And if you hadn’t taken it into your head to wangle your way into it, Dustfinger would still be alive –”
Farid punched Fenoglio in the face before Meggie could pull him back.
“How can you say a thing like that?” she shouted at Fenoglio as Farid, sobbing, put his arms around her. “Farid saved Dustfinger at the mill. He’s protected him ever since he arrived here –”
“Yes, yes, all right!” growled Fenoglio, feeling his nose. It hurt. “I’m a heartless old man, I know.
But although you may not believe it, I felt dreadful when I saw Dustfinger lying there. And then Roxane’s tears, appalling, really appalling. All the wounded men, Meggie, all the dead, so many dead .. No, Meggie, the words don’t obey me anymore. Except when it suits them. They’ve turned against me like snakes.”
“Exactly. You’re a failure, a miserable failure!” Farid shook Meggie off. “You don’t know your own trade. But someone else does. The man who brought Dustfinger here. Orpheus. He’ll get him back, you wait and see. Write him here! You can at least do that! Yes, write Orpheus here at once or . . or . . I’ll tell the Adderhead you were going to kill him, I’ll tell all the women in Ombra it’s your fault their men folk are dead .. I’ll. . I’ll. .”
He stood there with his fists clenched, quivering with rage and despair. But the old man just looked at him. Then, with difficulty, he rose to his feet. “Do you know something, my boy?” he said, putting his face very close to Farid’s. “If you’d asked me nicely I might have tried, but not this way. No, no! Fenoglio must be asked, not threatened. I still have that much pride left.”
At this Farid looked like going for him again, but Meggie held him back. “Fenoglio, stop it!” she shouted at the old man. “He’s desperate, can’t you see that?”
“Desperate? So what? I’m desperate, too!” Fenoglio snapped at her. “My story is foundering in misfortune, and these hands here,” he said, holding them out to her, “don’t want to write anymore! I’m afraid of words, Meggie! Once they were like honey, now they’re poison, pure poison! But what is a writer who doesn’t love words anymore? What have I come to? This story is devouring me, crushing me, and I’m its creator!”
“Fetch Orpheus!” said Farid hoarsely. Meggie could hear how much trouble he was taking to control his voice, to banish the rage from it. “Bring him here, and let him write it for you! Teach him what you know, the way Dustfinger taught me everything! Let him find the right words for you. He loves your story, he told Dustfinger so himself! He even wrote you a letter when he was a boy.”
“Did he?” For a moment Fenoglio sounded almost like his old inquisitive self.
“Yes, he admires you! He thinks this is the best of all stories, he said so!”
“Really?” Fenoglio sounded flattered. “Well, it isn’t bad. That is to say, it wasn’t bad.” He looked thoughtfully at Farid. “A pupil. A pupil for Fenoglio,” he murmured. “A writer’s apprentice. Hmm.
Orpheus .. ” He spoke the name as if he had to taste it. “The only poet who ever challenged Death . . appropriate.”
Farid was looking at him so hopefully that it went to Meggie’s heart again. But Fenoglio smiled, even though it was a sad smile.
“Look at him, Meggie!” he said. “He has the same pleading look as my grandchildren could turn on to wheedle anything out of me. Does he look at you the same way when he wants something from you?”
Meggie felt herself blushing. However, Fenoglio turned back to Farid. “You know we’ll need Meggie’s help, don’t you?”
Farid nodded, and looked at her.
“I’ll read it,” she said quietly. “If Fenoglio writes it, I’ll read it.” And get the man who helped Mortola to bring my father here and almost kill him into this story, Meggie added in her thoughts.
She tried not to think of what Mo would say about the deal.
However, Fenoglio already seemed to be searching for words in his mind. The right words –
words that would not betray and deceive him. “Very well,” he muttered abstractedly, “let’s get down to work one last time. But where am I going to find paper and ink? Not to mention a pen and a helpful glass man? Poor Rosenquartz is still in Ombra.”
“I have paper,” said Meggie, “and a pencil.”
“That’s very beautiful,” said Fenoglio when she put her notebook in his lap. “Did your father bind it?”
Meggie nodded.
“There are some pages torn out.”
“Yes, for a message I gave my mother and the letter I sent you. The one that Cloud-Dancer brought you.”
“Oh. Oh yes. Him.” For a moment Fenoglio looked dreadfully tired. “Books with blank pages,” he murmured. “They seem to be playing more and more of a part in this story, don’t you think?”
Then he asked Meggie to leave him alone with Farid so that the boy could tell him about Orpheus. “To be honest,” he whispered to Meggie, “I think he vastly overestimates the man’s abilities! What has this fellow Orpheus done? Put my own words together in a different order, that’s all. But I’ll admit I’m curious to meet him. It takes a fair amount of megalomania to give yourself a name like that, and megalomania is an interesting character trait.”
Meggie did not share his opinion, but it was too late to go back on her promise. She would read again. For Farid this time. She went quietly back to her parents, laid her head on Mo’s chest, and fell asleep hearing his heartbeat in her ear. Words had saved him, why shouldn’t they do the same for Dustfinger? Even if he had gone far, far away .. didn’t the words of this world rule even the land of silence?
Chapter 73 – The Bluejay
The world existed to be read. And I read it.
– L. S. Schwartz, Ruined by Reading
Resa and Meggie were asleep when Mo woke, but he felt as if he couldn’t breathe among all the stones and the dead a moment longer. The men guarding the entrance of the mine greeted him with a nod as he came climbing up to them. Pale morning light was seeping through the crevice that led to the outside world; the air smelled of rosemary, thyme, and the berries on Mortola’s poisonous trees. Mo’s senses were constantly confused by the way the familiar mingled with the strange in Fenoglio’s world – and by the fact that the strange features often struck him as more real than the others.
The guards were not the only men Mo met at the entrance to the mine. Five more were leaning against the walls of the gallery, among them Snapper and the Black Prince himself.
“Ah, here comes the most wanted robber between Ombra and the sea!” said Snapper, low-voiced, as Mo came toward them. They examined him like some new kind of animal, of which they had heard the strangest stories. And Mo felt more than ever like an actor who had stepped onstage with the unpleasant feeling that he knew neither the play nor his part in it.
“I don’t know how the rest of you feel,” said Snapper, glancing around at the others, “but I always thought some writer had made up the Bluejay. And that the only man who might lay claim to that feathered mask was our own Black Prince, even if he doesn’t entirely match the description in the songs. So when folk said the Bluejay was a prisoner in the Castle of Night, I thought they just wanted to hang some other poor fellow because he happened to have a scar on his arm. But then,” he said, looking Mo up and down as extensively as if assessing him by every line of every song he had ever heard about the Bluejay, “then I saw you fight in the forest . . ‘and his sword-blade flashes through them like a needle through the pages,’ isn’t that what one of the songs says? A good description, indeed!”
