“Meggie, suppertime!”
Elinor’s call echoed right to the top of the stairs. She had a very powerful voice. Louder than the Titanic’s foghorn, Mo always said.
Meggie slipped off the windowsill.
“Coming!” she called down the corridor. Then she went back into her room, took the notebooks off the shelf one by one until her arms could hardly hold the stack, and carried the precarious pile down the corridor and into the room that Mo used as an office. It had once been Meggie’s bedroom; she had slept there when she first came to Elinor’s house with Mo and Dustfinger, but all you could see from its window was the gravel forecourt, some spruce trees, a large chestnut, and Elinor’s gray station wagon, which stood outdoors in all weather, because it was Elinor’s opinion that cars living in luxury in a garage rusted more quickly. But when they had decided to come and live there, Meggie had wanted a window with a view of the garden. So Mo, surrounded by Elinor’s collection of old travel guides, did his paperwork in the room where Meggie had slept before she ever went to Capricorn’s village, when she still had no mother and almost never quarreled with Mo. .
“Meggie, where are you?” Elinor’s voice sounded impatient. Her joints often ached these days, but she refused to go to the doctor. (“What’s the point?” was her only comment. “They haven’t invented a pill to cure old age, have they?”)
“I’ll be down in a minute!” called Meggie, carefully lowering the notebooks onto Mo’s desk.
Two of them slipped off the pile and almost knocked over the vase of autumn flowers that her mother had put by the window. Meggie caught it just before the water spilled over Mo’s invoices and receipts for gasoline. She was standing there with the vase still in her hand, her fingers sticky with drifting pollen, when she saw the figure between the trees where the path came up from the road. Her heart began to thud so hard that the vase almost slipped out of her fingers again. Well, that just went to prove it. Mo was right. “Meggie, take your head out of those books, or soon you won’t know the difference between reality and your imagination!” He’d told her that so often, and now it was happening. She’d been thinking about Dustfinger only a moment ago, hadn’t she? And now she saw someone standing out there in the night, just like the time, more than a year ago, when she’d seen Dustfinger waiting outside their house, motionless as the figure she saw there at this moment. .
“Meggie, for heaven’s sake, how many more times do I have to call you?” Elinor was wheezing from climbing all the stairs. “What are you doing, standing there rooted to the spot? Didn’t you say – good heavens, who’s that?”
“You can see him, too?” Meggie was so relieved she could have hugged Elinor. “Of course I can.”
The figure moved. Barefoot, it ran over the pale gravel.
“It’s that boy!” Elinor sounded incredulous. “The one who helped the matchstick-eater steal the book from your father. Well, he’s got nerve, turning up here. He looks somewhat worse for wear.
Does he think I’m going to let him in? I daresay the matchstick-eater’s out there, too.”
Elinor came closer to the window, looking anxious, but Meggie was already out the door. She ran downstairs and raced through the entrance hall. Her mother came along the corridor leading to the kitchen.
“Resa!” Meggie called. “Farid’s here. It’s Farid!”
Chapter 5 – Farid
He was stubborn as a mule, clever as a monkey, and nimble as a hare.
– Louis Pergaud, The War of the Buttons
Resa took Farid into the kitchen and tended his feet first. They .looked terrible, cut and bleeding.
While Resa cleaned them and put bandages over the cuts, Farid began telling his story, his tongue heavy with weariness. Meggie did her best not to stare at him too often. He was still rather taller than she was, even though she’d grown a great deal since they last met .. on the night when he had gone off with Dustfinger. Dustfinger and the book. She hadn’t forgotten his face, any more than she could forget the day when Mo first read him out of his own story in Tales from the Thousand and One Nights. She’d never met another boy with such beautiful eyes, almost like a girl’s. They were as black as his hair, which was cut a little shorter than it had been in the old days and made him look more grown-up. Farid. Meggie felt her tongue relishing his name – and quickly turned her eyes away when he raised his head and looked at her.
Elinor stared at him all the time without any embarrassment and with as much hostility as she had shown in scrutinizing Dustfinger when he had sat at her kitchen table, feeding his marten bread and ham. She hadn’t let Farid bring the marten into the house with him. “And if he eats a single songbird in my garden he’d better watch out!” she said as the marten scurried away over the pale gravel. She had bolted the door after him, as if Gwin could open locked doors as easily as his master.
Farid played with a book of matches as he told his tale.
“Look at that!” Elinor whispered to Meggie. “Just like the matchstick-eater. Don’t you think he looks a lot like him?”
But Meggie did not reply. She didn’t want to miss a word of the story Farid had to tell. She wanted to hear everything about Dustfinger’s return, about the man with the hellhound who read aloud so well, about the snarling creature that could have been one of the big cats from the Wayless Wood – and about the words that Basta had shouted after Farid: “You can run, but I’ll get you yet, do you hear? You, the fire-eater, Silvertongue and his hoity-toity daughter – and the old man who wrote those accursed words! I’ll kill you all! One by one!”
While Farid told his story, Resa’s eyes kept straying to the grubby piece of paper he had put down on the kitchen table. She looked at it as if she were afraid of it, as if the words on that paper could draw her back again. Back to the Inkworld. When Farid repeated the threat Basta had shouted, she put her arms around Meggie and held her close. But Darius, who had been sitting next to Elinor in silence all this time, buried his face in his hands. Farid didn’t waste much time describing how he had gotten to Elinor’s house on his bare, bloody feet. In answer to Meggie’s questions, he just muttered something about getting a lift from a truck driver. He ended his account abruptly, as if he had suddenly run out of words, and when he fell silent it was very quiet in the big kitchen.
Farid had brought an invisible guest with him. Fear.
“Put more coffee on, Darius!” said Elinor as she looked gloomily at the table laid for supper. No one was taking any notice of it. “This could be iced tea, it’s so cold.”
Darius set to work at once, busy and eager, like a bespectacled squirrel, while Elinor gave Farid a glance as cold as if he were personally responsible for the bad news he had brought. Meggie still remembered just how alarming she had once found that look. “The woman with pebble eyes,”
she had secretly called Elinor. Sometimes the name still fitted.
“What a terrific story!” exclaimed Elinor as Resa went to give Darius a hand; Farid’s news had obviously made him so nervous that he couldn’t measure out the right amount of ground coffee.
He had just begun counting the spoonfuls he was tipping into the filter for the third time when Resa gently took the measuring spoon from his hand.