Day and night, Balbulus was painting the most wonderful pictures to illustrate stories about that lost life. More than a dozen scribes supplied him with the handwritten pages. “My husband still won’t enter the library,” Violante had commented bitterly, last time Fenoglio saw her. “But he fills all the reading desks with books about himself.”
Unfortunately, it was only too clear that the words from which Fenoglio and Meggie had made him did not satisfy Cosimo. There were simply not enough of them. Everything he heard about himself seemed to have to do with another man. Perhaps that was why he loved Dustfinger’s daughter so much: because she had nothing to do with the man he seemed to have been before his death. Fenoglio had to keep writing new and ardent love songs to Brianna for him. He generally stole them from other poets; he had always had a good memory for verse, and Meggie wasn’t here now to catch him in the act of theft. Tears always came to Brianna’s eyes when one of the minstrels, who were now welcomed to the castle again, sang her one of those songs.
“Fenoglio!” Cosimo reined in his horse, and Fenoglio bent his head in the most natural way in the world, as he did only for the young prince. “Where are you going, poet? Everything’s ready for us to march out!” He sounded as impatient as his horse, which was prancing back and forth, and threatened to infect Fenoglio’s horse with its restlessness. “Or would you rather stay here and sharpen your pens for all the songs you’ll have to write about my victory?”
March out? Ready?
Fenoglio looked around in confusion, but Cosimo laughed. “Do you think I’d assemble the troops here in the castle? There are far too many for that. No, they’re encamped down by the river. I’m only waiting for one more company of mercenaries recruited for me in the north. They may arrive tomorrow!”
As soon as that? Fenoglio cast Brianna a quick glance. So that was why she looked so sad.
“Please, Your Grace!” Fenoglio could not conceal the anxiety in his voice. “It’s much too soon!
Wait a little longer!”
But Cosimo only smiled. “The moon is red, poet! The soothsayers think that’s a good sign. A sign that we mustn’t miss the moment, or all may come to grief.”
What nonsense! Fenoglio bowed his head to keep Cosimo from seeing the annoyance in his face.
Cosimo knew, anyway, that his love of soothsayers and fortune-tellers irritated Fenoglio, who thought them all a set of avaricious frauds. “Let me say it once again, Your Grace!” He had repeated this warning so often that it was beginning to sound flat. “The only thing that will bring you bad luck is setting out too soon!”
But Cosimo merely shook his head indulgently.
“You’re an old man, Fenoglio,” he said. “Your blood flows slowly, but I’m young! What should I wait for? For the Adderhead to recruit mercenaries, too, and barricade himself in the Castle of Night?”
He probably did that long ago, thought Fenoglio. And that’s why you must wait for the words, my words, and for Meggie to read them, the way she read you here. Wait for her voice! “Just one or two weeks more, Your Grace!” he said urgently. “Your peasants must bring in their harvest. What else will they have to live on in winter?”
But Cosimo didn’t want to hear about such things. “That truly is old man’s talk!” he said angrily.
“Where are your fiery words now? They’ll live on the Adderhead’s stores of provisions, on the good fortune of our victory, on the silver from the Castle of Night. I’ll have it distributed in the villages!”
They can’t eat silver, Your Grace, thought Fenoglio, but he did not say so aloud. Instead, he looked up at the sky. Dear God, how high the moon had risen already! But Cosimo still had something on his mind.
“There’s a question I’ve been meaning to ask you for some time,” he said, just as Fenoglio was about to take his leave with some stammered excuse. “You’re so friendly with the strolling players. Everyone’s talking about that fire-eater, the one they say can talk to the flames. . ”
Out of the corner of his eye, Fenoglio saw Brianna bend her head.
“You mean Dustfinger?”
“Yes, that’s his name. I know he’s Brianna’s father,” said Cosimo, casting her a loving glance, “but she won’t talk about him. And she says she doesn’t know where he is now. But perhaps you do?”
Cosimo patted his horse’s neck. His face seemed to burn with beauty.
“Why? What do you want of him?”
“Isn’t that obvious? He can talk to fire! They say he can make the flames grow to a great height without burning him.” Fenoglio understood even before Cosimo explained. “You want Dustfinger for your war.” He couldn’t help it, he laughed aloud. “What’s so funny about that?” Cosimo frowned.
Dustfinger the fire-dancer as a weapon. Fenoglio shook his head. “Oh no,” he said. “I know Dustfinger very well” – he saw Brianna give him a look of surprise as he said so – “and he is many things but certainly not a warrior. He’d laugh in your face.”
“He had better not.” There was no mistaking the anger in Gosimo’s voice. But Brianna was looking at Fenoglio as if she had a thousand questions on the tip of her tongue. Well, this was no time for them! “Your Highness,” he said hastily, “please excuse me now! One of Minerva’s children is ill, and I promised to get a few herbs from Brianna’s mother for her.”
“Oh, I see. Of course. Yes, of course, ride on, and we’ll talk later.” Cosimo gathered up his reins again. “If the child doesn’t improve let me know, and I’ll send a physician.”
“Thank you,” said Fenoglio, but before he finally went on his way there was one question he himself had to ask. “I’ve heard your wife isn’t well, either?” Balbulus, who at present was the only visitor allowed to see Violante, had told him so.
“Oh, she’s just in a temper.” Cosimo took Brianna’s hand as if to comfort her for the fact that they were talking about his wife. “Violante loses her temper easily. She gets it from her father. She simply will not understand why I won’t let her leave the castle, yet it’s obvious that her father’s informers are everywhere, and who would they try to pump for information first? Violante and Jacopo.” It was hard not to believe every word that those beautiful lips uttered, particularly when they spoke with so much genuine conviction.
“Well, I expect you’re right! But please don’t forget that your wife hates her father.”
“You can hate someone and obey him all the same. Isn’t that so?” Cosimo looked at Fenoglio with that naked expression in his eyes, like the eyes of a very young baby.
“Yes, yes, probably,” he replied uncomfortably. Every time Cosimo looked at him like that, Fenoglio felt as if he had found an empty page in a book, a moth hole in the finely woven carpet of words.
“Your Highness!” he said, bowing his head again, and he finally, if not very elegantly, got his horse to trot out of the gateway.
Brianna had given him a good description of the way to her mother’s farmhouse. He had asked her about it after Roxane’s visit, apparently in all innocence, saying that he was plagued by aching bones. Dustfinger’s daughter was a strange child. She wanted nothing to do with her father and obviously not much with her mother, either. Luckily, she had warned him about the goose, so he was holding the horse’s reins firmly when the cackling bird came toward him.
