Perhaps I should ash Doria if he can really build me wings, Meggie said to herself, and suddenly she thought of the magpie that had frightened her mother so much.
Why hadn’t Resa taken her along? Because she thinks I’m still a small child, she told herself.
"Meggie?" One of the children slipped her cold fingers into Meggie’s hand. Elinor had nicknamed the little girl Fire-Elf because of her hair, which was as red as if Dustfinger had sprinkled it with sparks. How old was she? Four? Five? Many of the children didn’t know their own ages.
"Beppe says there are birds that eat children up there."
"Nonsense. Anyway, how would he know? You think Beppe’s been up there already?" Fire-Elf smiled in relief and looked sternly at Beppe. But her face grew grave again as, her fingers still clutching Meggie’s hand firmly, she listened with the others to Farid reporting to the Black Prince.
"The nests are so large that I should think five or even six of us can sleep in each of them!" He sounded so excited. "Many of the bridges are crumbling, but there are enough creepers and timber up there to repair them."
"We have hardly any tools," Doria pointed out. "We must make do with our knives and swords."
The robbers looked in some alarm at their swordbelts.
"The crown of the tree is dense enough to give us good shelter from the wind, but there are gaps in it in some places," Farid went on. "I guess they were lookout points for the guards. We’ll have to pad and line the nests, as the fairies do."
"Maybe some of us had better stay down here," Elfbane put in, "We have to go hunting and—"
"Oh, you can hunt up there!" Farid interrupted. "There are flocks of birds, and I’ve seen large squirrels, and creatures like rabbits with fingers that cling to the branches.
Though there are wild cats up there as well. . ."
The women looked at one another, frightened.
" . . . and bats, and long-tailed brownies," Farid went on.
"There’s a whole world up there! It has caves in it, and a lot of the branches are so wide you can easily walk along them. Flowers and mushrooms grow there! It’s fabulous. Wonderful!"
Fenoglio was smiling all over his wrinkled face, like a king hearing praise of his domain, and even Elinor looked wistfully up the rough trunk for the first time. Some of the children wanted to climb the tree at once, but the women stopped them. "Go and collect leaves," they told them, "and moss and birds’ feathers —anything you can find to make soft linings."
The sun was already low as the robbers began stretching ropes, weaving nets, and building wooden platforms to be hauled up the tall trunk. Battista went back with some of the men to wipe out their tracks, and Meggie saw the Black Prince looking at his bear, at a loss. How was he going to get the bear up the tree? What would happen to the packhorses? So many questions, and he still wasn’t at all sure that they had outrun the Milksop.
Meggie was just helping Minerva to tie creepers together to make a net for provisions when Fenoglio drew her aside, a conspiratorial expression on his face.
"You won’t believe this!" he murmured to her when they were standing among the mighty roots of the tree. "And don’t you dare tell Loredan about it. She’d only accuse me of having delusions of grandeur again!"
"What don’t you want me to tell her?" Meggie looked at him blankly.
"Well, that boy, you know who I mean — the one who keeps looking at you and brings you flowers and turns Farid green with jealousy. Doria. . . ."
Above them the crown of the tree was bathed with red in the light of the setting sun, and the nests hung among its branches like black fruits.
Feeling embarrassed, Meggie turned her face away. "What about him?"
Fenoglio looked around as if afraid that Elinor might appear behind him the next moment. "Meggie," he said, lowering his voice,. "I think I made him up, too, just like Dustfinger and the Black Prince!"
"Oh, nonsense, what are you talking about?" Meggie whispered back. "Doria probably wasn’t even born when you were writing your book!"
"Yes, yes, I know! That’s the confusing part of it! All these children," said Fenoglio, with a sweeping gesture toward the children searching busily for moss and feathers under the trees, my story lays them like eggs, entirely without my aid. It’s a very fertile story! But that boy Fenoglio lowered his voice as if Doria could hear him, although he was far away with Battista, kneeling on the forest floor and turning knives into machetes and saws. "Meggie, this is where it gets so crazy: I wrote a story about him, but the character with his name was grown-up! And even stranger
— the story was never published! Presumably it’s still lying in a drawer in my old desk, or my grandchildren have made it into balls of paper to throw for the cats!"
"But that’s impossible. He can’t be the same person." Meggie unobtrusively glanced at Doria. She liked the sight of him, she liked it very much. "What’s this story about?" she asked. "What does this grown-up Doria do?"
"He builds castles and city walls. He even invents a flying machine, a clock to measure time, and"— here Fenoglio looked at Meggie — "and a printing machine for a famous bookbinder." "Really?" Meggie suddenly felt warm, the way she used to when Mo had told her a particularly good story. For a famous bookbinder. Just for a moment she forgot all about Doria and thought only of her father. Perhaps Fenoglio had already written the words that would keep Mo alive, perhaps he’d written them long ago. Oh, please, she begged Fenoglio’s story, let the bookbinder be Mo!
"Doria the Enchanter, I called him," Fenoglio whispered. "But it’s with his hands that he works enchantment, like your father. And now, listen to this: It gets even better!
This Doria has a wife who is said to come from a distant land, and she often gives him his ideas in the first place. Isn’t that strange?"
"What’s so strange about it?" Meggie felt herself blushing, and just at that moment Farid looked at her. "Did you give her a name?" she asked Fenoglio.
Awkwardly, the old man cleared his throat. "Well, you know I sometimes neglect my women characters a bit, and I couldn’t find the right name, so I just called her his wife."
Meggie had to smile. Yes, that was very like Fenoglio. "Doria has two stiff fingers on his left hand," she pointed out. "So how could he do all the things you say?"
"But I wrote him those stiff fingers!" cried Fenoglio out loud, forgetting to be quiet.
Doria raised his head and glanced at them, but luckily the Black Prince went up to him just at that moment.
"His father broke them," Fenoglio went on more quietly. "When he was drunk. He was going to hit Doria’s sister, and Doria tried to protect her."
Meggie leaned back against the tree trunk. She felt as if she could hear its heart beating behind her, a gigantic heart in the wood. It was all a dream, just a dream.
"What was this sister’s name?" she asked. "Susa?"
"How should I know?" retorted Fenoglio. "I can’t remember everything. Maybe she didn’t have a name any more than his wife did. Anyway, it will just make him all the more famous later when people find out he can build such marvels in spite of his stiff fingers!"