Yes,” replied Dustfinger in a husky voice. “It sounds just like him, doesn’t it?”

Chapter 64 – All Is Lost

‘Tis war! ‘Tis war! God’s angel stand by ye

And guide your hand.

‘Tis war, alas, and guiltless I would be

Of what betides this land.

– Matthias Claudius, “War Song”

After a few days’ rest, Dustfinger’s leg was much better, and Farid was just telling the two martens how they’d soon all be stealing into the Castle of Night to rescue Meggie and her parents when bad news came to the Badger’s Earth. One of the men who had been watching the road to Ombra brought it. His face was covered with blood and he could hardly keep on his feet.

“They’re killing them!” he kept stammering over and over again. “They’re killing them all.”

“Where?” asked the Prince. “Where exactly?”

“Not two hours from here,” the messenger managed to say. “Keep going north.”

The Prince left ten men at the Badger’s Earth. Roxane tried to persuade Dustfinger to stay, too.

“You must spare your leg, or it will never heal,” she said. But he would not listen to her, so she, too, came on the fast, silent march through the forest.