“Yes, you did.” Meggie moved very close to her mother, but Resa’s hands fell silent. They were still roughened from all her years of toil as a maid, working first for Mortola and then for Capricorn. “You’ve told me about everything,” said Meggie. “The bad things, too, even if Mo won’t believe it!”
“Because all the same he feels that we dream only of the wonderful part. As if I ever had much of that!” Resa shook her head. Again her fingers fell silent for a long time before she let them go on.
“I had to steal it for myself, in seconds, minutes .. sometimes a precious hour when we were allowed out in the forest to gather the plants Mortola needed for her black potions.” “But there were the years when you were free, too! When you disguised yourself and worked in the markets as a scribe.” Disguised as a man .. Meggie had pictured it over and over again: her mother with her hair cut short, wearing a scribe’s tunic, ink on her fingers from the finest handwriting to be found in the Inkworld. So Resa had told her. It was the way she had earned a living in a world that didn’t make it easy for women to work. Meggie would have liked to hear the story again now, even if it had a sad ending, for after that Resa’s years of unhappiness had begun. But wonderful things had happened during that time, too, like the great banquet at the Laughing Prince’s castle to which Mortola had taken her maids, the banquet where Resa saw the Laughing Prince himself, and the Black Prince and his bear, the tightrope-walker called CloudDancer…
But Resa hadn’t come into her room to tell all those stories again. She said nothing in reply. And when her fingers did begin to speak once more, they moved more slowly than usual.
“Forget the Inkworld, Meggie,” they said. “Let’s both of us forget it, at least for a little while. For your father’s sake – and for yours. Or one day you may be blind to the beauty around you here.”
She looked out of the window again at the gathering dusk. “I’ve told you all about it already,”
said her hands. “Everything you wanted to know.”
So she had. And Meggie had asked her many questions, thousands and thousands of them. Did you ever see one of the giants? What sort of clothes did you wear? What did the fortress look like, in the forest where Mortola took you, and that prince you talk about, the Laughing Prince – was his castle as huge and magnificent as the Castle of Night? Tell me about his son, Cosimo the Fair, and the Adderhead and his men-at-arms. Was everything in his castle really made of silver? How big is the bear that the Black Prince always keeps beside him, and what about the trees, can they really talk? And that old woman, the one they all call Nettle, is it true that she can fly?
Resa had answered all these questions as well as she could, but even a thousand answers did not add up to a whole ten years, and there were some questions that Meggie had never put to her.
She had never asked about Dustfinger, for instance. But Resa had talked about him all the same, telling her that everyone in the Inkworld knew his name, even many years after he had disappeared. Of course, he was known as the fire-dancer, too, so Resa had recognized him at once when she met him for the first time in this world. .
There was another question that Meggie didn’t ask although it often came into her mind – for Resa couldn’t have answered it: What about Fenoglio, the writer of the book that had drawn first her mother and finally even its own author into its pages? How was Fenoglio now?
More than a year had passed since Meggie’s voice had cast the spell of Fenoglio’s own words over him – and he had disappeared as if they had swallowed him up. Sometimes Meggie saw his wrinkled face in her dreams, but she never knew if it looked sad or happy. Not that it had ever been easy to read the expression on Fenoglio’s tortoiselike face, anyway. One night, when she woke suddenly from one of these dreams and couldn’t get to sleep again, she had begun a story in which Fenoglio was trying to write himself home again, back to his grandchildren and the village where Meggie had first met him. But as with all the other stories she’d started to write, she never got past the first three sentences.
Meggie leafed through the notebook that Mo had taken away from her, then closed it again. Resa put a hand under her chin and looked into her face.
“Don’t be cross with him!”
“I never am, not for long! He knows that. How much longer will he be away?” “Ten days, maybe more.”
Ten days! Meggie looked at the shelf beside her bed. There they were, neatly arranged side by side: the Bad Books, as she secretly called them, full of Resa’s stories: tales of glass men and water-nymphs, fire-elves, NightMares, White Women, and all the other strange creatures that her mother had described.
“All right. I’ll phone him and say he can make them a box. But I’ll keep the key to it.”
Resa dropped a kiss on her forehead. Then she carefully passed her hand over the notebook in Meggie’s lap. “Does anyone in the world bind books more beautifully than your father?” her fingers asked.
Meggie shook her head with a smile. “No,” she whispered. “No one, in this world or any other.”
When Resa went downstairs again to help Darius and Elinor with supper, Meggie stayed by the window to watch Elinor’s garden filling with shadows. When a squirrel scurried over the lawn, its bushy tail stretched out behind it, she was reminded of Dustfinger’s tame marten, Gwin. How strange that she now understood the yearning she had so often seen on his master’s scarred face.
Yes, Mo was probably right. She thought about Dustfinger’s world too much, far too much. She had even read some of Resa’s stories aloud a few times, although didn’t she know how dangerous her voice could be when it spoke the words on the page?
Hadn’t she – to be perfectly honest, more honest than people usually are – hadn’t she cherished a secret hope that the words would take her to that world? What would Mo have done if he’d known about these experiments? Would he have buried the notebooks in the garden or thrown them into the lake, as he sometimes threatened to do with the stray cats that stole into his workshop?
Yes, I’ll lock them away, thought Meggie, as the first stars appeared outside. As soon as Mo has made them a new box. The box with her favourite books in it was crammed full now. It was red, red as poppies; Mo had only recently repainted it. The box for the notebooks must be a different color, perhaps green like the Wayless Wood that Resa had described so often. Yes, green. And didn’t the guards outside the Laughing Prince’s castle wear green cloaks, too?
A moth fluttered against the window, reminding Meggie of the blue-skinned fairies and the best of all the stories that Resa had told her about them: how they healed Dustfinger’s face after Basta had slashed it, in gratitude to him for the many times he had freed their sisters from the wire cages where peddlers imprisoned them to be sold at market as good-luck charms. And deep in the Wayless Wood he . . no, that’s enough!
Meggie leaned her forehead against the cool pane. Quite enough.
I’ll take them all to Mo’s workshop, she thought. At once. And when he’s back I’ll ask him to bind me a new notebook for stories about this world of ours. She had already begun writing some: about Elinor’s garden and her library, about the castle down by the lake. Robbers had once lived there; Elinor had told her about them in her own typical storytelling style, with so many grisly details that Darius, listening, forgot to go on sorting books, and his eyes widened in horror behind his thick glasses.