How sweet revenge would taste when the Bluejay had cured the book and his own rotting flesh! Dream of your revenge, Silver Prince, thought Fenoglio as he wrote down the Adderhead’s dark thoughts. Think of nothing but your revenge and forget that you’ve never trusted your daughter!
"Well, fancy that, he’s writing!" The words were only a whisper, but the Adderhead
‘s face, so clear a moment ago that Fenoglio could have touched it, blurred and changed into the face of Signora Loredan. Meggie was with her. Why wasn’t the child asleep? It didn’t surprise Fenoglio in the least that her deranged great-aunt clambered around the branches by night, very likely in pursuit of every shining moth, but Meggie she was tired to death after insisting on climbing the trunk with Doria instead of being pulled up like the children.
"Yes, he’s writing," he growled. "And he’d probably have finished long ago if people didn’t keep interrupting him the whole time."
"What do you mean, the whole time?" replied Loredan. She sounded aggressive again, and she looked so silly in the three dresses she was wearing, one on top of the other. It was amazing she could find so many in her considerable size. Luckily, Battista had been able to make jackets for the children out of the monstrous garment she’d been wearing when she had stumbled into Fenoglio’s world.
"Elinor —" Meggie tried to interrupt her, but no one could ever stop that busy tongue, as Fenoglio had discovered by now.
"The whole time, he says!" Now she was letting wax from her candle drop onto the paper, too! "Is he hard at work day and night making sure the children don’t fall out of these damn nests, is he climbing up and down this wretched tree to bring up something to eat? Is he repairing the walls so that the wind doesn’t kill us all, is he keeping watch? No, but people are interrupting him the whole time."
Splash. Another drop of candle wax. And what a nerve she had, leaning over to look at the words he’d lust written. "This really doesn’t sound bad," she informed Meggie, as if Fenoglio had dissolved into the cold forest air before their eyes. "No, not at all bad."
It was beyond belief.
Now Rosenquartz, too, was bending over his lines, wrinkling up his glassy forehead so much that it looked as if water were tracing folds there.
"Oh, and do you, by any chance, want to deliver your opinion as well before I go on writing?" Fenoglio asked him sharply. "Anything in particular you fancy? You want me to put a heroic glass man into the story, or a fat woman who always knows best and will drive the Adderhead to such distraction that he’ll hand himself over to the White Women of his own free will? That would be one solution, I suppose."
Meggie came up to him and put her hand on his shoulder. "You don’t know how much longer you’ll need, do you?" Her voice sounded so desolate. Not at all like a voice that had already changed this world several times.
"It won’t be long now." Fenoglio took great care to sound confident. "The words are coming. They--"
He fell silent.
From outside came the hoarse, long-drawn-out cry of a falcon. Again and again. The guards’ alarm signal. Oh no.
The nest into which Fenoglio had settled hung over a branch broader than any street in Ombra, but once again he felt dizzy when he climbed down the ladder Doria had made him so that he wouldn’t have to let himself down on a rope. On the Black Prince’s orders, ropes woven by the robbers from bark and climbing plants had been stretched everywhere. In addition, the tree itself had so many air-roots and branches hanging down that there was always something to hold on to. Yet none of that could make you forget the deep void yawning under the slippery boughs. The fact is, Fenoglio, you’re no squirrel, he told himself as he clung to a few woody shoots and peered down. But for an old man, you’re not doing too badly up here.
"They’re hauling in the ropes!" Signora Loredan, unlike him, was surprisingly agile as she moved through the air along the wooden paths.
"I can see that for myself!" growled Fenoglio. They were hauling up all the ropes that went down to the foot of the tree. That boded no good.
Farid came climbing down to them. He often joined the guards posted by the Black Prince in the top branches of the tree. Heavens, how could any human being climb like that? The boy was almost as good at it as his marten.
"Torches! They’re coming closer!" he said breathlessly. ‘And do you hear the dog barking?" He looked accusingly at Fenoglio. "Didn’t you say no one knew about this tree? Didn’t you claim it had been forgotten, and the nests with it?"