“Off you go, then!” growled Fenoglio when Ivo looked pleadingly at him. After all, he didn’t need the torch anymore. Several fires were burning among the tents, which often consisted of little more than a few grubby lengths of cloth stretched over ropes between the trees. Fenoglio looked around with a sigh of satisfaction as the boy raced away. Yes, this was just as he’d imagined the Inkworld as he wrote his story: bright and noisy, full of life. The air smelled of smoke, of roast meat, of rosemary and thyme, horses, dogs and dirty clothes, pine needles and burning wood.

Oh, he loved it! He loved the hurry and bustle, he even loved the dirt. He loved the way life here was lived before his very eyes, not behind locked doors. You could learn anything in this world: how the smith shaped the metal of a sickle in the fire, how the dyer mixed his dyes, how the tanner removed hair from leather and how the cobbler cut it to shape to make shoes. Nothing happened behind closed doors. It was all going on, in the alleyways, on the road, in the marketplace, here among shabby tents, and he, Fenoglio – still as curious as a boy – could watch, although the stench of the leather was mordant and the dye tubs sometimes took his breath away. Yes, he liked this world of his. He liked it very much – although he couldn’t help seeing that not everything was working out the way he had intended.

It was his own fault. I should have written a sequel, thought Fenoglio, making his way through the crowd. I could still write one, here and now, and change everything, if only I had someone to read it aloud! Of course he had looked for another Silvertongue, but in vain. No Meggie, no Mortimer, not even someone like that man Darius who was more than likely to botch the job .. and Fenoglio could play only the part of a writer whose fine words didn’t exactly keep him in luxury, while the two princes he had invented ruled his world after their own fashion. Annoying, extremely annoying.

One of those princes above all gave him cause for concern the Adderhead.

He reigned to the south of the forest, high above the sea, sitting on the silver throne of the Castle of Night. As an invented character, not by any means a bad one. A bloodhound, a ruthless slave driver – but after all, the villains are the salt in the soup of a story. If you can keep them under control. It was for this purpose that Fenoglio had thought up the Laughing Prince, a ruler who would rather laugh at the broad jokes of the strolling players than wage war, and his magnificent son, Cosimo. Who could have guessed that Cosimo would simply die, and then his father would collapse with grief like a cake taken out of the oven too soon?

Not my fault! How often Fenoglio had told himself that. Not my idea, not my fault! But it had happened all the same. As if some diabolical scribbler had intervened, going on with the story in his place and leaving him, Fenoglio, the creator of this whole world, with nothing but the role of a poor writer!

Oh, stop that. You’re not so poor, Fenoglio, he thought as he stopped beside a minstrel sitting among the tents, singing one of Fenoglio’s own songs. No, he wasn’t poor. The Laughing Prince, who was now the Prince of Sighs, would hear only Fenoglio’s laments for his dead son, and Balbulus, the most famous illuminator far and wide, had to record the stories Fenoglio wrote for the prince’s grandson, Jacopo, in his own hand, on the most costly of parchment. No, he really wasn’t so poor!

And moreover, didn’t his words now seem to him better in a minstrel’s mouth than pressed between the pages of a book, to lie there gathering dust? He liked to think of them as free, owing no one allegiance. They were too powerful to be given in printed form to any fool who might do God knew what with them. Looked at that way, it was reassuring to think that there were no printed books in this world. Books here were handwritten, which made them so valuable that only princes could afford them.

Other folk had to store the words in their heads or listen to minstrels singing them.

A little boy tugged at Fenoglio’s sleeve. His tunic had holes in it, and his nose was running.

“Inkweaver!” He brought out a mask from behind his back, the kind of mask worn by the actors, and quickly put it over his eyes. There were feathers, light brown and blue, stuck to the cracked leather. “Who am I, Inkweaver?” “Hmm!” Fenoglio wrinkled his lined brow as if he had to think hard about it.

The mouth below the mask drooped in disappointment. “The Bluejay! I’m the Bluejay, of course!”

“Of course!” Fenoglio pinched the child’s red little nose.

“Will you tell us another story about him today? Please!”

“Maybe! I must admit, I imagine his mask as rather more impressive than yours. What do you think? Shouldn’t you look for a few more feathers?”

The boy took off his mask and looked at it crossly. “They’re not very easy to find.”

“Take a look down by the river. Even blue jays aren’t safe from the cats that go hunting there.”

He was about to move away, but the boy held on tight. Thin as the children of the strolling players might be, they had strong little hands.

“Just one story. Please, Inkweaver!”

Two other children joined him, a girl and a boy. They looked expectantly at Fenoglio. Ah, yes, the Bluejay stories. He’d always told good robber tales – his own grandchildren had liked them, too, back in the other world. But the stories he thought up here were much better. You heard them everywhere these days: The Incredible Deeds of the Bravest of Robbers, The Noble and Fearless Bluejay. Fenoglio still remembered the night he had made up the Bluejay. His hand had been trembling with rage as he wrote. “The Adderhead’s caught another of the strolling players,” the Black Prince had told him that night. “It was Crookback this time. They hanged him at noon yesterday.”

Crookback – one of his own characters! A harmless fellow who could stand on his head longer than anyone else. “Who does this prince think he is?” Fenoglio had cried out into the night, as if the Adderhead could hear him. “I am lord of life and death in this world, I, Fenoglio, no one else!”

And the words had gone down on paper, wild and angry as the robber he created that night. The Bluejay was all that Fenoglio would have liked to be in the world he had made: free as a bird, subject to no lord, fearless, noble (sometimes witty, too), a man who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, and protected the weak from the tyranny of the strong in a world where there was no law to do it. .

Fenoglio felt another tug at his sleeve. “Please, Inkweaver! Just one story!” The boy was really persistent. He loved listening to stories and would very likely make a famous minstrel someday.

“They say the Bluejay stole the Adderhead’s lucky charm!” whispered the little boy. “The hanged man’s finger bone to protect him from the White Women. They say the Bluejay wears it around his own neck now.”

“Do they indeed?” Fenoglio raised his eyebrows, always a very effective move, thick and bushy as they were. “Well, I’ve heard of an even more daring deed, but I must have a word with the Black Prince first.”

“Oh, please, Inkweaver!” They were clinging to his sleeves, almost tearing off the expensive braid he’d had sewn on the coarse fabric for a few coins, so as not to look as poverty-stricken as the scribes who wrote wills and letters in the marketplace. “No!” he said sternly, freeing his sleeve.