Inkdeath (16 page)

"Stomachache! Headache!" said Farid crossly. "Cheeseface has been overeating again, that’s all!"

"Three roast gold-mockers filled with chocolate, fairy-nuts roasted in honey, and half a suckling pig stuffed with chestnuts," said Jasper, counting it up. Then he ducked in alarm as he saw Jink by the kitchen door. The marten made Jasper nervous, even though Farid kept assuring him that while martens did like to chase glass men, they never, ever ate them.

There was only one maid still in the kitchen. Farid stopped in the doorway when he saw it was Brianna. That was all he needed. She was scrubbing the pots and pans from supper, her beautiful face gray with exhaustiOn. The working day began for Orpheus’s maids before sunrise and often didn’t end until the moon was high in the sky. Orpheus himself made a tour of inspection of the whole house every morning, looking for cobwebs and dust, a speck on one of the mirrors that hung everywhere, a tarnished silver spoon or a shirt that still showed a dirty mark after laundering. If he found anything he would deduct a sum from all the maids’ paltry wages on the spot.

And he almost always did find something.

"What do you want?" Brianna turned, wiping her wet hands on her apron.

"Orpheus has a stomachache," muttered Farid, without looking at her. "I’m to make him some tea.

Brianna went to one of the kitchen dressers and took an earthenware jar off the top shelf. Farid didn’t know which way to look as she poured hot water on the herbs. Her hair was the same color as her father’s, but wavy, and it shone in the candlelight like the red-gold rings that the Governor liked to wear on his thin fingers. The strolling players sang songs about Dustfinger’s daughter and her broken heart.

"Why are you staring like that?" She took a sudden step toward him. Her voice was so cutting that Farid instinctively flinched back. "Yes, I look like him, don’t I?"

It was as if, all through the silence of the last few weeks, she had been sharpening her words until they were knives that she could thrust through his heart.

"You don’t look in the least like him. I keep telling my mother so. You’re only some good-for-nothing layabout who playacted that he was my father’s son, keeping up the pretense so long that in the end my father thought he had to die for you!"

Every word a knife, and Farid felt them piercing his heart.

Brianna’s eyes were not like her father’s. She had her mother’s eyes, and they looked at Farid with the same hostility as Roxane's. He wanted to hit her to silence her beautiful mouth. But she resembled Dustfinger too much.

"You’re a demon, an evil spirit bringing nothing but bad luck." She handed him the ready-brewed tea. "There, take Orpheus that. And tell him his stomach would feel better if he didn’t eat so much."

Farid’s hands trembled as he took the mug.

"You don’t know anything about it!" he said hoarsely. "Nothing at all. I didn’t want him to bring me back. Being dead felt much better."

But Brianna only looked at him with her mother’s eyes. And her father’s face.

And Farid stumbled back up to Orpheus’s room with the hot tea while Jasper stroked his hair with his tiny glass hand, full of pity.

Meggie liked it in the robbers’ camp. Sometimes it almost seemed to Resa as though her daughter had always dreamed of living in shabby tents. She watched Battista making himself a new mask, asked the Strong Man to teach her how to speak to the larks, and accepted the wildflowers that his younger brother brought her with a smile.

It was good to see Meggie smiling again more often although Farid was still with Orpheus. But Resa missed the farm they had left behind. She missed the silence and seclusion, and the sense of being alone with Mo and Meggie after all the weeks when they had been apart. Weeks, months, years. . .

Sometimes, when Resa saw the two of them sitting by the fire With the robbers, she felt almost as if she were watching them at a game they had played all through the years when she hadn’t been with them. Come on, Mo, let’s play robbers.

The Black Prince had advised Mo not to go outside the camp for the time being, and for a few days he took that advice. But on the third night he disappeared into the forest once more, all alone, as if to go in search of himself. And on the fourth night he went out with the robbers again.

Battista had sung Resa the songs that were going around Ombra after Mo’s venture into the city. The Bluejay had flown away, said the songs, escaping on the back of the Milksop’s best horse. It was said that he had killed ten guards, imprisoned Sootbird in the vault, and stolen Balbulus’s finest books. "How much of it is true?"

she had asked Mo. He laughed. "I’m afraid I can’t be said to have flown I" he had whispered, caressing her belly in which their child was slowly growing. And then he had gone out with the Black Prince again. And she lay there night after night, listening to the songs Battista sang outside the tent, terrified for her husband.

The Black Prince had had two tents pitched for them right beside his own. They were patched together from old clothes that the robbers had dyed with oak bark so that they wouldn’t show up too much among the surrounding trees: one tent for Meggie, one for the Bluejay and his wife. The mats of dried moss on which they slept were damp, and when Mo went out at night Resa shared the tent with her daughter for warmth. One day the grass was so white with hoarfrost in the morning that you could see the glass men s tracks in it. "This will be a hard winter," said the Strong Man, not for the first time.

One could still find giants’ footsteps in the ravine where the camp lay. The rain of the last few weeks had turned them into ponds where gold-spotted frogs swam. The trees on the slopes of the ravine rose to the sky, almost as tall as the trees in the Wayless Wood. Their withering leaves covered the ground, which was Cool now in autumn, with gold and flaming red, and fairies’ nests hung among the branches like overripe fruit. If you looked south you could see a village in the distance, its walls showing pale as mushrooms between the trees, but it was such a poor village that even the Milksop’s greedy tax-gatherers didn’t bother to come this way. Wolves howled by night in the surrounding woods, pale gray owls like little ghosts flew over the shabby tents, and horned squirrels stole what food there was to steal among the campfires.

There were a good fifty men living in the camp, sometimes more. The youngest were the two boys saved from hanging by Snapper, and now they both went spying for the Prince: Doria, the Strong Man’s brother, who brought Meggie wildflowers, and his orphaned friend, Luc. Luc helped Gecko to tame his crows. Six women cooked and mended for the robbers, but none of them went out at night with the men. Resa drew portraits of almost all of them, boys, men, and women. Battista had found paper and chalk for her, where, he didn’t say. She wondered, as she portrayed every face, if the lines on them had indeed been drawn by Fenoglio’s words alone, or whether they weren’t perhaps, after all, living their own lives in this world independently of the old man.

The women did not even join the men when they sat together talking. Resa always sensed the disapproving looks when she and Meggie sat down quite naturally with Mo and the Black Prince. Sometimes she returned those glances, staring Snapper in the face, and Gecko, and all the others who tolerated women in the camp only to cook food and mend clothes. She cursed the nausea that kept coming back and prevented her from at least going with Mo when he and the Prince walked in the surrounding hills, looking for a place offering better shelter for the winter.

They had been in the camp that Meggie called the Camp of Lost Giants for five days and five nights when Doria and Luc returned from Ombra about midday with news.

It was obviously such bad news that Doria didn’t even tell it to his brother, but went straight to the Black Prince’s tent. A little later the Prince sent for Mo, and Battista assembled the men.

Doria glanced at his strong brother before stepping into the circle of robbers, as if drawing courage from him to tell his news. But his voice was clear and firm when he began to speak. He sounded so much older than he was.

"The Piper came out of the Wayless Wood yesterday," he began. "He took the road that approaches Ombra from the west, burning and looting as he went, letting it be known everywhere that the Milksop hasn’t sent enough taxes to the Castle of Night and he’s here to collect more."

"How many men-at-arms are there with him?" As usual, Snapper sounded brusque.

Resa didn’t like his voice. She didn’t like anything about him.

Doria seemed to like the man who had saved his life no better than she did, judging by the look he gave him. "A great many. More than us. Far more," he added. "I don’t know the exact figure. The peasants whose houses they burned didn’t have time to count them."

"Even if they had had time it wouldn’t have been much use, would it?" replied Snapper. "Everyone knows peasants can’t count."

Gecko laughed, and with him some of the robbers who were always to be found near Snapper: Swindler, Grabber, the Charcoal-Burner, Elfbane, and several more.

Doria’s lips tightened. He and the Strong Man were peasant-born, and Snapper knew it. His own father, apparently, had been a mercenary soldier.

"Tell them what else you heard, Doria." The Black Prince’s voice sounded weary as Resa had seldom heard it before.

The boy glanced at his brother once more. "They’re taking a head count of the children," he said. "The Piper is drawing up lists of all of them over six years old and no more than five feet tall."

A murmur rose among the robbers, and Resa saw Mo leaning over to the Prince to whisper something to him. How close to each other they seemed, and how naturally Mo sat there with the ragged robbers. As if he belonged to them as much as to her and Meggie. The Black Prince straightened up. His hair wasn’t long now, as it had been when Resa had first met him. Three days after Dustfinger’s death he had shaved his head, the custom in this world after the death of a friend. For on the third day, it was said, the souls of the dead entered the realm from which there was no return.

"We knew the Piper would be coming sometime," said the Black Prince. "The Adder could hardly have failed to notice that his brother-in-law was keeping most of the taxes he collects for himself. But as you’ve heard, the taxes aren’t the only reason why he’s coming. We all know only too well what they use children for in Argenta."

"What do they use them for?" Meggie’s voice sounded so clear among the voices of all the men. You couldn’t tell from the Sound of it that it had already changed this world several times by reading a few sentences.

"What for? The tunnels in the silver mines are narrow, Blueiay’s daughter," replied Snapper. "Be glad you’re too large to be any use down there yourself."

The mines. Resa’s hand went instinctively to the place where her unborn child was growing, and Mo glanced at her as if the same thought had struck him, too.

"Of course. The Adderhead has sent far too many children to the mines already. His peasants are beginning to resist. It seems the Piper has only just put down a revolt."

Battista’s voice sounded as weary as the Prince’s. There were too few of them to right all these wrongs. "The children die quickly down there," Battista went on. "It’s a marvel the Adder hasn’t thought of taking ours before. Children with no fathers, only defenseless, unarmed mothers."

"Then we’ll have to hide them!" Doria sounded as fearless as only a boy of fifteen can. "The way you hid the harvest!" Resa saw a smile appear on Meggie’s lips.

"Hide them, oh yes, of course!" Snapper laughed with derision. "A fabulous idea.

Gecko, tell this greenhorn how many children there are in Ombra alone. He’s a peasant’s son, you know; can’t count."

The Strong Man was rising to his feet, but Doria cast him a warning glance, and his brother sat down again. "I can pick my little brother up with one hand," the Strong Man often said, "but he’s a hundred times cleverer than me."

Gecko obviously had not the faintest notion how many children there were in Ombra, quite apart from the fact that he wasn’t too good at counting himself. "Well, there are a lot," he faltered, while the crow on his shoulder pecked at his hair, presumably hoping to find a few lice. "Flies and children that’s the only two things still in plentiful supply in Ombra."

No one laughed.

The Black Prince remained silent, and so did everyone else. If the Piper wanted those children, then he would take them.

A fire-elf settled on Resa’s arm. She shook it off and found herself longing for Elinor’s house so much that her heart hurt as if the elf had burned it. She longed for the kitchen, always full of the humming of the oversized fridge, for Mo’s workshop in the garden, and the armchair in the library where you could sit and visit strange worlds without getting lost in them.

"Perhaps it’s just bait!" said Battista, breaking the silence. "You know how the Piper likes to leave bait lying around—and he knows very well that we can’t simply let him take the children. Perhaps," he added, glancing at Mo, "perhaps he’s hoping to catch the Bluejay that way at last!"

Resa saw Meggie instinctively moving closer to Mo. But his face remained unmoved, as if the Bluejay were someone else entirely. "Violante’s already told me the Piper would soon be coming here," said Mo. "But she said nothing about children."

The Bluejay’s voice. . . the voice that had fooled the Adderhead and beguiled the fairies. It did nothing of the kind to Snapper. It merely reminded him that he had once sat where the Bluejay was sitting now — at the Black Prince’s side.

"You’ve been talking to Her Ugliness? Fancy that! So that’s what took you to Ombra Castle. The Bluejay in conversation with the Adder’s daughter." Snapper twisted his coarse face into a grimace. "Of course she didn’t tell you anything about the children! Why would she? Quite apart from the fact that we can assume she doesn’t even know about it! Her Ugliness has no more Say than a kitchen maid about what goes on at the castle. That’s how it always was, and that’s how it always will be."