But Violante smiled. "Then what my father’s librarian told me is indeed true," she said, as softly as if the dead could overhear her. "When my father began feeling unwell he thought at first that one of his maids had poisoned him."
"Mortola" Whenever Mo said her name he pictured her raising her gun.
"You know her?" Violante seemed as reluctant as he was to utter that name. "My father had her tortured to make her say what poison she’d given him, and when she didn’t confess she was thrown into a dungeon under the Castle of Night, but she disappeared one day. I hope she’s dead. They say she poisoned my mother." Violante stroked the black fabric of her dress as if she had been speaking of the quality of the silk and not her mother’s death. "Whether or not that’s true, my father knows by now who’s to blame for the way his flesh is rotting on his bones. Soon after your flight, Taddeo noticed that the Book was beginning to smell strange. And the pages were swelling. The clasps concealed it for a while, which presumably was your intention, but now they can hardly hold the wooden covers together. Poor Taddeo almost died of fear when he saw the state the Book was in. Apart from my father himself, he was the only one who was permitted to touch it and who knew where it was hidden. . . .
He even knows the three words that would have to be written in it! My father would have killed anyone else for possessing that knowledge. But he trusts the old man more than anyone else in the world, perhaps because Taddeo was his tutor for many years and often protected him from my grandfather when he was a child. Who knows? Of course, Taddeo didn’t tell my father what state the Book was in. He’d have hung even his old tutor on the spot for bringing him such bad news. No, Taddeo secretly summoned every bookbinder between the Wayless Wood and the sea to the Castle of Night, and when none of them could help him, he took Balbulus’s advice to bind a second book looking just like the first, which he showed my father when he asked for it. But meanwhile my father was feeling worse every day. Everyone knows about it by now. His breath stinks like stagnant pond water, and he’s freezing, as if the White Women’s breath is already wrapping him in their deadly cold. What a revenge, Bluejay! Endless life with endless suffering. That doesn’t sound like the doing of an angel, more like the work of a very clever devil. Which of the two are you?"
Mo didn’t answer. Don’t trust her, a voice inside him said. But his heart, strangely enough, told him something else.
"As I said, it was a long time before my father suspected anyone but Mortola,"
Violante went on. "His suspicions even made him forget his search for you. But a day came when one of the bookbinders Taddeo had summoned to his aid told him what was wrong with the Book, presumably hoping to be rewarded with silver for the news. My father had him killed— after all, no one must know about the threat to his immortality — but word soon spread. Now there’s hardly a bookbinder left alive in Argenta. Every one of them who couldn’t cure the book went to the gallows. And Taddeo has been thrown into the dungeons under the Castle of Night. ‘So that your flesh will rot away slowly like mine,’ my father’s supposed to have said. I don’t know if Taddeo is still alive. He’s old, and the dungeons of the Castle of Night are enough to kill much younger men.
Mo felt sick, just as he had in the Castle of Night when he was binding the White Book to save Resa, Meggie, and himself. Even then he had guessed that he was buying their lives at the cost of many others. Poor, timid Taddeo. Mo saw him in his mind’s eye, crouching in one of those windowless dungeons. And he saw the bookbinders, he saw them very clearly, desolate figures swaying back and forth high in the air. . . . He closed his eyes.
"Well, imagine that. Just as it says in the songs," he heard Violante say. "‘A heart more full of pity than any other beats in the Bluejay’s breast.’ You’re really sorry that other people had to die for What You did. Don’t be foolish. My father loves killing. If it hadn’t been the bookbinders he’d have hung someone else! And in the end it wasn’t a bookbinder but an alchemist who found a way to preserve the book.