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 dreamed of lying in such a vault himself someday. But in Fenoglio's book the most magnificent sarcophagus of all hadn't yet been there. Candles burned at Cosimo's feet, tall, honey-colored 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. Rumor 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 toward 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 gold 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."