When twilight fell he looked around for a safe place to sleep. Finally, he climbed up onto a fallen oak with its root-ball towering so high into the air that it offered good shelter for the night. The root-ball was like a great rampart of earth, yet some of the roots still clung to the ground as if unwilling to let go of life. The crown of the fallen tree had put out new shoots, although they now pointed to the ground and not the sky. Dustfinger nimbly clambered along the mighty trunk, digging his fingers into its rough bark.
When he reached the roots, which were now thrusting up into the air as if they could find nourishment there, a few fairies flew up, chattering crossly. They had obviously been looking for building materials for their nests. Of course: It would soon be autumn, time for a more weatherproof sleeping place. The blue fairies took no particular trouble over the nests they built in spring, but as soon as the first leaf turned color they began improving them, padding them with animal fur and birds’ feathers, weaving more grass and twigs into the walls, sealing cracks with moss and fairy spit.
Two of the tiny blue creatures didn’t fly away when they saw him. They stared avidly at his sandy hair as the evening light, falling through the treetops, tinged their wings with red.
“Ah, of course!” Dustfinger laughed softly. “You want some of my hair for your nests.” He cut off a lock with his knife. One of the delighted fairies seized the hair in her delicate, insect like hands and fluttered quickly away with it. The other fairy, so tiny that she could only just have hatched from her mother-of-pearl egg, followed her. He had missed those bold little blue creatures, he’d missed them so much.
Down below among the trees, night was falling, but in the light of the setting sun the treetops overhead were turning red as sorrel in a summer meadow. Soon the fairies would be asleep in their nests, the mice and rabbits in their holes and burrows. The cool of the night would make the lizards’ legs stiff, the birds would fall silent, predators would prepare to go hunting, their eyes like yellow lights in the darkness. Let’s hope they don’t fancy a fire-eater for dinner, thought Dustfinger, stretching his legs out on the fallen trunk. He thrust his knife into the cracked bark beside him, wrapped himself in the cloak he hadn’t worn for ten years, and stared up at the leaves. They were growing darker and darker now. An owl rose from an oak and swooped away, little more than a shadow among the branches. A tree whispered in its sleep, words that no human ear could understand.
Dustfinger closed his eyes and listened. He was home again.
Chapter 4 – Silvertongue’s Daughter
Was there only one world after all, which spent its time dreaming of others?
– Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife
Meggie hated quarrelling with Mo. It left her shaking inside, and nothing could comfort her – not a hug from her mother, not the licorice candies Resa’s aunt Elinor gave her if their loud voices had carried to the library, not Darius, who firmly believed in the miraculous healing powers of hot milk and honey in such cases.
Nothing helped.
This time it had been particularly bad, because Mo had really only come to see her to say good-bye. He had a new job waiting, some sick books too old and valuable to be sent to him. In the past Meggie would have gone with him, but this time she had decided to stay with Elinor and her mother.
Why did he have to come to her room just when she was reading the notebooks again? They’d often quarreled over those notebooks recently, although Mo hated a quarrel as much as she did.
Afterward, he usually disappeared into the workshop that Elinor had had built behind the house for him, and a time would come, once Meggie couldn’t bear to be angry with him anymore, when she would follow him there. He never raised his head when she slipped through the doorway, and without a word Meggie would sit down beside him on the chair that was always ready for her and watch him at work, just as she had done even before she could read. She loved watching his hands free a book from its shabby dress, separate stained pages from each other, part the threads holding together a damaged quire, or soak rag paper to mend a sheet of paper worn thin. It was never long before Mo turned and asked her a question of some kind: Did she like the color he’d chosen for a linen binding, did she agree that the paper pulp he’d mixed for repairs had turned out slightly too dark? It was Mo’s way of apologizing, of saying: Don’t let’s quarrel, Meggie; let’s forget what we said just now.
But that was no good today. Because he hadn’t disappeared into his workshop, he’d gone away to see some book collector or other and give the collector’s printed treasures a new lease on life.
This time he wouldn’t come to her with a present to make up for the quarrel – a book he’d found in a second-hand bookshop somewhere, or a bookmark decorated with blue jay feathers found in Elinor’s garden. .
So why couldn’t she have been reading some other book when he came into her room?
“Good heavens, Meggie, you seem to have nothing in your head but those notebooks!” he had said angrily. It had been the same every time, these last few months, whenever he had found her like that in her room – lying on the rug, deaf and blind to all that went on around her, eyes glued to the words with which she had written down what Resa told her – tales of what she had seen
“there,” as Mo bitterly called it.
There.
Inkworld was the name Meggie gave to the place of which Mo spoke so slightingly and her mother sometimes with such longing. Inkworld, after the book about it, Inkheart. The book was gone, but her mother’s memories were as vivid as if not a day had passed since she was there –
in that world of paper and printer’s ink where there were fairies and princes, water-nymphs, fire-elves, and trees that seemed to grow to the sky.
Meggie had sat with her mother for countless days and nights, writing down what Resa’s fingers told her. Resa had left her voice behind in the Inkworld, so she talked to her daughter either with pencil and paper or with her hands, telling the story of those years – those terrible magical years, she called them. Sometimes she also drew what her eyes had seen but her tongue could no longer describe: fairies, birds, strange flowers, conjured up on paper with just a few strokes, yet looking so real that Meggie almost believed she had seen them, too.
At first Mo himself had bound the notebooks in which Meggie wrote down Resa’s memories –
and each binding was more beautiful than the last – but a time came when Meggie noticed the anxiety in his eyes as he watched her reading them, completely absorbed in the words and pictures. Of course she understood his uneasiness; after all, for years he had lost his wife to this world made of words and paper. How could he like it if his daughter thought of little else? Oh yes, Meggie understood Mo very well, yet she couldn’t do as he asked – close the books and forget the Inkworld for a while.
Perhaps her longing for it wouldn’t have been quite as strong if the fairies and brownies had still been around, all those strange creatures they had brought back from Capricorn’s accursed village. But none of them lived in Elinor’s garden now. The fairies’ empty nests still clung to the trees, and the burrows that the brownies had dug were still there, but their inhabitants were gone. At first Elinor thought they had run away or been stolen, but then the ashes had been found. They covered the grass in the garden, fine as dust, gray ashes, as gray as the shadows from which Elinor’s strange guests had once appeared. And Meggie had realized that there was no return from death, even for creatures made of nothing but words.