to gather plants when she was in Mortola’s service, but only plants that killed. Roxane had taught her to find their healing sisters. She told her which leaves were good for sleeplessness, which roots relieved the pain of an old wound, and that in this world it was wise to leave a dish of milk or an egg if you picked something from a tree, to please the wood-elves living in it. Many of the plants were strange to Resa, with unfamiliar odours that made her dizzy. Others she had often seen in Elinor’s garden without guessing what power lay hidden in their inconspicuous stems and leaves. The Inkworld had taught her to see her own world more clearly and reminded her of something Mo had said long ago: ‘I think we should sometimes read stories where everything’s different from our world, don’t you agree? There’s nothing like it for teaching us to wonder why trees are green and not red, and why we have five fingers rather than six.’
Of course Roxane knew a remedy for Resa’s sickness. She was just telling her what herbs would help the flow of her milk later on when Fenoglio, with Meggie and Farid, rode into the yard. Resa asked herself why the old man and her daughter wore such a guilty look on their faces. Of course she didn’t guess the reason.
Roxane put her arms around Resa as Fenoglio, his voice faltering, told them what had happened. But Resa didn’t know what to feel. Fear? Despair? Anger? Yes, anger. That was what she felt first of all. She was angry with Mo for being so reckless.
‘How could you have let him go?’ she snapped at Meggie, so sharply that the Strong Man jumped. The words were out before she could regret them. But her anger stayed with her: because Mo had gone to the castle even though he knew it was dangerous. And because he had done it behind her back. His daughter had been allowed to come with him, but to his wife he hadn’t said a word.
Roxane stroked Resa’s hair as she began to sob. Tears of rage, tears of fear. She was tired of feeling afraid.
Afraid of knowing Roxane’s pain.
9
A Giveaway
‘You’re going to stop cruelty?’ she asked. ‘And greediness, and all those things? I don’t think you could. You’re very clever, but, oh no, you couldn’t do anything like that.’
Mervyn Peake,
Titus Groan
A dungeon awaited him, what else? And then? Mo remembered the death that the Adderhead had promised him only too clearly. It could take days, many days and nights. The fearlessness that had been his constant companion over the last few weeks, the cold calm that hatred and the White Women had implanted in him – they were gone as if he had never felt them. Since meeting the White Women he no longer feared death itself. It seemed to him familiar and at times even desirable. But dying was another matter, and so was imprisonment, which he feared almost more. He remembered, only too well, the despair waiting behind barred doors and the silence where even your own breath was painfully loud, every thought a torment, and where every hour tempted you simply to beat your head against the wall until you no longer heard and felt anything.
Mo had been unable to bear closed doors and windows since the days he had spent in the tower of the Castle of Night. Meggie seemed to have shed the fear of confinement like a dragonfly shedding its skin, but Resa felt as he did, and whenever fear woke one of them, they could find sleep again only in each other’s arms.
Please, not a dungeon again.
That was what made fighting so easy – you could always choose death rather than captivity.
Perhaps he could seize a sword from one of the soldiers in one of the dark corridors, far from the other guards on duty. For guards stood everywhere with the Milksop’s emblem on their chests. He had to clench his fists to keep his fingers from putting that idea into practice. Not yet, Mortimer, he told himself. Another flight of steps, burning torches on both sides. Of course, they were leading him down into the depths of the castle. Dungeons always lay high above or far below. Resa had told him about the cells in the Castle of Night, so deep in the mountainside that she had often thought she wouldn’t be able to breathe in them. They weren’t pushing and hitting him yet as the soldiers there had done. Would they be more civil when it came to torturing and quartering him too? Down and down they went, step by step. One in front of him, two behind him, breathing on the back of his neck. Now, Mortimer! Try it now! There are only three of them! Their faces were so young – children’s faces, beardless, frightened under their assumed ferocity. Since when had children been allowed to play soldiers? Always, he answered himself. They make the best soldiers because they still think they’re immortal.
Only three of them. But even if he killed them quickly they would shout, bringing more men down on him.
The stairs ended at a door. The soldier in front of him opened it. Now! What are you waiting for? Mo flexed his fingers, getting ready. His heart was beating a little faster, as if to set the pace for him.
‘Bluejay.’ The soldier turned to him, bowed, and left. There was a look of embarrassment on his face. In surprise, Mo scrutinized the other two. Admiration, fear, respect. The same mixture that he had met with so often, the result not of anything he had done himself, but of Fenoglio’s songs. Hesitantly, he went through the open doorway – and only then did he realize where they had brought him.
The vault of the Princes of Ombra. Mo had read about that too. Fenoglio had found fine words for this place of the dead, words that sounded as if the old man dreamt of lying in such a vault himself some day. But in Fenoglio’s book the most magnificent sarcophagus of all hadn’t yet been there. Candles burnt at Cosimo’s feet, tall, honey-coloured candles. Their perfume sweetened the air, and his stone image, lying on a bed of alabaster roses, was smiling as if in a happy dream.
Beside the sarcophagus, very erect as if to compensate for the lack of light, stood a young woman in black, her hair drawn severely back.
The soldiers bowed their heads to her and murmured her name.
Violante. The Adderhead’s daughter. She was still known as Her Ugliness, although the birthmark that had earned her the name was only a faint shadow on her cheek now – it had begun to fade, people said, on the day when Cosimo came back from the dead. Only to return there soon.
Her Ugliness.
What a nickname. How did she live with it? But Violante’s subjects used it with affection. Rumour had it that she secretly had leftovers from the princely kitchen taken to the starving villages by night, and fed those in need in Ombra by selling silverware and horses from the princely stables, even when the Milksop punished her for it by shutting her up in her rooms for days on end. She spoke up for those condemned to death and taken off to the gallows, and for those who vanished into dungeons – even though no one listened to her. Violante was powerless in her own castle, as the Black Prince had told Mo often enough. Even her son didn’t do as she told him, but the Milksop was afraid of her all the same, for she was still his immortal brother-in-law’s daughter.
Why had they brought him to her, here in the place where her dead husband lay at rest? Did she want to earn the price put on the Bluejay’s head before the Milksop could claim it?
‘Does he have the scar?’ She didn’t take her eyes off his face.
One of the soldiers took an awkward step towards Mo, but he pushed up his sleeve, just as the little girl had the night before. The scar left by the teeth of Basta’s dogs long ago, in another life – Fenoglio had made a story out of it, and sometimes Mo felt as if the old man had drawn the scar on his skin with his own hands, in pale ink.
Violante came up to him. The heavy fabric of her dress trailed on the stone floor. She was really small, a good deal smaller than Meggie. When she put her hand to the embroidered pouch at her belt Mo expected to see the beryl that Meggie had told him about, but Violante took out a pair of glasses. Ground glass lenses, a silver frame – Orpheus’s glasses must have been the model for this pair. It couldn’t have been easy to find a master capable of grinding such lenses.
‘Yes, indeed. The famous scar. A giveaway.’ The glasses enlarged Violante’s eyes. They
were not like her father’s. ‘So Balbulus was right. Do you know that my father has raised the price on your head yet again?’
Mo hid the scar under his sleeve once more. ‘Yes, I heard about that.’
‘But you came here to see Balbulus’s pictures all the same. I like that. Obviously what the songs say about you is true: you don’t know what fear is, maybe you even love danger.’
She looked him up and down as thoroughly as if she were comparing him with the man in the pictures. But when he returned her glance she blushed – whether out of embarrassment or anger because he ventured to look her in the face, Mo couldn’t have said. She turned abruptly, went over to her husband’s tomb and ran her fingers over the stone roses as delicately as if she were trying to bring them to life.
‘I would have done exactly the same in your place. I’ve always thought we were like each other. Ever since I heard the first song about you from the strolling players. This world breeds misfortune like a pond breeding midges, but it’s possible to fight back. We both know that. I was already stealing gold from the taxes in the treasury before anyone sang those songs about you. For a new infirmary, a beggars’ refuge, or somewhere for orphans to go … I just made sure that one of the administrators was suspected of stealing the gold. They all deserve to hang anyway.’
How defiantly she tilted her chin as she turned back to him. Almost the way Meggie sometimes did. She seemed very old and very young at the same time. What was she planning? Would she hand him over to her father, to feed the poor with the price on his head, or so that she could buy enough parchment and paints for Balbulus at last? Everyone knew that she had even pawned her wedding ring to buy him brushes. Well, what could be more suitable? thought Mo. A bookbinder’s skin, sold for new books.
One of the soldiers was still standing right behind him. The other two were guarding the door, obviously the only way out of the vault. Three. There were only three of them.
‘I know all the songs about you. I had them written down.’ The eyes behind the lenses in her glasses were grey and curiously light. As if you could see that they weren’t very strong. They certainly didn’t resemble the Adderhead’s lizard-like eyes. She must have inherited them from her mother. The book in which death was held captive had been bound in the room where she and her ugly little daughter used to live after they fell into disfavour. Did Violante still remember that room? Surely she did.
‘The new songs aren’t very good,’ she went on, ‘but Balbulus makes up for that with his pictures. Now that my father’s made the Milksop lord of this castle he usually works on them at night, and I keep the books with me so that they don’t get sold like all the others. I read them when the Milksop is making merry in the great hall. I read them out loud so that the words will drown out all that noise: the drunken bawling, the silly laughter, Tullio crying when they’ve been chasing him again … and every word fills my heart with hope, the hope that you will stand there in the hall some day, with the Black Prince at your side, and kill them all. One by one. While I stand beside you with my feet in their blood.’
Violante’s soldiers didn’t move a muscle. They seemed to be used to hearing such words in their mistress’s mouth.
She took a step towards him. ‘I’ve had people searching for you ever since I heard from my father’s men that you were in hiding on this side of the forest. I wanted to find you before they did, but you’re good at staying out of sight. No doubt the fairies and brownies hide you, as the songs say, and the moss-women heal your wounds …’
Mo couldn’t help it. He had to smile. For a moment Violante’s face had reminded him so much of Meggie’s when she was telling one of her favourite stories.
‘Why do you smile?’ Violante frowned, and for a moment he glimpsed the Adderhead in her light eyes. Careful, Mortimer.
‘Oh, I know. You’re thinking: she’s only a woman, hardly more than a girl, she has no power, no husband, no soldiers. You’re right, most of my soldiers lie dead in the forest because my husband was in too much of a hurry to go to war against my father. But I’m not so stupid! “Balbulus,” I said, “spread word that you’re looking for a new bookbinder. Perhaps we’ll find the Bluejay that way. If what Taddeo said is true, he’ll come just to see your pictures. And then, when he’s in my castle, my prisoner, just as he was once a prisoner in the Castle of Night, I’ll ask him to help me kill my immortal father.”’
Violante’s lips smiled in amusement as Mo looked sideways at her soldiers. ‘Don’t look so anxious! My soldiers are devoted to me. My father’s men killed their brothers and fathers in the Wayless Wood!’
‘Your father won’t be immortal for very much longer.’ The words came from Mo’s lips unthinkingly; he hadn’t meant to speak them aloud. Idiot, he told himself. Have you forgotten who this is facing you, just because something about her reminds you of your daughter?
But Violante smiled. ‘Then what my father’s librarian told me is indeed true,’ she said, as softly as if the dead could overhear her. ‘When my father began feeling unwell he thought at first that one of his maids had poisoned him.’
‘Mortola.’ Whenever Mo said her name he pictured her raising her gun.
‘You know her?’ Violante seemed as reluctant as he was to utter that name. ‘My father had her tortured to make her say what poison she’d given him, and when she didn’t confess she was thrown into a dungeon under the Castle of Night, but she disappeared one day. I hope she’s dead. They say she poisoned my mother.’ Violante stroked the black fabric of her dress as if she had been speaking of the quality of the silk and not her mother’s death. ‘Whether or not that’s true, my father knows by now who’s to blame for the way his flesh is rotting on his bones. Soon after your flight Taddeo noticed that the book was beginning to smell strange. And the pages were swelling. The clasps concealed it for a while, which presumably was your intention, but now they can hardly hold the wooden covers together. Poor Taddeo almost died of fear when he saw the state the book was in. Apart from my father himself, he was the only one who was permitted to touch it, and who knew where it was hidden … he even knows the three words that would have to be written in it! My father would have killed anyone else for possessing that knowledge. But he trusts the old man more than anyone else in the world, perhaps because Taddeo was his tutor for many years, and often protected him from my grandfather when he was a child. Who knows? Of course, Taddeo didn’t tell my father what state the book was in. He’d have hung even his old tutor on the spot for bringing him such bad news. No, Taddeo secretly summoned every bookbinder between the Wayless Wood and the sea to the Castle of Night, and when none of them could help him, he took Balbulus’s advice to bind a second book looking just like the first, which he showed my father when he asked for it. But meanwhile my father was feeling worse every day. Everyone knows about it by now. His breath stinks like stagnant pond water, and he’s freezing, as if the White Women’s breath is already wrapping him in their deadly cold. What a revenge, Bluejay! Endless life with endless suffering. That doesn’t sound like the doing of an angel, more like the work of a very clever devil. Which of the two are you?’
Mo didn’t answer. Don’t trust her, a voice inside him said. But his heart, strangely enough, told him something else.
‘As I said, it was a long time before my father suspected anyone but Mortola,’ Violante went on. ‘His suspicions even made him forget his search for you. But a day came when one of the bookbinders Taddeo had summoned to his aid told him what was wrong with the book, presumably hoping to be rewarded with silver for the news. My father had him killed – after all, no one must know about the threat to his immortality – but word soon spread. Now there’s hardly a bookbinder left alive in Argenta. Every one of them who couldn’t cure the book went to the gallows. And Taddeo has been thrown into the dungeons under the Castle of Night. “So that your flesh will rot away slowly like mine,” my father’s supposed to have said. I don’t know if Taddeo is still alive. He’s old, and the dungeons of the
Castle of Night are enough to kill much younger men.’
Mo felt sick, just as he had in the Castle of Night when he was binding the White Book to save Resa, Meggie and himself. Even then he had guessed that he was buying their lives at the cost of many others. Poor, timid Taddeo. Mo saw him in his mind’s eye, crouching in one of those windowless dungeons. And he saw the bookbinders, he saw them very clearly, desolate figures swaying back and forth high in the air … He closed his eyes.
‘Well, imagine that. Just as it says in the songs,’ he heard Violante say. ‘A heart more full of pity than any other beats in the Bluejay’s breast. You’re really sorry that other people had to die for what you did. Don’t be foolish. My father loves killing. If it hadn’t been the bookbinders he’d have hung someone else! And in the end it wasn’t a bookbinder, but an alchemist, who found a way to preserve the book. It’s rumoured to be a very unappetizing way, and it couldn’t reverse the harm you’d already done, but at least the book isn’t rotting any more – and my father is looking for you harder than ever, because he still thinks only you can lift the curse you hid so skilfully between the empty pages. Don’t wait for him to find you! Steal a march on him! Ally yourself with me. You and I, Bluejay – his daughter and the robber who has already tricked him once. We can be his downfall! Help me to kill him. Together we can do it easily!’
How she was looking at him – expectant as a child who has just told her dearest wish. Come with me, Bluejay, let’s kill my father! What does a man have to do to his daughter, wondered Mo, to make her want something like that?
‘Not all daughters love their fathers, Bluejay,’ said Violante, as if she had read his thoughts, just as Meggie so often did. ‘They say your daughter loves you dearly – and you love her. But my father will kill them, your daughter, your wife, everyone you love, and last of all he’ll kill you too. He won’t let you go on making him a laughing stock to his subjects. He’ll find you even if you go on hiding as cleverly as a fox in its earth, because with every breath he draws, his own body reminds him of what you’ve done to him. Sunlight hurts his skin, his limbs are so bloated that he can’t ride any more. He finds even walking difficult. Day and night he pictures what he wants to do to you and yours. He’s made the Piper write songs about your death, such terrible songs that anyone who hears them can’t sleep, or so they say, and soon he’ll send the silver-nosed man to sing them here as well – and to hunt you down. The Piper has been waiting a long time for that order, and he’ll find you. His bait will be your pity for the poor. He’ll kill so many of them that their blood will lure you out of the forest at last. But if I help you—’
A voice interrupted Violante, a childish voice that was clearly used to getting a hearing from adults. It echoed down the endless stairway leading to the vault.
‘He’s bound to be with her, you just wait and see!’ How excited Jacopo sounded! ‘Balbulus is a very good liar, especially when he’s lying for my mother. But when he does it he plucks at his sleeves and looks even more pleased with himself than usual. My grandfather’s taught me to notice that kind of thing.’
The soldiers at the door looked enquiringly at their mistress, but Violante took no notice of them. She was listening to Jacopo outside the door, when another voice was heard and Mo saw, for the first time, a trace of fear in her fearless eyes. He knew the voice himself, and his hand went to the knife at his belt. Sootbird sounded as if the fire that he played with so clumsily had singed his vocal cords. ‘His voice is like a warning,’ Resa had once said of him, ‘a warning to be on guard against his pretty face and the eternal smile on it.’
‘What a clever lad you are, Jacopo!’ Did the boy hear the sarcasm in his voice? ‘But why don’t we go to your mother’s rooms?’
‘Because she wouldn’t be stupid enough to have him taken there. My mother is clever too, much cleverer than any of you!’
Violante went up to Mo and took his arm. ‘Put the knife away!’ she whispered. ‘The Bluejay won’t die in this castle. I refuse to hear that song. Come with me.’
She beckoned to the soldier standing behind Mo – a tall, broad-shouldered young man who held his sword as if he hadn’t used it very often – and made her purposeful way past the stone coffins, as if this wasn’t the first time she had had to hide someone from her son. More than a dozen tombs stood in the vault. Sleeping stone figures lay on top of most of them, with swords on their breasts, dogs at their feet, pillows of marble or granite under their heads. Violante hurried past them without a glance until she stopped by a coffin with a plain stone lid cracked right down the middle, as if the dead man inside had once pushed it open.
‘If the Bluejay isn’t here we’ll go and scare Balbulus a bit, shall we?’ There was jealousy in Jacopo’s voice when he uttered Balbulus’s name, as if he were talking about an older brother whom his mother preferred to him. ‘We’ll go back, and you can make fire lick around those books of his!’
The soldier’s young face flushed red with effort as he heaved the