Cornelia Funke - Inkdeath

They caught some of the horses left behind by the Adderhead's men. Although weakened by his wounds, Silvertongue was in a hurry. At least let's save our daughters.

"The Black Prince will have been looking after Meggie," Dustfinger told him, but the anxiety was still on his face as they rode farther and farther south.

They were a silent company, all caught up in their own thoughts and memories. Only Jacopo sometimes raised his clear voice, as demanding as ever. "I'm hungry." "I'm thirsty." "When will we be there?" "Do you think the Milksop has killed the children and the robbers?" His mother always answered him, although often abstractedly. The Castle in the Lake had spun a bond between them out of shared fear and dark memories, and perhaps the strongest strand of it was the fact that Jacopo had done what his mother intended to do when she rode to the castle. The Adderhead was dead. But Dustfinger felt sure that, all the same, Violante would feel her father behind her like a shadow all her life – and very likely Her Ugliness knew it herself by now.

Silvertongue took the Bluejay away with him, too. It seemed as if the two of them were riding side by side, and not for the first time Dustfinger wondered whether they were only two sides of the same man. Whatever the answer was, the bookbinder loved this world as much as the robber did.

On the first night, when they stopped to rest under a tree with furry yellow catkins falling from its bare branches, the swift came back, although Resa had thrown the last of the seeds into the lake. She changed shape in her sleep and flew up into the flowering branches, where moonlight painted her plumage silver. When Dustfinger saw her sitting there he woke Silvertongue, and they waited under the tree together until the swift flew down again at dawn and turned back into a woman there between them.

"What will become of the child?" she asked, full of dread.

"It will dream of flying," Silvertongue replied. Just as the bookbinder dreamed of the robber, and the robber of the bookbinder, and the Fire-Dancer dreamed of the flames and the minstrel woman who could dance like them. Perhaps, after all, this world was made of dreams, and an old man had merely found the words for them.

Resa wept when they came to the cave and found it empty, but Dustfinger discovered the Strong Man's sign outside the entrance, drawn on the rocks in soot, and buried underneath was a message obviously left by Doria for his big brother. Dustfinger had heard of the tree with the nests in it that Doria described, but he had never seen it with his own eyes.

It took them two days to find the tree, and Dustfinger was the first to see the giant. He took Silvertongue's reins, and Resa put her hand to her mouth in alarm. But Violante stared at the giant like an enchanted child.

He was holding Roxane in his hand as if she, too, were a bird. Brianna turned pale at the sight of her mother between those mighty fingers, but Dustfinger dismounted and went up to the giant.

The Black Prince was standing between the giant's vast legs, with the bear beside him. He was limping as he went to meet Dustfinger, but he looked happier than he had for a long time.

"Where's Meggie?" asked Silvertongue as the Prince hugged him, and Battista pointed up into the tree. Dustfinger had never seen such a tree before, not even in the wild heart of the Wayless Wood, and he wanted to climb up to the nests at once and see the branches covered with frost-flowers where the women and children perched like birds.

Meggie's voice called her father's name, and Silvertongue went to meet her as she let herself down the trunk on a rope, as naturally as if she had always lived in the trees. But Dustfinger turned and looked up at Roxane. She whispered something to the giant, who put her down on the ground as carefully as if he believed she were made of glass. Roxane. He vowed never to forget her name again. He would ask the fire to write its letters in his heart so that not even the White Women could wash it away. Roxane. Dustfinger held her in his arms, and the giant looked down at them with eyes that seemed to reflect all the colors in the world.

"Look around," Roxane whispered to him, and Dustfinger saw Silvertongue embracing his daughter and wiping the tears off her face. He saw the bookworm woman running to Resa – how in the name of all the fairies did she come to be here? – Tullio burying his furry face in Violante's skirt, the Strong Man almost smothering Silvertongue in his bear hug… and…

Farid.

He stood there digging his toes into the newly fallen snow. He still went barefoot, and surely he'd grown taller?

Dustfinger went up to him. "I see you've taken good care of Roxane," he said. "Did the fire obey you while I was gone?"

"It always obeys me!" Yes, he had grown olden "I fought Sootbird."

"Imagine that!"

"My fire ate his fire."

"Did it indeed?"

"Yes! I climbed up on the giant and made fire rain down on Sootbird. And then the giant broke his neck."

Dustfinger couldn't help smiling, and Farid returned his smile. "Do you… do you have to go away again?" He looked as anxious as if he feared the White Women were already waiting.

"No," said Dustfinger, smiling again. "No, not for a while, I think."

Farid. He'd ask the fire to write that name in his heart as well. Roxane. Brianna. Farid. And Gwin, of course.

When the Black Prince took the children back to Ombra, snow lay on the battlements above the city wall, but the women threw flowers they had made out of scraps of fabric cut from old clothes. The lion emblem waved from the city towers again, but now his paw was laid on a book with blank pages, and his mane was made of fire. The Milksop had gone. He had fled from the giant, not to Ombra, but straight to the Castle of Night and his sister's arms, and Violante had returned to take possession of the city and prepare it for the return of its children.

Meggie was standing with Elinor, Darius, and Fenoglio in the square outside the castle gates as the mothers hugged their sons and daughters, and Violante, speaking from the battlements, thanked the Black Prince and the Bluejay for saving them.

"You know what, Meggie?" Fenoglio whispered to her, as Violante had provisions from the castle kitchens distributed to the women. "Maybe Her Ugliness will fall in love with the Black Prince someday. After all, he was the Bluejay before your father took the part, and Violante was more in love with the role than the man anyway!"

Oh, Fenoglio! He was just the same as ever. Although the giant had gone back to his mountains, he had completely restored the old man's self-confidence.

The Bluejay had not come to Ombra. Mo and Resa had stayed behind at the farm where they had once lived. "Let the Bluejay go back to where he came from," he had told the Prince. "Into the strolling players' songs." They were singing them everywhere already: how the Jay and the Fire-Dancer, all by themselves, had defeated the Adderhead and the Piper with all their men…

"Please, Battista," Mo had said, "why don't you, at least, write a song telling the true story? About the people who helped the Jay and the Fire-Dancer. About the swift – and the boy!"