Dustfinger did not reply to that. He said nothing about Fenoglio, he did not say they were all part of a story that an old man had written. In his place Farid wouldn't have said so, either. The Black Prince probably wouldn't believe there were words that could decide even his own fate, words like invisible paths from which you could not turn aside. The bear grunted in his sleep, and Roxane turned her head restlessly. She was holding Dustfinger's hand as if she wanted to take him into her dreams.
"You told the boy you'd go back," said the Prince. "You can come with us."
"Are you going to the Castle of Night? Why? Do you plan to storm it with these few men? Or tell the Adderhead that he's caught the wrong man? With this on your nose?" Dustfinger put his hand among the blankets lying on the floor and brought out a bird mask. Bluejay feathers sewn to cracked leather. He put the mask on his scarred face.
"Many of us have worn that mask before," said the Prince. "And now they're going to hang another innocent man for the deeds we've done. I can't allow that! This time it's a bookbinder. Last time, after we attacked one of the silver transports, they hanged a charcoal-burner just because he had a scar on his arm. His wife is probably still mourning him."
"It's not just the deeds you did. Fenoglio invented most of them!" Dustfinger sounded irritated. "Damn it, Prince, you can't save Silvertongue. You'll only die, too. Or do you seriously think the Adderhead will let him go just because you've turned yourself in?"
"No, I'm not such a fool as that. But I must do something." The Prince put his hand in his bear's mouth, as he so often did, and as always that hand, as if miraculously, came back intact from between the bear's teeth.
"Yes, yes, very well." Dustfinger sighed. "You and your unwritten rules. You don't even know Silvertongue! How can you want to die for someone you don't know?"
"Who would you die for?" the Prince asked in return.
Farid saw Dustfinger look at Roxane's sleeping face – and then turn to him. He quickly closed his eyes.
"You'd die for Roxane," he heard the Prince say.
"Perhaps," said Dustfinger, and through his lashes Farid saw him trace Roxane's dark brows with his finger. "Or perhaps not. Do you have many informers in the Castle of Night?"
"Yes, indeed. Kitchen maids, stable boys, even a few of the guards – although they come very expensive – and most useful of all, a falconer who sends me a message now and then by one of his clever birds. I shall hear at once when they've fixed the day of the execution. You know the Adderhead doesn't have such things done in a marketplace or in front of the common people in the castle courtyard anymore, not since you spoiled my punishment so thoroughly for him. He was never a friend of such spectacles, anyway. An execution is a serious matter to the Adderhead. The gallows outside the castle will do for a poor minstrel, there'll be no trouble about that, but the Bluejay will die inside the gate."
"Yes. If his daughter's voice doesn't open that gate for him," replied Dustfinger. "Her voice and a book – a book full of immortality."
Farid heard the Black Prince laugh. "That sounds almost like some new song by the Inkweaver!"
"Yes," replied Dustfinger in a husky voice. "It sounds just like him, doesn't it?"
64. ALL IS LOST
'Tis war! 'Tis war! God's angel stand by ye
And guide your hand.
'Tis war, alas, and guiltless I would be
Of what betides this land.
Matthias Claudius, "War Song"
After a few days' rest, Dustfinger's leg was much better, and Farid was just telling the two martens how they'd soon all be stealing into the Castle of Night to rescue Meggie and her parents when bad news came to the Badger's Earth. One of the men who had been watching the road to Ombra brought it. His face was covered with blood and he could hardly keep on his feet.
"They're killing them!" he kept stammering over and over again. "They're killing them all."
"Where?" asked the Prince. "Where exactly?"
"Not two hours from here," the messenger managed to say. "Keep going north."
The Prince left ten men at the Badger's Earth. Roxane tried to persuade Dustfinger to stay, too. "You must spare your leg, or it will never heal," she said. But he would not listen to her, so she, too, came on the fast, silent march through the forest.
They heard the sound of battle long before they could see anything. Screams reached Farid's ears, cries of pain, and the whinnying of horses, shrill with fear, A moment came when the Prince signaled to them to go more slowly. A few more paces, bending low, and the ground in front of them dropped steeply to the road that ended, many miles farther on, at the gates of Ombra. Dustfinger made Farid and Roxane get down on the ground, although no one was looking their way. Hundreds of men were fighting among the trees down below, but there were no robbers among them. Robbers do not wear shirts of chain mail, breastplates, and helmets decked with peacock feathers, they seldom have horses, and never coats of arms embroidered on silken surcoats.
Dustfinger held Roxane close when she began to sob. The sun was sinking behind the hills as the Adderhead's soldiers cut down Cosimo's men one by one. It looked as if the battle had been raging for a long time; the road was covered with dead bodies lying side by side. Only a small troop was still on horseback amid all this death. Cosimo himself was among them, his beautiful face distorted by rage and fear. For a moment it looked almost as if those few mounted men would be able to carve themselves a breach in the enemy ranks, but then Firefox came among them with a company of men gleaming like deadly beetles in their armor. They mowed down Cosimo and his retinue like dry grass as the sun sank right behind the hills, as red as if all the blood that had been shed was reflected in the sky. Firefox himself struck Cosimo from his horse, and Dustfinger buried his face in Roxane's hair, as if he were tired of seeing Death at work. But Farid did not turn his head away. His face unmoving, he looked at the slaughter and thought of Meggie – Meggie, who perhaps still believed that a little ink could cure anything in this world. Would she believe it if her eyes saw what his were seeing now?
Few of Cosimo's men survived their prince. Barely a dozen fled into the trees. No one went to the trouble of pursuing them. The Adderhead's soldiers broke into cries of triumph and began plundering the corpses like a flock of vultures in human form. They did not get Cosimo's body, however. Firefox himself drove his soldiers off and had that beautiful corpse loaded onto a horse and taken away.
"Why are they doing that?" asked Farid.
"Why? Because his corpse is the proof that he really is dead this time," said Dustfinger bitterly.
"Yes, he is indeed," whispered the Black Prince. "I suppose you think yourself immortal if you've come back from the dead once. But he wasn't, any more than his men, and now almost all the people of Lombrica will be widows and orphans."
It was many hours before the Adderhead's soldiers finally moved away, laden with what they could rob from the dead. Darkness was coming on again when silence fell at last among the trees, the silence that is felt only in the presence of Death.
Roxane was the first to find a way down the slope. She was no longer weeping. Her face was fixed and rigid, but whether with anger or pain Farid could not have said. The robbers hesitated before following her, for the first White Women were already standing there among the dead.
65. LORD OF THE STORY
Iron helmets will not save
Even heroes from the grave.
Good men's blood will drain away