Inkdeath (Inkworld 3)

Fenoglio drew Minerva’s children closer to his side. Despina didn’t mind at all, but her brother wriggled out of Fenoglio’s grasp and climbed up, nimble as a squirrel, to a ledge on the wall where he would have a view down the street along which they’d soon be coming. The Milksop and his retinue, also known to the townsfolk as his pack of hounds. Had the Adder’s brother-in-law already been told that almost all the women of Ombra were waiting for him at the castle gate? Yes, surely.

Why is the Piper counting our children? That was the question that had brought them here. They had already called it out to the guards, whose faces were unmoved and who had merely lowered their spears in the direction of the angry women. But the women hadn’t gone home, all the same.

It was Friday, the day when the hunt rode out, and the crowd had been waiting hours for the return of their new master, who from the moment of his arrival had set about killing all the game in the Wayless Wood. Once again his servants would be carrying dozens of bloodstained partridges, wild boar, deer, and hares through the streets of starving Ombra, past women who hardly knew where to find food for the next day.

That was why Fenoglio hardly ever went out of doors, and even less on Fridays than on any other day of the week, but curiosity had brought him here today. Curiosity—a tiresome feeling!

"Fenoglio," Minerva had said, "can you look after Despina and Ivo? I have to go to the castle. We’re all going. We want to make them tell us why the Piper is counting our children."

You know why, Fenoglio wanted to say. But the desperation on Minerva’s face silenced him. Let them hope their children weren’t wanted for the silver mines, he told himself. Leave it to the Milksop and the Piper to take their hope away.

Oh, how tired he was of all this! He’d tried his hand at writing again yesterday, roused to anger by the arrogant smile with which the Piper rode into Ombra. He had picked up one of the sharpened pens that the glass man still placed encouragingly in front of him, sat down in front of a blank sheet of paper, and after an hour of waiting in vain told Rosenquartz off for buying paper that anyone could see was made of old trousers.

Ah, Fenoglio, he wondered, how many more stupid excuses will you think up for the way you’ve turned into an old man with no power over words anymore?

Yes, he admitted it. He wanted to be master of this story, strongly as he had denied it after Cosimo’s death. More and more often these days he set to work with pen and ink in search of the old magic — usually while the glass man was snoring in his fairy nest, because it was too embarrassing to have Rosenquartz as a witness of his failure.

He tried it when Minerva had to give the children soup tasting little better than dishwater, when the horrible rainbow-colored fairies jabbered away in their nest at the tops of their voices, keeping him awake, or when one of his creations — like the Piper yesterday — reminded him of the days when he had woven this world out of letters, intoxicated by his own skill with words.

But the paper stayed blank — as if all the words had stolen away to Orpheus, just because he took them and savored them on his tongue. Had life ever tasted so bitter before?

In Fenoglio’s gloomy mood he had even played with the idea of going back to that village in the other world, such a peaceful, well-fed place, so wonderfully free of fairies and stirring events, back to his grandchildren, who must be missing his stories.

(And what fabulous stories he’d be able to tell them now!) But where could the words be found that would take him back? Certainly not in his empty old head, and he could hardly ask Orpheus to write them for him. He hadn’t sunk as low as that yet.

Despina tugged at his sleeve. Cosimo had given him the tunic he was wearing, but it, too, was moth-eaten now and as dusty as his brain that wouldn’t think. What was he doing here outside this damn castle? The sight of it depressed him. Why wasn’t he lying in bed? "Fenoglio? Is it true that when people dig silver out of the ground they spit blood on it?" Despina’s voice still reminded him of a little bird’s. "Ivo says I’m just the right size for the tunnels where they find most of the silver."

Damn the boy! Why did he tell his little sister such stories?

"How often have I told you not to believe a word your brother says?" Fenoglio tucked Despina’s thick black hair back behind her ears and looked accusingly at Ivo.

Poor fatherless little thing.

"Why shouldn’t I tell her? She asked me!" Ivo was at the age when he despised even comforting lies. "I don’t expect they’ll take you," he said, leaning down to his sister.

"Girls die too quickly. But they’ll take me and Beppo and Lino, and even Mungus, although he limps. The Piper will take us all. And then they’ll bring us back dead just like our —Despina put her hand over his mouth quickly, as if her father might come back to life if only her brother didn’t speak the bad word. Fenoglio could happily have seized and shaken the boy, but Despina would only have burst into tears on the spot. Did all little sisters adore their brothers?

"That’s enough! Stop upsetting your sister!" he snapped at Ivo. "The Piper’s here to catch the Bluejay. Not for anything else.

And to ask the Milksop why he isn’t sending more silver to the Castle of Night."

"Oh yes? Then why are they counting us?" The boy had grown up in the last few weeks. As if grief had wiped away the childishness on his face. At the tender age of ten, Ivo was now the man of the family — even if Fenoglio sometimes tried to lift the burden of that responsibility off his thin shoulders. The boy worked with the dyers, helped to pull wet fabric through the stinking vats day in, day out, and brought the smell home with him in the evening. But he earned more with that work than Fenoglio did as a scribe in the marketplace.

"They’re going to kill us all!" he went on unmoved, his eyes fixed on the guards, who were still pointing their spears at the waiting women. "And they’ll tear the Bluejay to pieces, like they did last week with the strolling player who threw rotten vegetables at the Governor. They fed the pieces to the hounds."

"No!" This was too much. Fenoglio tried to grab him by the ears, but the boy was too quick for him and ran away before he could get a hold. However, his sister stood there squeezing Fenoglio’s hand as tightly as if there were nothing else for her to cling to in this shattered world.

"They won’t catch him, will they?" Despina’s little voice was so timid that Fenoglio had to bend down to hear what she was saying. "The bear protects the Bluejay now as well as the Black Prince, doesn’t he?"

"Of course!" Fenoglio stroked her jet-black hair again. The sound of hoofbeats was coming up the street, echoing among the houses, with voices chatting as casually as if they scorned the silence of the women waiting there, while the sun sank behind the surrounding hills and turned the roofs of Ombra red. The noble lords were late coming back from the pleasures of the hunt today, their silver-embroidered garments spattered with blood, their bored hearts comfortably aroused by killing. Death could indeed be a great entertainer — when it was someone else’s death.

The women crowded closer together. The guards drove them back from the gates, but they stayed outside the castle walls: old women, young women, mothers, daughters, grandmothers. Minerva was one of those in front. She had grown thin in the last few weeks. Fenoglio’s story, that man-eating monster, was eating her alive. But Minerva had smiled when she heard that the Bluejay had gone to see some books in the castle and ridden away unscathed.