"Well, what does the old devil say?" asked Dustfinger.
Meggie offered him the two sheets. "It's different from what I expected. Quite different, but it's good. Here, read it for yourself."
Gingerly, he took the parchment in his fingertips, as if he might burn himself on it more easily than on a flame. "When did you learn to read?" Roxane's voice sounded so surprised that he had to smile.
"Meggie's mother taught me." Fool; why was he telling her that? Roxane gave Meggie a long look as he labored to decipher Fenoglio's handwriting. Resa had usually written in capital letters, to make it easier for him.
"It could work, couldn't it?" Meggie was looking over his shoulder.
The sea roared as if to agree with her. Yes, perhaps it really would work… Dustfinger followed the written words like a dangerous path. But it was a path, and it led right into the middle of the Adderhead's heart. However, Dustfinger didn't like the part the old man intended Meggie to play. After all, her mother had asked him to take care of her.
Farid looked unhappily at the letters. He still couldn't read. Sometimes Dustfinger felt that he suspected those tiny black signs of witchcraft. What else would he think of them, indeed, after all his experiences? "Come on!" Farid shifted impatiently from foot to foot. "What's he written?"
"Meggie will have to go to the castle. Straight into the Adder's nest."
"What?" Horrified, the boy looked first at him and then at the girl. "But that's impossible!" He took Meggie by the shoulders and turned her roughly around to face him. "You can't go there. It's much too dangerous!"
Poor boy. Of course she would go. "That's the way Fenoglio has written it," she said, removing Farid's hands from her shoulders.
"Leave her alone," said Dustfinger, giving Meggie the sheets of parchment back. "When are you going to read it aloud?"
"Now."
Of course. She didn't want to lose any time, and why should she? The sooner the story took a new turn, the better. It could hardly get worse.
Or could it?
"What's all this about?" Roxane looked from one to another of them, baffled. She scrutinized Farid without much friendliness; she still didn't like him. Dustfinger thought that wouldn't change until something convinced her that Farid was not his son. "Explain!" she said. "Fenoglio said this letter could save her parents. But what can a letter do for someone in a dungeon in the Castle of Night?"
Dustfinger stroked her hair back. He liked to see her wearing it loose again. "Listen," he said. "I know it's difficult to believe, but if anything can open the dungeon doors in the Castle of Night, it's this letter – and Meggie's voice. She can make ink live and breathe, Roxane, just as you can bring a song to life. Her father has the same gift. If the Adderhead knew that, then I imagine he'd have hanged him long ago. The words that Meggie's father used to kill Capricorn looked just as harmless as these."
The way she was looking at him! As incredulously as she used to when he had yet again tried to explain where he had been for weeks on end. "You mean magic, an inkspell?" she whispered.
"No. I mean reading aloud."
She didn't understand a word of this, of course, which was not surprising. Perhaps she would if she heard Meggie read, if she saw the words suddenly trembling in the air, if she could smell them, feel them on her skin…
"I'd like to be alone when I read it," said Meggie, looking at Farid. Then she turned and went back to the infirmary with Fenoglio's letter in her hand. Farid wanted to follow her, but Dustfinger detained him.
"Let her!" he said. "Do you think she'll disappear into the words? That's nonsense. We're all up to our necks in the story she's going to read, anyway. She only wants to make sure the wind changes, and it will – if the old man has written the right words!"
56. THE WRONG EARS
Song lies asleep in everything
That dreams the day and night away,
And the whole world itself will sing
If once the magic word you say.
Joseph von Eichendorff, "The Divining Rod"
Roxane brought Meggie an oil lamp before leaving her alone in the room where they would be sleeping. "Written words need light, that's the awkward thing about them," she said. "But if these words are really as important as you all say, I can understand that you want to read them alone. I've always thought my singing voice sounds best when I'm on my own, too." She was already in the doorway when she added, "Your mother – do she and Dustfinger know each other well?"
Meggie almost replied: I don't know. I never asked my mother. But at last she said, "They were friends." She did not mention the resentment she still felt when she thought of how Dustfinger had known where Resa was, all those years, and hadn't told Mo. But Roxane asked no more questions, anyway. "If you need any help," was all she said before she left the room, "you'll find me with the Barn Owl."
Meggie waited until her footsteps along the dark corridor had died away. Then she sat down on one of the straw mattresses and put the sheets of parchment on her lap. What would it be like, she couldn't help thinking as the words lay spread out before her, simply to do it for fun, just once? What would it be like to feel the magic of the words on her tongue when it wasn't a matter of life or death, good or bad luck? Once, in Elinor's house, she had been almost unable to resist that temptation, when she had seen a book that she'd loved as a small child – a book with mice in frilly dresses and tiny suits making jam and going for picnics. She had stopped the first word from forming on her lips by closing the book, though, because she'd suddenly seen some dreadful pictures in her mind. One of the dressed-up mice in Elinor's garden surrounded by its wild relations, who would never in a million years dream of making jam. And an image of a little frilly dress, complete with a gray tail, in the jaws of one of the cats that regularly roamed among Elinor's rhododendron bushes. Meggie had never brought anything out of the words on the page just for fun, and she wasn't going to do it this evening, either.
"The whole secret, Meggie," Mo had once told her, "is in the breathing. It gives your voice strength and fills it with your life. And not just yours. Sometimes it feels as if when you take a breath you are breathing in everything around you, everything that makes up the world and moves it, and then it all flows into the words." She tried it. She tried to breathe as calmly and deeply as the sea – the sound of the surf came into the room from outside – in and out, in and out, as if she could capture its power in her voice. The oil lamp that Roxane had brought in filled the bare room with warm light, and outside one of the women healers walked softly by.
"I'm just going on with the story!" whispered Meggie. "I'm going on with the story. That's what it's waiting for. Come on!" She pictured the massive figure of the Adderhead pacing sleeplessly up and down in the Castle of Night, never guessing that there was a girl who planned to whisper his name in Death's ear this very night.
She took the letter that Fenoglio had written her from her belt. It was as well that Dustfinger hadn't read it.
Dear Meggie, it said, I hope that what I'm sending won't disappoint you. It's odd, but I have found that obviously I can write only what doesn't contradict anything I wrote about the Inkworld earlier. I have to keep the rules I made myself, even though I often made them unconsciously.