"But Snapper hates Mo!" Resa's voice was so loud that several robbers turned to look at her, and even the children paused their game. "Why would he want to help him?"
"I'm afraid he has no intention of helping him," Battista replied quietly. "He's been telling the others he's going because the Bluejay plans to betray us and make his own bargain with Violante. And he said your husband hasn't told us the whole truth about the White Book."
"What kind of truth?" Resa's voice was failing her.
"Snapper says," Battista replied quietly, "that the Book doesn't just make its owner immortal, it makes him immensely rich. That sounds a lot more tempting to most of our men than immortality. They'd betray their own mothers for a book like that. So why, they ask themselves, wouldn't the Bluejay plan on doing the same to us?"
"But that's all lies! The Book makes its owner immortal, nothing more." Meggie didn't care that her voice was rising. Let them all hear her, all of them putting their heads together, whispering about her father!
Elfbane turned to her, an unpleasant smile on his thin face. "Oh yes? And how would you know that, little witch? Didn't your father keep it a secret from you that the Book was making the Adderhead's flesh rot on his bones?"
"What if he did?" Elinor asked Elfbane angrily, putting a protective arm around Meggie. "She still knows one thing: She can certainly trust her father more than a poisoner. Because who else poisoned the Prince if not your beloved Snapper?"
There was a rather unfriendly murmuring among the robbers, and Battista drew Elinor over to his side.
"Mind what you say!" he whispered to her. "Not all Snapper's friends went with him. And if you ask me, poison doesn't sound much like Snapper. A knife, yes, but poison…"
"Oh no? Then who else would it be?" Elinor retorted.
Resa looked up at the sky as if the answer might be found there. "Did Gecko take his magpie with him?" she asked.
Battista nodded. "Yes, luckily. The children are scared of it."
"With good reason." Resa looked up at the sky again, and then at Battista. "What exactly does Snapper mean to do?" she asked. "Tell me."
Battista just shrugged wearily. "I don't know. Maybe he's going to try to steal the Book from the Adderhead before he reaches the Castle in the Lake. Or maybe he's going straight there to get it for himself after the Bluejay has written the three words in it. Whatever his plan is, there's nothing we can do. The children need us, and until the Prince gets better he needs us, too. Remember, Dustfinger is with the Bluejay. Snapper won't have an easy time of it with the pair of them! Now forgive me, but I must go back to the Prince."
Snapper won't have an easy time of it with the pair of them! Yes, but what if he really did steal the White Book from the Adderhead on the way, and the Adderhead arrived at the Castle in the Lake knowing that even the Bluejay couldn't help him now? Wouldn't he kill Mo then and there? And even if Mo did get a chance to write those three words on the blank pages… what if Snapper poisoned him afterward, as ruthlessly as he'd presumably poisoned the Prince, just to get his hands on the Book?
What if, what if… Those questions kept Meggie awake even when all had long been sleeping around her, and finally she got up to go and see how the Black Prince was.
He was sleeping. The White Women had gone, but his dark face was still as gray as if their hands had bleached his skin. Minerva and Roxane were taking turns sitting at his side, and Fenoglio was with them, as if he must watch over his own words if they were to remain effective.
Fenoglio… Fenoglio could write again.
What did the sheets of paper he had hidden under his clothes say?
"Why did you make up the Bluejay for your robber songs, why didn't you just write about the Black Prince?" Meggie had asked him long ago.
"Because the Prince was tired," Fenoglio had replied. "The Black Prince needed the Bluejay as much as the poor people who whispered his name at night. The Prince had been part of this world for too long to believe it could really be changed. And his men never doubted that he was flesh and blood like them. They're not nearly so sure about your father. Do you understand now?"
Meggie understood only too well. But Mo was flesh and blood, and she was sure that Snapper didn't doubt it. When she returned to the sleepers, Darius had taken two of the children onto his lap and was quietly telling them a story. The little ones often woke him in the middle of the night because he knew how to drive away their bad dreams with stories, and Darius patiently resigned himself to his task. He liked Fenoglio's world, although it probably frightened him more than Elinor – but would he change it with his voice if Fenoglio asked him to? Would he read aloud what Meggie herself might not want to?
What was on the sheets of paper that Fenoglio had hidden so hastily from her and Elinor?
What did they say?
Co and look, Meggie, she told herself. You won't be able to sleep anyway.
As she went around behind the wall marking off the place where Fenoglio slept, she heard Rosenquartz's quiet snoring. His master was sitting with the Black Prince, but the glass man lay on the clothes under which Fenoglio had hidden the written pages. Meggie carefully picked him up, surprised as usual to feel how cold his transparent limbs were, and laid him on the cushion that Fenoglio had brought with him from Ombra. Yes, the pages were still exactly where he had hidden them from Elinor and her. There were more than a dozen, covered with words written in haste – scraps of sentences, questions, snippets of ideas that most likely made no sense to anyone but their author: The pen or the sword? Who does Violante love? Careful, the Piper… Who writes the three words? Meggie couldn't decipher all of it, but on the very first page, in capital letters, were the words that made her heart beat faster: THE SONG OF THE BLUEJAY.
"Just ideas, Meggie, as I told you. Only questions and ideas."
Fenoglio's voice made her spin around in such alarm that she almost dropped the pages on the sleeping Rosenquartz.
"The Prince is rather better," said Fenoglio, as if she had come to him to hear that. "It really does look as if my words have kept someone alive for once, instead of killing them. But then again, perhaps he's only alive because this story thinks he can still be useful to it. How would I know?" He sat down beside Meggie with a sigh and gently took what he had written from her hand.
"Your words saved Mo, too, before all this," she said.
"Yes, maybe." Fenoglio brushed his hand over the dry ink as if that would dust the words free of anything harmful. "All the same, you don't trust them now any more than I do, do you?"
He was right. She had learned both to love and to fear the words.
"Why 'The Song of the Bluejay'?" she asked softly. "You can't write any more about him! He's my father now! Make up a new hero. I'm sure you can invent one. But let Mo be Mo again, just Mo and no one else."
Fenoglio looked at her thoughtfully. "Are you sure that's what your father himself wants? Or don't you mind about that?"
"Of course I do!" Meggie's voice was so sharp that Rosenquartz woke with a start. He looked around him with a bewildered expression – and fell asleep again. "But Mo certainly wouldn't want you catching him in your words like a fly in a spider's web. You're changing him!"
"Nonsense! Your father himself decided to be the Bluejay! I just wrote a few songs, and you've never read a single one of them aloud! So how would they change anything?"
Meggie bowed her head.
"Oh no!" Fenoglio looked at her, horrified. "You did read them?"
"After Mo rode to the castle. To protect him, to make him strong and invulnerable. I read them aloud every day."