Violante put her son aside and took a step toward the Piper. But Dustfinger simply made the fire lick around his fingers as if he were playing with an animal, and Mo drew his sword. The Piper knew very well whose weapon it had once been.
"What’s the idea? Send the children out, Piper!" Mo cried, and this time his voice was so cold that Resa hardly recognized it as his. "Send them out, or you can tell your master that the flesh will go on rotting on his bones because you couldn’t bring him the Bluejay alive, only dead."
One of the women began sobbing. Another pressed her hand to her mouth. Just behind the two of them Resa saw Minerva, Fenoglio’s landlady. Of course, her children were among the captives. But Resa didn’t want to think of Minerva’s children or the children of the other women. She saw nothing but the spears Pointing at Mo’s unarmed breast and the crossbows aimed at him from the walls.
"I’m warning you, Piper!" Once more Violante’s voice allowed Resa to breathe again. "Let the children go.
The Milksop cast a longing glance at the crossbows. For a moment Resa was afraid he would give the order to shoot, so that he himself could lay the Bluejay at the Adderhead’s feet, his own personal hunting trophy. But instead the Piper leaned forward and gave the guards a signal.
"Open the gates!" he said, in a deliberately weary tone. "Let the children out and the Bluejay in!"
Resa buried her head in her daughter’s shoulder again. Meggie was still as self-controlled as her father, but she went on looking as if she feared to lose him the moment she took her eyes off him.
The gates slowly opened. They groaned and stuck until the guards pushed at them.
And then they came out. Children. So many children. They surged out as if they had been waiting behind the heavy gates for days. The little ones were in such a hurry to get outside the walls that they stumbled, but the bigger children helped them to their feet again. Fear was written on all their faces, a fear much greater than themselves.
The youngest began running as soon as they saw their mothers, threw themselves into their waiting arms, and burrowed their way in among the women as if into a safe hiding place. But the older children walked back to freedom slowly, almost hesitantly. They looked distrustfully at the guards they had to pass, and stopped when they saw the two men waiting on their horses outside the gate.
"Bluejay!" It was only a whisper, but it came from many mouths, louder and louder until the name seemed to be written on the air. "Bluejay, Bluejay." The children nudged one another, pointed to Mo — and stared in awe at the sparks surrounding Dustfinger like a swarm of tiny fairies. "Fire-Dancer."
More and more children stopped in front of the two horses, surrounded their riders, touched them as if to see if the men they knew only from the songs sung secretly by their mothers at their bedsides were really flesh and blood. Mo leaned down from his horse. He waved the children aside, quietly saying something to them. Then he gave Dustfinger one last glance and turned his horse toward the open gateway.
They would not let him go.
Three children barred his way, two boys and a girl. They reached for his reins and wouldn’t let him pass into the place they had just left, to be lost behind its walls like them. More and more of them crowded around him, held him, shielding him from the spears of the guards while their mothers called for them.
"Bluejay!"
The Piper’s voice made the children turn. "Through those gates with you now, or we’ll take them all back, and hang a dozen in cages over the gateway where the ravens can eat them!"
The children didn’t move. They just stared at the silver-nosed man and the boy beside him who was younger than they were. But Mo picked up his reins again and made his way through them as carefully as if each child were his own, and the children stood there while their mothers called them, watching him ride through the huge gateway. All alone.
Mo looked over his shoulder once more before he rode past the guards, as if he knew that Resa and Meggie had followed him after all, and Resa saw the fear on his face.
She was sure that Meggie had seen it, too. As he rode on again the gates were already beginning to close.
"Disarm him!" Resa heard the Milksop shout, and the last thing she saw was soldiers, dozens of soldiers, dragging Mo off his horse.
CHAPTER 36
A SURPRISING VISITOR
Oh, how good it was to see Despina’s little face again! Even if she looked tired and sad, scared as a bird that had fallen out of its nest. And Ivo - had he been so tall before that wretched Sootbird took to stealing children? How thin he was.., and was that blood on his tunic? "The rats bit us," he said, acting grownup and fearless as he had so often since his father’s death, but Fenoglio saw the fear in his childish eyes.
Rats!
He just couldn’t stop hugging and kissing them, he was so relieved. And so he should be. He forgave himself much, he forgave himself easily, but if his story had killed Minerva’s children he wasn’t sure how he would have come to terms with that. But they were alive, and he himself had called into being the man who saved them.
"What will they do to him now?" Despina freed herself from his arms, her big eyes dark with worry. Damn it, that was the trouble with children they were always asking the very questions you so carefully avoided yourself. And then they gave the very answers you didn’t want to hear!
"They’ll kill him," said Ivo, and his little sister’s eyes filled with tears.
How could she be crying for a stranger? She’d seen Mortimer for the first time today.
It’s because your songs have taught her to love him, Fenoglio, that’s how. They all love him, and today will write that love in their hearts forever. Whatever the Piper did to him, from now on the Bluejay was as immortal as the Adderhead. Indeed, he was far more reliably immortal, since the Adderhead could always be killed by three words. But words would keep Mortimer alive even if he died behind the castle walls all the words now being whispered and sung down there in the streets would keep him alive.
Despina wiped the tears from her eyes and looked at Fenoglio in the hope that he would contradict her brother, and of course he did, for her sake and his own. "Jvo!"
he said sternly. "What nonsense are you talking? Do you think the Bluejay didn’t have a plan when he gave himself up? Do you think he’s just going to the Piper like a rabbit falling into a trap?"
A smile of relief came to Despina’s lips, and the shadow of a doubt appeared on Ivo’s face.
"No, of course he isn’t!" said Minerva, who still hadn’t spoken a word since she had brought the children up to his room. "He’s a cunning fox, not a rabbit! He’ll outwit them all!" And Fenoglio heard the seed that his songs had sown begin to grow in her voice, too. Hope—the Bluejay still stood for hope in the midst of all the darkness.
Minerva took the children away with her. Of course. She would be going to feed them up with everything she could still find in the house, and Fenoglio was left alone with Rosenquartz who had been stirring the ink without a word while Fenoglio lavished kisses on Despina and Ivo.
"Outwit them all, will he?" he said in his reedy little voice as soon as Minerva closed the door behind her. "How? Do you know what I think? I think it’s all up with your fabulous robber! And he’ll have a particularly nasty execution, that’s what! I can only hope it will be in the Castle of Night. No one ever stops to think what all those screams of agony do to a glass man’s poor head."
