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 breeds 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 gray and curiously light. As if you could see that they weren't very strong. They certainly didn't resemble the Adderhead's lizardlike 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 disfavor. 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, Balbulus 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 someday, 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 toward 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 favorite 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.