He was holding a long pole with tiny birds sitting on it, birds as red as drops of blood, and when the dancer changed direction – stepping lightly, as if standing on a swaying rope was the most natural thing in the world – the birds flew up and fluttered around him, twittering shrilly. The marten on Dustfinger’s shoulder looked up at them and licked his lips. He was still very young, smaller and more delicate than Gwin, not half as likely to bite, and most important of all he didn’t fear fire. Absently, Dustfinger tickled his horned head. He had caught him behind the stable soon after his arrival at Roxane’s house, when the marten was trying to stalk her chickens, and had called him Jink, because of the way he jinked as he moved, dodging and darting before jumping up at Dustfinger so suddenly that he almost knocked him over. Are you crazy? he had asked himself when he lured the animal to him with a fresh egg. He’s a marten. How do you know that it makes any difference to Death what name he bears? But he’d kept Jink all the same.
Perhaps he had left all his fears behind in the other world: his fears, his loneliness, his ill fortune. .
Jink learned fast; he was soon leaping through the flames as if he’d been doing it all his life. It would be easy to earn a few coins with him at the markets – with him and the boy.
The marten nuzzled Dustfinger’s cheek. Some acrobats were building a human tower in front of the empty platform that still awaited the birthday boy. Farid had tried persuading Dustfinger to perform, too, but he didn’t want people staring at him today. He wanted to stare himself, see his fill of all he’d missed for so long. So he was not in fire-eater’s costume, either, but wore Roxane’s dead husband’s clothes, which she had given him. They had obviously been almost the same size.
Poor fellow: Neither Orpheus nor Silvertongue could bring him back from where he was now.
“Why don’t you earn the money today for a change?” he had asked Farid. The boy had turned first red and then white as chalk with pride – and shot away into the turmoil. He was a quick learner. Only a tiny morsel of the fiery honey, and Farid was talking to the flames as if he’d been born with their language on his tongue. Of course, they didn’t yet spring from the ground when the boy snapped his fingers as readily as for Dustfinger himself, but when Farid called to the fire in a low voice it would speak to him – condescendingly, sometimes with mockery, but still it answered him.
“Oh, but he is your son!” Roxane had said when Farid had drawn a bucket of water from the well early in the morning, cursing, to cool his burned fingers. “He’s not,” Dustfinger had replied – and had seen in her eyes that she didn’t believe him. Before they set off for the castle, he had practiced a couple of tricks with Farid, and Jehan had watched. But when Dustfinger beckoned the boy closer, he ran away. Farid had laughed out loud at him for it, but Dustfinger put his hand over Farid’s mouth. “The fire devoured his father, have you forgotten?” he had whispered, and Farid bowed his head, ashamed.
How proudly he stood there among the other entertainers! Dustfinger pushed his own way past the stalls to get a better view. Farid had taken off his shirt as Dustfinger himself sometimes did –
burning cloth was more dangerous than a small burn on the skin, and you could easily protect your naked body against the licking tongues of fire with grease. The boy put on a good act, such a good one that even the traders stared at him spellbound, and Dustfinger took his chance to free a few fairies from the cages where they had been imprisoned, to be sold to some fool as lucky charms. No wonder Roxane suspects you of being his father, he told himself. Your chest swells with pride when you look at him. Next to Farid, a couple of clowns were exchanging broad jokes, to his right the Black Prince was wrestling with his bear, but all the same more and more people stopped to look at the boy standing there playing with fire, oblivious of all around him.
Dustfinger watched as Sootbird lowered his torches and looked enviously their way. He’d never learn. He was still as poor a fire-eater as he’d been ten years ago.
Farid bowed, and a shower of coins fell into the wooden bowl that Roxane had given him. He glanced proudly at Dustfinger, as hungry for praise as a dog for a bone, and when Dustfinger clapped his hands he flushed red with delight. What a child he still was, even though he had proudly shown Dustfinger the first stubble on his chin a few months ago!
Dustfinger was making his way past two farmers haggling over a couple of piglets when the gate to the Inner Castle opened again – this time not, as before, for the Adderhead, when Dustfinger himself had only just managed to hide from the Piper’s searching glance behind a cake stall. No.
Obviously, the birthday boy himself was finally appearing at his own festivities – and his mother would accompany the child, with her maidservant. How fast his foolish heart was suddenly beating! “She has your hair,” Roxane had said, “and my eyes.”
The prince’s pipers made the most of their big scene. Proud as turkey-cocks they stood there, long-stemmed trumpets held aloft in the air. The strolling players, being their own masters, disapproved without exception of musicians who sold their art to a single lord. In exchange, the pipers were better dressed, not in Motley array like the players on the road, but in their prince’s colors. For the pipers of the Prince of Sighs, that meant green and gold. His daughter-in-law wore black. Cosimo the Fair had been dead for barely a year, but his young widow would certainly have been courted by several suitors already, in spite of the mark, dark as a burn, that disfigured her face. The crowd came thronging around the platform as soon as Violante and her son had taken their seats. Dustfinger had to climb on an empty barrel to catch a glimpse of her maidservant beyond all those heads and bodies.
Brianna was standing behind the boy. Despite her bright hair, she was like her mother. The dress she wore made her look very grown-up, yet Dustfinger still saw in her face traces of the little girl who had tried to snatch burning torches from his hand or stamped her foot angrily when he wouldn’t let her catch the sparks he brought raining down from the sky.
Ten years. Ten years he’d spent in the wrong story. Ten years in which Death had taken one of his daughters, leaving behind nothing but memories as pale and indistinct as if she had never lived at all, while his other daughter had grown up, laughing and weeping through all those years, and he had not been there. Hypocrite! he told himself, unable to take his eyes from Brianna’s face. Are you trying to tell yourself you were a devoted father before Silvertongue lured you into his story?
Cosimo’s son laughed out loud. His stubby finger pointed first at one, then at another of the entertainers, and he caught the flowers that the women players threw him. How old was he?
Five? Six? Brianna had been the same age when Silvertongue’s voice had enticed him away. She had only come up to his elbow, and she’d weighed so little that he scarcely noticed when she climbed up on his back. When he forgot time yet again and stayed away for weeks on end, in places with names she had never heard, she used to hit him with her little fists and throw the presents he brought her at his feet. Then she would slip out of bed the same night to retrieve them after all: colored ribbons as soft as rabbit fur, fabric flowers to put in her hair, little pipes that could imitate the song of a lark or the hoot of an owl. She had never told him so, of course, she was proud – even prouder than her mother – but he always knew where she put the presents – in a bag among her clothes. Did she still have it?