Inkspell

9. MEGGIE READS

When all was quiet in Elinor's house, and the garden was bright in the moonlight, Meggie put on the dress that Resa had made for her. Several months ago, she had asked her mother what kind of clothes women wore in the Inkworld.

"Which women?" Resa had inquired. "Farmers' wives? Strolling players? Princes' daughters? Maidservants?"

"What did you wear?" Meggie asked, and Resa had gone into the nearest town with Darius and bought some dress material there: plain, coarsely woven red fabric. Then she had asked Elinor to bring the old sewing machine up from the cellar. "That's the sort of dress I wore when I was living in Capricorn's fortress as a maid," her hands had said, putting the finished dress over Meggie's head. "It would have been too fine for a peasant woman, but it was just about good enough for a rich man's

servant, and Mortola was very keen that we shouldn't be much worse dressed than the prince's maids – even if we only served a gang of fire-raisers."

Meggie stood in front of her wardrobe mirror and examined herself in the dull glass. She looked strange to herself. And she'd be a stranger in the Inkworld, too; a dress alone couldn't alter that. A stranger, just as Dustfinger was here, she thought – and she remembered the unhappiness in his eyes. Nonsense, she told herself crossly, pushing back her smooth hair. I'm not planning to spend ten years there.

The sleeves of the dress were already a little too short, and it was stretched tight over her breasts, too. "Good heavens, Meggie!" Elinor had exclaimed when she realized, for the first time, that they weren't as flat as the cover of a book anymore. "Well, I imagine your Pippi Longstocking days are over now!"

They hadn't found anything suitable for Farid to wear, not in the attic or in the trunks of clothes down in the cellar that smelled of mothballs and cigar smoke, but he didn't seem to mind. "Who cares? If it works we'll start out in the forest," he said. "No one will be interested in my jeans there, and as soon as we come to a village or town I'll steal myself something to wear!"

Everything always seemed so simple to him. He couldn't understand that Meggie felt guilty because of Mo and Resa any more than he understood her anxiety to find the right clothes. When she confessed that she could hardly look Mo and her mother in the eye after deciding to go with him, he had just asked "Why?" looking at her blankly. "You're thirteen! Surely they'd be marrying you off to someone quite soon anyway?"

"Marrying me off?" Meggie had felt the blood rise to her face. But how could she talk about such things to a boy out of a story in the Thousand and One Nights, where all women were servants or slave girls – or lived in a harem?

"Anyway," added Farid, kindly ignoring the fact that she was still blushing, "you're not intending to stay very long, are you?"

No, she wasn't. She wanted to taste and smell and feel the Inkworld, see fairies and princes – and then come home again to Mo and Resa, Elinor and Darius. There was just one problem: The words Orpheus had written might take her into Dustfinger's story, but they couldn't bring her back. Only one person could write her back again – Fenoglio, the inventor of the world she wanted to visit, the creator of glass men and blue-skinned fairies, of Dustfinger and Basta, too. Yes, only Fenoglio could help her to return. Every time Meggie thought of that, her courage drained away and she felt like canceling the whole plan, striking out those three little words she had added to what Orpheus had written: "… and the girl."

Suppose she couldn't find Fenoglio, suppose he wasn't even in his own story anymore? Oh, come on! He must still be there, she told herself whenever that thought made her heart beat faster. He can't simply write himself back, not without someone to read what he's written aloud! But suppose Fenoglio had found another reader there, someone like Orpheus or Darius? The gift didn't seem to be unique, as she and Mo had once thought.

No, he's still there! I'm sure he is! thought Meggie for the hundredth time, reading her good-bye letter to Mo and Resa once more. She herself didn't know why she had chosen to write it on the letterhead that she and Mo had designed together. That was hardly going to mollify him.

Dearest Mo, dear Resa. Meggie knew the words by heart.

Please don't worry. Farid has to find Dustfinger to warn him about Basta, and I'm going, too. I won't stay long, I just want to see the Wayless Wood, the Laughing Prince, and Cosimo the Fair, and perhaps the Black Prince and Cloud-Dancer. I want to see the fairies again, and the glass men – and Fenoglio. He'll write me back here. You know he can do it, so don't worry. Capricorn isn't in the Inkworld anymore, after all.

See you soon, lots of love and kisses, Meggie.

P.S. I'll bring you back a book, Mo. Apparently, there are wonderful books there, handwritten books full of pictures, like the ones in Elinor's glass cases. Only even better. Please don't be angry.

She had torn up this letter and rewritten it three times, but that had made matters no better. Because she knew that there were no words that could stop Mo from being angry with her and Resa from weeping with anxiety – the way she did the day Meggie came home from school two hours later than usual. She put the letter on her pillow – they couldn't miss seeing it there – and went over to the mirror again. Meggie, she thought, what are you doing? What do you think you're doing? But her reflection did not reply.

When she let Farid into her room just after midnight he was surprised to see her dress. "I don't have shoes to go with it," she said. "But luckily it's quite long, and I don't think my boots show much, do they?"

Farid just nodded. "It looks lovely," he murmured awkwardly.

Meggie locked the door after letting him in, and took the key out of the lock so that it could be unlocked again from outside. Elinor had a second key, and though she probably wouldn't be able to find it at first, Darius would know where it was. Meggie glanced at the letter on her pillow once more…

Over his shoulder, Farid had the backpack she had found in Elinor's attic. "Oh, he's welcome to it," Elinor had said when

Meggie asked her. "It once belonged to an uncle of mine. I hated him! The boy can put that smelly marten in it. I like the idea!"

The marten! Meggie's heart missed a beat.

Farid didn't know why Dustfinger had left Gwin behind, and Meggie hadn't told him, although she knew the reason only too well. She herself, after all, had told Dustfinger what part the marten was to play in his story. He was to die a dreadful, violent death because of Gwin – if what Fenoglio had written came true.

But Farid just shook his head sadly when she asked him about the marten. "He's gone," said the boy. "I tied him up in the garden, because the bookworm woman kept on at me about her birds, but he gnawed through the rope. I've looked for him everywhere, but l just can't find him!"

Clever Gwin.

"He'll have to stay here," said Meggie. "Orpheus didn't write anything about him, and Resa will look after him. She likes him."

Farid nodded and glanced unhappily at the window, but he didn't contradict her.

The Wayless Wood – that was where Orpheus's words would take them. Farid knew where Dustfinger had meant to go after arriving in the forest: to Ombra, where the Laughing Prince's castle stood. And that was where Meggie hoped to find Fenoglio, too. He had often told her about Ombra when they were both Capricorn's prisoners. One night, when neither of them could sleep because Capricorn's men were shooting at stray cats outside again, Fenoglio had whispered to Meggie, "If I could choose to see one place in the Inkworld, then it would be Ombra. After all, the Laughing Prince is a great lover of books, which can hardly be said of his adversary the Adderhead. Yes, life must surely be good for a writer in Ombra. A room in an attic somewhere, perhaps in the alley where the cobblers and saddlers work – their trades don't smell too bad – and a glass man to sharpen my quills, a few fairies over my bed, and I could look down into the alley through my window and see all life pass by…"

"What are you taking with you?" Farid's voice startled Meggie out of her thoughts. "You know we're not supposed to bring too much."

"Of course I know." Did he think that just because she was a girl she needed a dozen dresses? All she was going to carry was the old leather bag that had always gone with her and Mo on their travels when she was little. It would remind her of Mo, and she hoped that in the Inkworld it would be as inconspicuous as her dress. But the things she'd stuffed into it would certainly attract attention if anyone saw them: a hairbrush made of plastic, modern like the buttons on the cardigan she had packed; also a couple of pencils, a penknife, a photograph of her parents, and one of Elinor. She had thought hard about what book to take. Going without one would have seemed to her like setting off naked, but it mustn't be a heavy book, so it had to be a paperback. "Books in beach clothes," Mo called them, "badly dressed for most occasions but useful when you're on vacation." Elinor didn't have a single paperback on her shelves, but Meggie herself owned a few. In the end she had decided on one that Resa had given her, a collection of stories set near the lake that lay close to Elinor's house. That way she would be taking a little bit of home with her – for Elinor's house was her home now, more than anywhere else had ever been. And who knew, maybe Fenoglio would be able to use the words in it to write her back again, back into her own story…

Farid had gone to the window. It was open, and a cool wind was blowing into the room, moving the curtains that Resa had made. Meggie shivered in her new dress. The nights were still very mild, but what would the season be in the Inkworld? Perhaps it was winter there…

"I ought to say good-bye to him, at least," murmured Farid. "Gwin!" he called softly into the night air, clicking his tongue.

Meggie quickly pulled him away from the window. "Don't do that!" she snapped. "Do you want to wake up everyone? I've already told you, Gwin will be fine here. He's probably found a female marten by now. There are a few around the place. Elinor's always afraid they'll eat the nightingale that sings outside her window in the evening."

Farid looked very unhappy, but he stepped back from the window. "Why are you leaving it open?" he asked. "Suppose Basta…" He didn't finish his sentence.

"Elinor's alarm system works even if there's an open window," was all Meggie said, while she put the notebook Mo had given her in her bag. There was a reason why she didn't want to close the window. One night in a hotel by the sea, not far from Capricorn's village, she had persuaded Mo to read her a poem. A poem about a moon-bird asleep in a peppermint wind. Next morning the bird was fluttering against the window of their hotel bedroom, and Meggie couldn't forget how its little head kept colliding with the glass again and again. Her window must stay open.

"We'd better sit close to each other on the sofa," she said. "And sling your backpack over your back."

Farid obeyed. He sat down on the sofa as hesitantly as he had on her chair. It was an old, velvet, button-backed sofa with tassels, its pale green upholstery very worn. "You need somewhere comfortable to sit and read," Elinor had said when she asked Darius to put it in Meggie's room. What would Elinor say when she found that Meggie had gone? Would she understand? She'll probably swear a lot, thought Meggie, kneeling beside her schoolbag. And then she'll say, "Damn it, why didn't the silly girl take me, too?" That would be Elinor all over. Meggie suddenly wanted to see her again, but she tried not to think of any of them anymore – not Elinor or Resa or Mo. Particularly not Mo, for she might have only too clear an idea of what he'd look like when he found her letter… No, stop it, she told herself.

She quickly reached into her schoolbag and took out her geography book. The sheet of paper that Farid had brought with him was in there, beside her own copy of it, but Meggie took out only the copy in her own handwriting. Farid moved aside as she sat down next to him, and for a moment Meggie thought she saw something like fear in his eyes.

"What's the matter?" she asked. "Have you changed your mind?"

But he shook his head. "No. It's just… it hasn't ever happened to you, has it?"

"What?" For the first time Meggie noticed that he had a beard coming. It looked odd on his young face.

"Well, what – what happened to Darius."

Ah, that was it. He was afraid of arriving in Dustfinger's world with a twisted face, or a stiff leg, or mute like Resa.

"No, of course not!" Meggie couldn't help the note of injury that crept into her voice. Although – could she really be sure that Fenoglio had arrived unharmed on the other side? Fenoglio, the Steadfast Tin Soldier… she had never seen people again after sending them away into the letters on the page. She'd seen only those who came out of the pages. Never mind. Don't think so much, Meggie. Read, or you may lose courage before you even feel the first word on your tongue…

Farid cleared his throat, as if he, and not Meggie, must start reading.

So what was she waiting for? Did she expect Mo to knock on her door and wonder why she had locked it? All had been quiet next door for some time. Her parents were asleep. Don't think of them, Meggie! Don't think of Mo or Resa or Elinor, just think of the words – and the place where you want them to take you. A place of marvels and adventures.

Meggie looked at the letters on the page, black and carefully shaped. She tried the taste of the first few syllables on her tongue, tried to picture the world of which the words whispered, the trees, the birds, the strange sky… Then she began to read. Her heart was thudding almost as violently as it had on the night she had been meant to use her voice to kill. Yet this time she had to do so much less. She had only to open a door, nothing but a door between the words, just large enough for her and Farid to pass through…

A fresh fragrance rose to her nostrils, the scent of thousands and thousands of leaves. Then everything disappeared: her desk, the lamp beside her, the open window. The last thing that Meggie saw was Gwin, sitting on the windowsill, snuffling and looking at them.