Sometime, Mortimer, he thought, the nights will overshadow the days. Nights of blood. Peaceful days — days when Meggie showed him everything she had only been able to tell him about in the tower of the Castle of Night. Nymphs with scaly skins dwelling in blossom-covered pools, footprints of giants long gone, flowers that whispered when you touched them, trees growing right up to the sky, moss-women who appeared between their roots as if they had peeled away from the bark. . .
Peaceful days. Nights of blood.
They did what they could to cover up the traces of the fight and left, taking the horses with them. There was a note of fear in the stammered thanks of the village women as they left. They’d seen with their own eyes that their allies knew as much about killing as their enemies did.
Snapper rode back to the robbers’ camp with the horses and most of the men. The camp was moved almost daily. At present it was in a dark ravine that became hardly any lighter even by day. They would send for Roxane to tend the wounded, while Mo went back to where Resa and Meggie were sleeping at the deserted farm. The Prince had found it for them, because Resa didn’t want to stay in the robbers’ camp, and Meggie, too, longed for a house to live in after all those homeless weeks.
The Black Prince accompanied Mo, as he so often did. "Of course. The Bluejay never travels without a retinue," mocked Snapper before they parted company. Mo, whose heart was still racing from all the killing, could have dragged him off his horse for that, but the Prince restrained him.
They traveled on foot. It meant a painfully long walk for their tired limbs, but their footprints were harder to follow than a trail left by horses’ hooves. And the farm must be kept safe, for everything Mo loved was waiting there.
The house, and the dilapidated farm buildings, always appeared among the trees as unexpectedly as if someone had dropped and lost them there. There was no trace now of the fields where food for the farm had once been grown, and the path that used to lead to the nearest village had disappeared long ago. The forest had swallowed up everything. Here it was no longer called the Wayless Wood, the name it bore south of Ombra. Here the forest had as many names as there were local villages: the Fairy Forest, the Dark Wood, the Moss-Women’s Wood. If the Strong Man was to be believed, the place where the Bluejay’s hideout lay was called Larkwood.
"Larkwood? Nonsense" was Meggie’s response to that. "The Strong Man calls everything after birds! He even gives birds’ names to the fairies, although they can’t stand the birds. Battista says it’s called the Wood of Lights, which suits it much better. Did you ever see so many glowworms and fire-elves in a wood? And all those fireflies that sit in the treetops at night..
Whatever the name of the wood, Mo was always captivated afresh by the peace and quiet under its trees. It reminded him that this, too, was a part of the Inkworld, as much a part of it as the Milksop’s soldiers. The first of the morning sun was filtering through the branches, dappling the trees with pale gold, and the fairies were dancing as if intoxicated in the cold autumn sunlight. They fluttered into the bear’s furry face until he hit out at them, and the Prince held one of the little creatures to his ear, smiling as if he could understand what its sharp, shrill little voice was saying. Had the other world been like this? Why could he hardly remember? Had life there been the same beguiling mixture of darkness and light, cruelty and beauty. . . so much beauty that it sometimes almost made you drunk?
The Black Prince had the farm guarded by his men day and night.
Gecko was one of the guards today. As Mo and the Prince came through the trees, he emerged from the ruined pigsty, a morose expression on his face. Gecko was always on the move. He was a small man whose slightly protuberant eyes had earned him his name. One of his tame crows was perched on his shoulder. The Prince used the crows as messengers, but most of the time they stole for Gecko from the markets; the amount they could carry away in their beaks always amazed Mo.
When he saw the blood on their clothes, Gecko turned pale. But the shadows of the Inkworld had obviously left the isolated farm untouched again last night.