“No!” Farid’s own voice rang in his ears as he jumped at the man. He bit his shoulder and kicked him until he dropped the sword that he had been pointing at Dustfinger’s chest. Then Farid pushed Slasher into the flames. The man was more than a head taller than Farid himself, but desperation lent him strength. Farid was about to attack Basta, too, as he emerged from the smoke, coughing, but Dustfinger pulled him back and hissed at the flames until they made for Basta like angry vipers. Farid heard Basta scream but did not turn to look. He just stumbled toward the window, with Dustfinger beside him, cursing as he pressed his fingers to his bleeding leg. But he was alive. He was really alive. While the fire was devouring Basta.

Chapter 50 – The Best of All Nights

“Eat,” said Merlot.

“I couldn’t possibly,” said Despereaux, backing away from the book.

“Why?”

“Um,” said Despereaux, “it would ruin the story.”

– Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux

Later, none of them knew how they had gotten away from the j mill. All Farid could remember were images: of Meggie’s face as she stumbled down to the river, of the blood in the water when Dustfinger jumped in, of the smoke they could see still rising into the sky after they had been wading through the cold water for more than an hour. But no one came after them: not Slasher or the miller or his man, and not Basta, either. Only Gwin appeared on the bank at some point.

Stupid Gwin.

It was the middle of the night when Dustfinger clambered out of the water, his face pale with exhaustion. As he let himself drop onto the grass, Farid anxiously listened into the darkness, but all he heard was a loud and steady roar like the breathing of a gigantic animal. “What’s that?” he whispered.

“The sea. Don’t you know what the sea sounds like?”

The sea. Gwin jumped on Farid’s back as he was looking at Dustfinger’s leg, but he shooed the marten away. “Get out!” he snapped. “Go hunting! You’ve done enough harm for one day.”

Then he let Jink out of the backpack, too, and looked for something to bind up the wound.

Meggie wrung out her wet dress and crouched beside them.

“Is it bad?”

“No, I’m fine,” said Dustfinger, but he winced as Farid cleaned the deep gash. “Poor CloudDancer!” he murmured. “He escaped death once, and now the Grim Reaper’s come for him after all. Who knows? Perhaps the White Women don’t like people to slip through their fingers like that.”

“I’m sorry.” Meggie spoke so quietly that Farid could hardly hear her. “I’m so very sorry. It’s all my fault, and he died for nothing. Because where is Fenoglio going to find us now, even if he’s written something for me?”

“Fenoglio.” Dustfinger spoke as if it were the name of some disease.

“Did you feel them, too?” Meggie looked at him. “I thought I could feel his words on my skin. I thought: They’re going to kill Dustfinger, and there’s nothing we can do about it!” “But there was,” said Farid defiantly.

Dustfinger, however, leaned back and looked up at the stars. “Really? We’ll see. Perhaps the old man’s thought up some different fate for me by now. Perhaps death is waiting just around another corner.”

“Let it wait!” was all Farid would say, fishing a bag out of Dustfinger’s backpack. “A little fairy dust can never hurt,” he murmured as he trickled the glittering powder into the wound.

Then he pulled his shirt over his head, cut off a strip with his knife, and tied it carefully around Dustfinger’s leg. It wasn’t easy with his burned fingers, but he did his best, although the pain twisted his face.

Dustfinger reached for his hand and looked at it, frowning. “Heavens, your fingers are covered with as many blisters as if fire-elves had been dancing on them,” he commented. “I guess we both need a physician. What a pity Roxane isn’t here.” Sighing, Dustfinger lay down on his back again and looked up at the dark sky. “You know what, Farid?” he said, as if talking to the stars.

“There’s one really strange thing about all this. If Meggie’s father hadn’t plucked me out of my own story, I don’t suppose I’d ever have found such a fabulous watchdog as you.” He winked at Meggie. “Did you see him biting? I’ll bet Slasher thought it was the Black Prince’s bear gnawing his shoulder.”

“Oh, stop it!” Farid didn’t know where to look. Embarrassed, he picked a blade of grass with his bare toes.

“Yes, but Farid is cleverer than the bear,” said Meggie. “Much cleverer.”

“Indeed. Cleverer than me, too,” Dustfinger pointed out. “And as for what he can do with fire, I’m beginning to get seriously worried.”

Farid couldn’t help it; he had to grin. He felt so proud that the blood shot all the way to his ears, but in the dark no one, luckily, would see him blushing.

Dustfinger felt his leg and cautiously rose to his feet. The first step he took made his face contort with pain, but then he limped up and down the riverbank a few times. “There we are,” he said. “A little slower than usual, but it will do. It must.” Then he stopped in front of Farid. “I believe I owe you a debt,” he said. “How am I to repay you? Perhaps I could show you something new? A game with fire that only I can play? How about that?”

Farid held his breath. “What kind of a game is it?” he asked.

“I can’t show you except by the sea,” replied Dustfinger, “but we must go there, anyway, because we both need a physician. And the best physician I know lives by the sea. In the shadow of the Castle of Night.”

They decided to take turns keeping watch. Farid said he would take the first watch, and while Meggie and Dustfinger slept behind him, under the branches of a durmast oak that dipped low to the ground, he sat in the grass and looked up at the sky, where more stars shone than there were fireflies hovering above the river. Farid tried to remember a night, any night, when he had felt as he did now, so entirely at ease with himself, but he couldn’t. This was the best of all nights for him – in spite of all the terrors that lay behind him, in spite of his burned fingers, which still hurt although Dustfinger had put fairy dust on them and the cooling ointment that Roxane had made for him.

He felt so much alive. As alive as the fire.

He had saved Dustfinger. He had been stronger than the words. Everything was all right.

The two martens were squabbling behind him, no doubt over prey of some kind. “Wake me when the moon is above that hill,” Dustfinger had said, but when Farid went to him he was sleeping deeply, with such peace in his face that Farid decided to let him sleep on and returned to his place under the stars.

Soon afterward, when he heard steps behind him, it was not Dustfinger but Meggie he saw there.

“I keep waking up,” she said. “I just can’t stop thinking.”

“Wondering how Fenoglio is going to find you now?” She nodded.

She still believed in words so much. Farid believed in other things: in his knife, in courage and cunning. And in friendship. Meggie leaned her head against his shoulder, and they both remained as silent as the stars above them. After a while a wind rose, cold and gusty, salty as seawater, and Meggie sat up and clasped her arms around her knees, shivering.