“But we’ve been here so long.” It was almost two weeks since the bloodbath in the forest, and he was sick and tired of hanging around in the Badger’s Earth. “What about Meggie? You promised we’d go back!”
All Dustfinger said to that was, “If you go on pressing me so hard I shall forget that promise.”
Then he went to Roxane. She was busy day and night, nursing the wounded they had found among the dead, in the hope that at least these few would return to Ombra, but some of them she tended in vain. He will stay with her, thought Farid every time he saw Dustfinger sitting beside her. And I’ll have to go back to the Castle of Night alone. The thought hurt like fire biting him.
On the fifteenth day, when Farid felt he would never be able to wash the smell of mouse droppings and pale mushrooms off his skin, two of the Black Prince’s informers brought identical news: The Adderhead’s wife had borne him a son. To celebrate this event, so his criers were announcing in every marketplace, in exactly two weeks’ time he would show his great kindness and mercy by setting free all the prisoners held in the dungeons of the Castle of Night.
Including the Bluejay.
“Nonsense!” said Dustfinger, when Farid told him about it. “The Adderhead has a roast quail where other people have a heart. He would never set anyone free out of mercy, however many sons were born to him. No, if he really intends to let them go it’s because Fenoglio wrote it that way, and for no other reason.”
Fenoglio seemed to share this opinion. Ever since the bloodbath he had spent most of his time sitting in some dark corner of the Badger’s Earth, looking gloomy and scarcely saying a word, but now he started defiantly announcing to anyone who would listen that the good news was due solely to him. No one took any notice of him, no one knew what he was talking about –
except for Dustfinger, who was still avoiding him like the plague in human form. “Listen to the old man! How he boasts and brags!” he said to Farid. “Cosimo and his men are hardly cold in the ground and he’s forgotten them already. I hope he drops dead himself!”
The Black Prince, of course, believed in the Adderhead’s mercy as little as Dustfinger did, in spite of Fenoglio’s assurances that exactly what the informers had said would really happen. The robbers sat together until late into the night, discussing what to do. They would not let Farid join this council, but Dustfinger was with them.
“What’s their plan? Tell me!” Farid asked him, when he finally came back from the cave where the robbers had been putting their heads together for hours on end.
“They’re going to set out in a week’s time.”
“Where for? The Castle of Night?”
“Yes.” Dustfinger didn’t seem half as pleased as he was. “Good heavens, you’re fidgeting like fire when the wind blows into it,” he snapped at Farid irritably. “We’ll see if you’re still so happy once we get there. We’ll have to crawl underground like worms, and go much deeper there than here.”
“Even deeper?”
But of course. Farid pictured Mount Adder before him: There wasn’t anywhere to hide, not a bush, not a tree.
“There’s an abandoned mine at the foot of the north slope.” Dustfinger made a face, as if the mere thought of the place turned his stomach. “Some ancestor of the Adderhead must have dug too deep there, and several galleries fell in, but that’s so long ago that obviously not even the Adderhead himself remembers the mine. Not a pleasant place, but a good hideout, and the only one on Mount Adder. The bear found the entrance.”
A mine. Farid swallowed. The thought of it left him struggling for air. “Then what?” he asked.
“What do we do when we get there?”
“Wait. Wait to see if the Adderhead really keeps his promise.”
“Wait? Is that all?”
“You’ll learn everything else soon enough.”
“Then we’re going, too?”
“Did you have anything else in mind?”
Farid hugged him more tightly than he had for a long time. Even though he knew that Dustfinger did not particularly like to be hugged.
“No,” said Roxane when the Black Prince offered to have her escorted back to Ombra by one of his men before they set out. “I’m coming with you. If you can spare a man, then send him to my children to tell them I’ll be home soon.”
Soon! Farid wondered exactly when that was going to be, but he said nothing. Although the time when they would set out was now fixed, the days still passed terribly slowly, and almost every night he dreamed of Meggie. Those were bad dreams, full of darkness and fear. When the day of their departure finally came, half a dozen robbers stayed in the Badger’s Earth to go on tending the wounded. The rest set out on the road to the Castle of Night: thirty men in ragged clothing, but well armed. And Roxane. And Fenoglio.
“You’re taking the old man, too?” Dustfinger asked the Prince in astonishment when he saw Fenoglio among the men. “Are you crazy? Send him back to Ombra. Take him anywhere else, straight to the White Women for preference, but send him away!”
However, the Prince wouldn’t hear of it. “What do you have against him?” he asked. “He’s a harmless old man. And don’t start telling me again how he can bring the dead to life! Even my bear likes him. He’s written us some fine songs, and he can tell wonderful stories, even if he has no appetite for them just now. And he doesn’t want to go back to Ombra, anyway.”
“I’m not surprised, considering all the widows and orphans he’s made there,” said Dustfinger bitterly, and when Fenoglio looked his way he cast him so icy a glance that the old man quickly turned his head again.
It was a silent march. The trees whispered above their heads, as if warning them not to take a step farther south, and once or twice Dustfinger had to summon fire to chase away beings that none of them could see, although they sensed them. Farid was tired, tired to death, his face and his arms all scratched with thorns, by the time the silver towers finally appeared above the treetops. “Like a crown on a bald head!” whispered one of the robbers, and for a moment Farid felt he could physically grasp the fear that these ragged men felt at the sight of the mighty fortress. No doubt they were all glad when the Prince led them to the north slope of Mount Adder, and the tops of the towers disappeared again. The earth fell in folds like a crumpled garment on this side of the hill, and the few trees cowered low, as if they heard the sound of axes too often. Farid had never seen such trees before. Their leaves seemed as black as night itself, and their bark was prickly like a hedgehog. Red berries grew on the branches. “Mortola’s berries!” Dustfinger whispered to him as he picked a handful in passing. “She’s said to have scattered them everywhere at the foot of this hill, until they were sprinkled all over the ground.
The trees grow very fast, they shoot up from the earth like mushrooms and keep all other trees away. Bitterberry trees, they’re called. Everything about them is poisonous – their berries and their leaves. And their bark burns the skin worse than fire.” Farid dropped the berries, and wiped his hand on his trousers.
A little later, when it was pitch dark, they almost ran into one of the patrols that the Adderhead regularly sent out, but the bear warned them in time. The mounted men appeared among the trees like silver beetles. Moonlight was reflected on their breastplates, and Farid hardly dared to breathe as he ducked down into a crevice in the ground with Dustfinger and Roxane, waiting for the hoofbeats to die away. They stole on, like mice under the eyes of a cat, until they had finally reached their goal.