“Please! Do please at least try!” Farid’s voice sounded almost pleading. “Suppose Orpheus has already read Basta back after all? Dustfinger has to learn that they’re in league with each other.
He thinks he’s safe from Basta in his own world!”
Meggie was still staring at the words written by Orpheus.
They sounded beautiful, enchantingly beautiful. Meggie felt her tongue longing to taste them.
She very nearly began reading them aloud. Horrified, she clapped her hand to her mouth.
Orpheus.
Of course she knew the name, and the story that surrounded it like a tangle of flowers and thorns. Elinor had given her a book with a beautiful poem about him in it.
Orpheus with his lute made trees And the mountaintops that freeze, Bow themselves when he did sing: To his music plants and flowers Ever sprung; as sun and showers There had made a lasting spring. Everything that heard him play, Even the billows of the sea, Hung their heads, and then lay by. In sweet music is such art, Killing care and grief of heart Fall asleep, or hearing die.
She looked at Farid with a question in her eyes. “How old is he?” “Orpheus?” Farid shrugged.
“Twenty, twenty-five, how should I know? Difficult to say. His face is like a child’s.”
So young. But the words on the paper didn’t sound like a young man’s words. They sounded as if they knew a great many things.
“Please!” Farid was still looking at her. “You will try, won’t you?” Meggie looked out of the window. She couldn’t help thinking of the empty fairies’ nests, the glass men who had vanished, and something Dustfinger had said to her long ago: Sometimes, when you went to the well to wash early in the morning, those tiny fairies would be whirring above the water, hardly bigger than the dragonflies you have here, and blue as violets .. they weren’t very friendly, but by night they shone like glow-worms.
“All right,” she said, and it was almost as if someone else were answering Farid. “All right, I’ll try.
But your feet must get better first. The world my mother talks about isn’t a place where you’d want to be lame.”
“Nonsense, my feet are fine!” Farid walked up and down on the soft carpet as if to prove it. “You can try right away as far as I’m concerned!”
But Meggie shook her head. “No,” she said firmly. “I must learn to read it fluently first. That’s not going to be easy, given his handwriting – and it’s smeared in several places, so I’ll probably copy it out. This man Orpheus wasn’t lying. He did write something about you, but I’m not quite sure that it will do. And if I try it,” she went on, trying to sound very casual, “if I try it, then I want to come with you.”
“What?”
“Yes, why not?” Meggie couldn’t keep her voice from showing how hurt she felt by his horrified look.
Farid did not reply.
Didn’t he understand that she wanted to see it for herself? She wanted to see everything that Dustfinger and her mother had told her about, Dustfinger in a voice soft with longing: the fairies swarming above the grass, trees so high that you thought they would catch the clouds in their branches, the Wayless Wood, the strolling players, the Laughing Prince’s castle, the silver towers of the Castle of Night, the Ombra market, the fire that danced for him, the whispering pool where the water-nymphs’ faces looked up at you . .
No, Farid didn’t understand. He had probably never felt that yearning for a completely different world, any more than he felt the homesickness that had broken Dustfinger’s heart. Farid wanted just one thing: He wanted to find Dustfinger, warn him of Basta’s knife, and be back with him again. He was Dustfinger’s shadow. That was the part he wanted to play, never mind what story they were in.
“Forget it! You can’t come, too.” Without looking at Meggie he limped back to the chair she had given him, sat down, and pulled off the bandages that Resa had so carefully put on his toes.
“People can’t read themselves into a book. Even Orpheus can’t! He told Dustfinger so himself: He’s tried it several times, he said, and it just won’t work.”
“Oh no?” Meggie tried to sound more sure of herself than she felt. “You said yourself that I read better than he does. So perhaps I can make it work!” Even if I can’t write as well as he does, she added to herself.
Farid cast her an uneasy glance as he put the bandages in his trouser pocket. “But it’s dangerous there,” he said. “Particularly for a g –” He didn’t finish the word. Instead he began inspecting his bloodstained toes intently.
Idiot. Meggie’s anger tasted bitter on her tongue. Who did he think she was? She probably knew more about the world she’d be reading him into than he did. “I know it’s dangerous,” she said, piqued. “Either I go with you or I don’t read aloud from this sheet of paper. You must make up your mind. And now you’d better leave me alone. I have to think.”
Farid cast a final glance at the piece of paper with Orpheus’s words on it before he went to the door. “When will you try?” he asked before he went back out into the corridor. “Tomorrow?”
“Perhaps,” was all Meggie would say.
Then she closed the door behind him and was alone with the words that Orpheus had written.
Chapter 6 – The Inn of the Strolling Players
“Thank you,” said Lucy, opening the box and taking out a match. “WATCH, EVERYONE!”
she cried, her voice echoing round the White Flats. “WATCH! THIS IS GOODBYE TO BAD
MEMORIES!”
– Philip Ridley, Dakota of the White Flats
It took Dustfinger two whole days to get through the Wayless Wood. He met very few people on the way: a few charcoal burners blackened with soot, a ragged poacher with two rabbits slung over his shoulder and hunger written large on his face, and a group of the prince’s game wardens, armed to the teeth, probably on the trail of some poor devil who had shot a deer to feed his children. None of them saw Dustfinger. He knew how to pass unseen, and only on the second night, when he heard a pack of wolves howling in the nearby hills, did he dare to summon fire. Fire. So different in this world and the other one. How good it would be to hear its crackling voice again at last, and to be able to answer. Dustfinger collected some of the dry wood lying around among the trees, with wax-flowers and thyme rambling over it. He carefully unwrapped the fire-elves’ stolen honey from the leaves that kept it moist and supple and put a tiny morsel in his mouth. How scared he had been the first time he tasted the honey! Scared that his precious booty would burn his tongue forever and he would lose his voice. But that fear had proved groundless. The honey did burn your mouth like red-hot coals, but the pain passed away
– and if you bore it long enough, then afterward you could speak to fire, even with a mere human tongue. The effect of a tiny piece lasted for five or six months, sometimes almost a year. Just a soft whisper in the language of the flames, a snap of your fingers, and sparks would leap crackling from dry wood, damp wood, even stone.
At first the fire licked up from the twigs more reluctantly than it had in the old days – as if it couldn’t really believe he was back. But then it began to whisper and welcomed him more and more exuberantly, until he had to rein in those wildly leaping flames, imitating the sound of their crackling until the fire sank lower, like a wildcat that will crouch down and purr if you stroke its fur carefully enough.
