Elinor stared at the words, shaping them with her lips. In the streets of Ombra… She'd stood here so often over the last few weeks, surrounded by books that meant nothing to her; now she was once again alone with them. They didn't speak to her, just as if they knew that she'd have exchanged them all on the spot for the three people she had lost. Lost in a book.
"I will learn how, damn it!" Her voice sounded defiant, like a child's. "I'll learn how to read them so that they'll swallow me up, too, I will, I will!"
The dog was looking at her as if he believed every word of it, but Elinor didn't, not a single one. No, she was no Silvertongue. Even if she tried for a dozen years or more, the words wouldn't make music when she spoke them. She'd loved words so much all her life. Although they didn't sing for her the way they sang for Meggie or Mortimer – or Orpheus, damn him three times over.
The piece of paper shook in her fingers as she started to cry. Here came the tears again. She'd held them back for so long, all the tears in her heart, until it was simply overflowing with them. Elinor's sobs were so loud that the dog cowered in alarm. How ridiculous that water ran out of your eyes when your heart hurt. Tragic heroines in books tended to be amazingly beautiful. Not a word about swollen eyes or a red nose. Crying always gives me a red nose, thought Elinor. I expect that's why I'll never be in any book.
"Elinor?"
She spun around, hastily wiping away her tears.
Darius stood in the open doorway, wearing the bathrobe that she had given him for his last birthday. It was much too large for him.
"What is it?" she snapped. Where had that handkerchief gone this time? Sniffing, she pulled it from her sleeve and blew her nose. "Three months, they've been gone three months now, Darius! Isn't that a good reason to cry? Yes, it is. Don't look at me so pityingly with your owlish eyes. Never mind how many books we buy," she said, with a wide sweep of her arm toward her well-filled shelves, "never mind how many we get at auctions, swap, or steal – not one of them tells me what I want to know! Thousands of pages, and not a word on any of them with news of the only people I want to know about. Why would I be interested in anything else? Theirs is the only story I want to hear! How is Meggie now, do you think? How are Resa and Mortimer? Are they happy, Darius? Are they still alive? Will I ever see them again?
Darius looked along the books, as if the answer might after all be found in one of them. But then, like all those printed pages, he gave her no answer.
"I'll make you some hot milk and honey," he said at last, disappearing into the kitchen.
And Elinor was alone again with the books, the moonlight, and Orpheus's ugly dog.
2. ONLY A VILLAGE
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, And the highwayman came riding -
Riding – riding,
The highwayman came riding up to the old inn door.
Alfred Noyes, "The Highwayman"
The fairies were already beginning to dance among the trees, swarms of tiny blue bodies. Their wings caught the starlight, and Mo saw the Black Prince glancing anxiously at the sky. It was still as dark as the surrounding hills, but the fairies were never wrong. On a cold night like this, only the coming of dawn could lure them from their nests, and the village whose harvest the robbers were trying to save this time lay dangerously close to Ombra. As soon as daybreak came they must be gone.
A village like many others: only a dozen poor huts; a few barren, stony fields; and a wall that would hardly keep out a child, let alone a soldier. Thirty women without their menfolk, three dozen fatherless children. Two days ago the new governor's men had carried off almost the entire harvest of the neighboring village. The robbers had reached the place too late, but something could still be salvaged here. They'd spent hours digging, showing the women how to hide livestock and provisions underground…
The Strong Man was carrying the last hastily dug sackful of potatoes, his rough-hewn face red with effort. It turned the same color when he was fighting or drunk. Between them all, they lowered the sack into the hiding place they had made just beyond the fields, and Mo covered the entrance with a network of twigs to hide the storage pit from soldiers and tax-gatherers. By now, toads were croaking in the surrounding hills, as if to entice out the day, and the men on watch among the huts were getting restless. They'd seen the fairies, too. High time to get away, back into the forest where a hiding place could always be found, even though the new governor was sending more and more patrols out to the hills. The Milksop, the widows of Ombra called him. A good nickname for the Adderhead's puny brother-in-law. But the Milksop's greed for what few possessions his new subjects had was insatiable.
Mo rubbed his eyes. Heavens, he was tired. He'd hardly slept for days. There were just too many villages that they might yet be able to reach ahead of the soldiers.
"You look worn-out," Resa had said only yesterday when she woke up beside him, unaware that he hadn't come to bed beside her until the first light of dawn. He had said something about bad dreams, told her he'd been passing the sleepless hours by working on the book he was binding, a collection of her drawings of fairies and glass men. He hoped Resa and Meggie would be asleep again now when he came back to the lonely farmhouse that the Black Prince had found for them. It was east of Ombra, an hour's journey from the city on foot, and far from the land where the Adderhead still ruled, made immortal by a book that Mo had bound with his own hands.
Soon, thought Mo. Soon the book won't protect him anymore. But how often had he told himself that before? And the Adderhead was still immortal.
A girl hesitantly approached Mo. How old would she be? Six? Seven? Her hair was as blond as Meggie's, but it was a long time since Meggie had been so small. Shyly, she stopped a pace away from him.
Snapper emerged from the darkness and went over to the child. "Yes, go on, take a good look!" he whispered to the little girl. "That's really him – the Bluejay! He eats children like you for supper."
Snapper loved such jokes. Mo bit back the words on the tip of his tongue. "Don't believe a word he says!" he told her in a low voice. "Why aren't you asleep like everyone else?"
The child looked at him. Then she pushed up his sleeve with her small hands until the scar showed. The scar of which the songs told tales…
She looked at him, wide-eyed, with the same mixture of awe and fear he had now seen in so many faces. The Bluejay. The girl ran back to her mother, and Mo straightened up. Whenever his chest hurt where Mortola had wounded him, he felt as if the Bluejay – the robber to whom Fenoglio had given Mo's face and voice – had slipped in there to join him. Or had the Bluejay always been a part of him, merely sleeping until Fenoglio's world brought him to life?
Sometimes when they were taking meat or a few sacks of grain stolen from the Milksop's bailiffs to one of the starving villages, women would come up to him and kiss his hand. "Go and thank the Black Prince, not me," he always told them, but the Prince just laughed. "Get yourself a bear," he said. "Then they'll leave you alone."
A child began crying in one of the huts. A tinge of red was showing in the night sky, and Mo thought he heard hoofbeats. Horsemen, at least a dozen of them, maybe more. How fast the ears learned to tell what sounds meant, much faster than it took the eyes to decipher written words.
The fairies scattered. Women cried out and ran to the huts where their children slept. Mo's hand drew his sword as if of its own accord. As if it had never done anything else. It was the sword he had taken from the Castle of Night, the sword that once belonged to Firefox.