“You were dead, Farid!” Meggie whispered. “And Dustfinger brought you back.” She closed her eyes so as not to see that motionless figure anymore. She wanted to see other pictures: Dustfinger breathing fire for her in Elinor’s garden, or guiding her and Mo through the hills away from Capricorn’s dreadful village, and his happiness when she first saw him in his own world. He had both betrayed and rescued her – and now he had given her Farid back. Tears were running down her face, and she hardly noticed when her mother kneeled down beside her.

It was a long night.

Roxane and the Prince kept watch by Dustfinger’s side, but Farid had climbed out of the mine to where the moon was showing through black clouds, and mist rose from the ground that was wet with rain. He had pushed aside the guards who tried to stop him and thrown himself down on the moss. He lay there now under Mortola’s venomous trees, sobbing – while the two martens scuffled in the darkness as if they still had a master to quarrel over.

Of course Meggie went to him, but Farid sent her away, so she set off to find Mo. Resa was asleep beside him, her face wet with tears, but Mo was awake. He sat there with his arm around her sleeping mother and looked into the darkness as if a story was written there – a story that he didn’t yet understand. For the first time, Meggie couldn’t read in his face what he was thinking.

There was something strange and closed in it, hard as the scab over a wound, but when he noticed her inquiring look he smiled at her, and all the strangeness was gone.

“Come here,” he said softly, and she sat down beside him and pressed her face into his shoulder.

“I want to go home, Mo!” she whispered.

“No, you don’t,” he whispered back, and she sobbed into his shirt, as she had done so often when she was a little girl. She had been able to unload all her grief onto him, however heavily it weighed. Mo had brushed it away simply by stroking her hair, putting his hand on her brow, and whispering her name, and that was what he did now in this sad place, on this sad night. He couldn’t take away all the pain, there was too much of it, but he could help just by holding her close. No one could do it better. Not Resa. Not even Farid.

Yes, it was a long night, as long as a thousand nights, darker than any that Meggie had ever known. And she didn’t know how long she had been sleeping beside Mo when Farid was suddenly shaking her awake. He led her off with him, away from her sleeping parents, into a dark corner that smelled of the Prince’s bear.

“Meggie,” he whispered, taking her hand between his and pressing it so hard that it hurt. “I know how we can make everything right again. You go to Fenoglio! Tell him to write something that will bring Dustfinger back to life! He’ll listen to you!”

Of course. She might have known he would think up this idea. He was looking at her so pleadingly that it hurt, but she shook her head.

“No, Farid. Dustfinger is dead. Fenoglio can’t do anything for him. And even if he could – haven’t you heard what he keeps muttering to himself? He says he’ll never write another word, not after what happened to Cosimo.”

Fenoglio had indeed changed. Meggie had hardly recognized him when she saw him again.

Once, his eyes had always reminded her of a little boy’s. Now they were an old man’s eyes. His gaze was suspicious, uncertain, as if he didn’t trust the ground under his feet anymore, and since Cosimo’s death he cared nothing for shaving himself, combing his hair, or washing. He had asked only about the book that Mo had bound. But not even Meggie’s assurance that its blank pages did indeed ward off death had wiped the bitterness from his face. “Oh, wonderful!” he had muttered.

“The Adderhead’s immortal and Cosimo’s dead as a doornail. Nothing goes right with this story anymore.” And he had gone off again, far from all the others. No, Fenoglio wouldn’t help anyone anymore, not even himself. All the same, when Farid set off in search of him, Meggie went, too.

Fenoglio was spending most of his time these days in one of the deepest galleries of the mine, a place almost entirely filled with rubble, to which no one else climbed down. He was asleep when they clambered down the steep ladder, the fur that the robbers had given him drawn up to his chin, his old forehead wrinkled as if he were thinking hard even in his dreams.

“Fenoglio!” Farid roughly shook him awake.

The old man turned over on his back with a grunt that would have done the Prince’s bear credit.

Then he opened his eyes and stared at Farid as if seeing his dark face for the very first time. “Oh, it’s you!” he growled, dazed with sleep, and propped himself on his elbows. “The boy who came back from the dead. Something else that I never wrote! What do you want? Do you know I was just having my first good dream for days?”

“You must write us something!”

“Write something? I’m never going to write again. Haven’t we seen what comes of it? I have this fabulous idea about the book of immortality that will set the good characters free and bring the Adderhead to his death in the most subtle way. And what happens? The Adder is immortal now, and the forest is full of corpses again! Robbers, strolling players, the two-fingered man dead!

Why do I keep making them up if this story is only going to kill them? Oh, this thrice-accursed story! It’s in love with Death!”

“But you must bring him back!” Farid’s lips were trembling.

“You made the Adderhead immortal, so why not him?” “You’re talking about Dustfinger, aren’t you?” Fenoglio sat up and rubbed his face, sighing heavily. “Yes, he’s dead now, too, dead as a doornail, but I’d planned that a long way back, as you perhaps remember. Be that as it may, Dustfinger is dead, you were dead .. Minerva’s husband, Cosimo, the boys who rode with him, they’re all dead! Can’t this story think of anything else? I’ll tell you something, my boy. I’m not its author anymore. No, the author is Death, the Grim Reaper, the Cold Man, call him what you like.

It’s his dance, and never mind what 1 write he’ll take my words and make them serve him!”

“Nonsense!” Farid was no longer even wiping away the tears that streamed down his face. “You must fetch him back. It wasn’t his death at all, it was mine! Make him breathe again! It will only take a few words. After all, you did it for Cosimo and for Silvertongue.”

“Just a moment – Meggie’s father wasn’t dead yet,” Fenoglio soberly pointed out. “And as for Cosimo, he only looked like Cosimo – how many more times do I have to explain that? Meggie and I made a brand-new Cosimo, and unfortunately it went terribly wrong. No!” He reached into his belt, produced something resembling a handkerchief, and blew his nose noisily. “This is not a story in which the dead come to life! All right, I admit I brought immortality into it, yes. But that’s different from bringing back the dead. No, when someone is dead here, he stays dead! It’s the same in this world as in the one I come from. Dustfinger got around that rule very cleverly on your behalf. Perhaps I wrote the sentimental story that gave him the idea myself .. I really don’t remember, but never mind, there are always gaps. And he paid for your life with his own.

That’s always been the only trade-off that Death will accept. Who’d have thought it? Dustfinger, of all people, gets so fond of a good-for nothing boy that he ends up dying for him. I admit it’s a much better idea than the one about the marten, but it isn’t mine. Oh no! So if you’re looking for someone to blame, then blame yourself. Because one thing is certain, my boy” – and so saying he jabbed his finger roughly into Farid’s thin chest – “and it’s that you don’t belong in this story!