Inkdeath (Inkworld #3)

Inkdeath (Inkworld #3) Page 87

"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?

Go 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."

"Well, who’d have thought it! Then let’s hope the words in the songs work as well as those I’ve written for the Black Prince." Fenoglio put an arm around her shoulders, as he had often done when they were both Capricorn’s prisoners —in another world, in another story. Or was it the same story after all?

"Meggie," he said quietly. "Even if you go on reading my songs aloud, even if you read them a dozen times a day—we both know they haven’t made your father the Bluejay. If I’d chosen him as the model for the Piper, do you think he’d have become a murderer? Of course not! Your father is like the Black Prince! He feels for the weak. I didn’t write that into his heart; it was always there! Your father didn’t ride to Ombra Castle because of my words but for the children asleep out there. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps this story is changing him, but he’s changing the story, too!

He’s telling the next part of it through what he does, Meggie, not because of what I write. Even if the right words might be able to help him. . ."

"Protect him, Fenoglio!" Meggie whispered. "Snapper’s after him, and he hates Mo."

Fenoglio looked at her in surprise. "What do you mean? You actually want me to write something about him? Heavens, it was confusing enough when I had only my own characters to worry about!"

And you let them die without giving it a thought, Meggie told hersel€ but she didn’t say so aloud. After all, Fenoglio had saved the Black Prince today and he had really feared for him. What would Dustfinger have said about this sudden fit of sympathy?

Rosenquartz started snoring again.

"Hear that?" asked Fenoglio. "Can you tell me how such a ridiculously small creature can snore at such volume? Sometimes I feel like stuffing him in the inkwell overnight just to get some peace and quiet!"

"You’re a terrible old man!" Meggie reached for the written pages again and ran her finger along the words jotted down there.

"What does all this mean? The pen or the sword? Who writes the three words? Who does Violante love?"

"Well, those are only some of the questions to be answered as this story goes on. All good stories hide behind a tangle of questions, and it isn’t easy to find out their dodges. And this story certainly has a mind of its own. But," and here Fenoglio lowered his voice as if the story itself could be eavesdropping, "if you ask the right questions it will whisper all its secrets to you. A story like this is a very talkative thing.

Fenoglio read aloud what he had written. "The pen or the sword? A very important question. But I don’t know the answer yet. Perhaps it will be both. Well, however that may be. . . Who writes the three words? Your father let himself be taken prisoner to do that, but who knows.., will the Adderhead really allow his daughter to trick him? IsViolante as clever as she thinks, and Who does Her Ugliness love? I am afraid she’s fallen in love with your father. I think she fell in love with him a long time ago, before she ever met him."

"What?" Meggie looked at him in astonishment. "What are you talking about?

Violante isn’t much older than me and Brianna!"

"Nonsense! Not in years, perhaps, but with all the experience she’s had, she’s at least three times your age. And like so many princes daughters, she has a very romantic notion of robbers. Why do you think she made Balbulus illuminate all my Bluejay songs? And now he’s riding along beside her in flesh and blood. Not unromantic, is it?"