So Elinor had given her the bookcase to hold more of the books she loved. It stood beside Meggie’s bed, and it had glass doors, and carvings that twined over the dark wood, making it look as if it hadn’t forgotten that it was once alive. And the shelves behind the glass doors were well filled, for by now Resa and Elinor, as well as Mo, gave Meggie books, and even Darius brought her a new one now and then. But her old friends, the books Meggie had already owned before they had moved in with Elinor, still lived in the box, and when she opened the heavy lid it was almost as if half-forgotten voices met her ears and familiar faces were looking at her. How well worn they all were. . “Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said when, on Meggie’s last birthday, they were looking at all her dear old books again. “As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells .. and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower . . both strange and familiar.”
Slightly younger, yes. Meggie picked up one of the books lying on top and leafed through it.
She had read it at least a dozen times. Ah, here was the scene she had liked best when she was eight, and there was the one she had marked with a red pencil when she was ten because she thought it was so beautiful. She ran her finger down the wobbly line. There’d been no Resa in her life then, no Elinor, no Darius, only Mo .. no longing to see blue fairies, no memories of a scarred face, a marten with little horns, and a boy who always went barefoot, no memory of Basta and his knife. A different Meggie had read that book, very different .. and there she would stay between its pages, preserved as a memento.
With a sigh, Meggie closed the book again and put it back with the others. She could hear her mother pacing up and down next door. Did she, like Meggie, keep thinking of the threat that Basta had shouted after Farid? I ought to go to her, thought Meggie. Perhaps our fear won’t be so bad if we’re together. But just as she was getting up Resa’s footsteps died away, and it was quiet in the room next door, quiet as sleep. Maybe sleep wasn’t a bad idea. Mo certainly wouldn’t arrive any sooner just because she was awake and waiting for him. . Oh, if only she could at least have called him, but he was always forgetting to’ switch his cell phone on.
Meggie closed the lid of her book box softly, as if the sound might wake Resa again, and blew out the candles that she lit every evening although Elinor was always telling her not to. As she was taking her T-shirt off over her head, she heard a knock at her door, a very quiet knock. She opened the door, expecting to see her mother outside because she couldn’t sleep after all, but it was Farid. He went scarlet in the face when he saw that she was wearing only her underclothes.
He stammered an apology and before Meggie could say anything limped away again on his lavishly bandaged feet. She almost forgot to put the T-shirt back on before going after him.
“What’s the matter?” she whispered anxiously as she beckoned him back into her room. “Did you hear anything downstairs?”
But Farid shook his head. He was holding the piece of paper in his hand: Dustfinger’s return ticket, as Elinor had tartly described it. Hesitantly, he followed Meggie into her room, and looked around it like someone who doesn’t feel comfortable in enclosed spaces. Ever since he had disappeared with Dustfinger, leaving no trace behind, he had probably spent most of his days and nights in the open air.
“I’m sorry,” Farid stammered, staring at his toes. Two of Resa’s bandages were already peeling off. “I know it’s late, but –” And for the first time he looked Meggie in the eye, turning red again as he did so. “But Orpheus says he didn’t read it all,” he went on, his voice hesitating. “He just left out the words that would have taken me into the book, too. He did it on purpose, but I have to warn Dustfinger, so .. ”
“So, what?” Meggie pushed the chair from her desk over to him and sat down on the windowsill herself. Farid sat down as hesitantly as he had entered her room.
“You must get me there, too. Please!” He held the dirty piece of paper out to her again, with such a pleading expression in his black eyes that Meggie didn’t know where to look. How long and thick his eyelashes were! Hers were nowhere near as beautiful. “Please! I know you can do it!”
he stammered. “I remember that night in Capricorn’s village .. I remember all about it, and you had only a single sheet of paper then!”