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"Elinor?"
She turned. Darius! For heaven’s sake, she’d completely forgotten him. What was he doing under the rubbish cart?
Looking bewildered, he crawled out from between the wooden wheels and plucked a few not-very-clean blades of straw off his tunic. Oh, Darius! Of all the places in the Inkworld, he had to Land under a load of garbage! Just Like him! He was a walking disaster area. And the way he was looking around him— as if he’d fallen among thieves. Poor Darius. Wonderful Darius. He was still holding the sheet of paper with Orpheus’s words on it, but where was the bag with all the things they’d meant to bring?
Just a moment, Elinor, you were going to bring it. She looked around — and instead of the bag saw Cerberus beside her, snuffling at the strange paving stones with great interest.
"H-h-he’d have starved to death if we’d left him behind" stuttered Darius, still brushing straw off his tunic. ‘A-a-anyway I suppose he can lead us to his master, and maybe he’ll know where we can find the others."
Not a bad idea, Elinor told herself. I’d never have thought of that. But what was making him stammer again?
"Darius! You did it!" she whispered, hugging him so hard that his glasses slipped.
"Thank you! Thank you so, so much!"
"Hey, you there, where’d that dog come from?"
Cerberus pressed close to Elinor’s legs, growling. Two soldiers were facing them.
The soldiers are worse than the highwaymen. Hadn’t Resa told her that, too? Most of them will kill for fun sometime or other.
Involuntarily, Elinor took a step back, but she just came up against the wall of the house behind her.
"Well, cat got your tongues?" One of the men punched Darius in the belly with his gloved fist, so hard that he doubled up.
"What do you think you’re doing? Leave him alone!" Elinor’s voice didn’t sound half as fearless as she had hoped. "That’s my dog."
"Yours?" The soldier approaching her had only one eye. Fascinated, Elinor stared at the place where the other eye had once been. "Only princesses may keep dogs.
Trying to tell me you’re a princess?"
He drew his sword and ran the blade over Elinor’s dress. "And what sort of clothes are those? You think they make you look like a fine lady? What seamstress made that dress? She ought to be put in the pillory, so she ought!"
The other soldier Laughed. "The strolling players wear such garments!" he said.
"She’s a minstrel woman rather past her prime."
"A minstrel woman? Nah, too ugly for that." The one-eyed man scrutinized Elinor as if he were about to strip off her dress.
She longed to tell him what she thought of his own appearance, but Darius cast her a pleading glance, and the point of the sword pressed menacingly against her stomach as if the one-eyed soldier was thinking of boring a second navel in it. Look down, Elinor! Remember what Resa said. Women keep their eyes lowered in this world.
"Please!" With difficulty, Darius scrambled to his feet. "We. . . we’re strangers here.
W-w-we come from far away. . ."
"And you come to Ombra?" The soldiers laughed. "By the Adderhead’s silver, who’d come here of his own freewill?"
The one-eyed man was staring at Darius. "Take a look at this!" he said, lifting off his glasses. "He’s got the same kind of frame thing as Four-Eyes, the fellow that got the unicorn and the dwarf for the Milksop."
Making a big performance of it, he perched the glasses on his own nose.
"Hey, take that off!" The other man uneasily retreated.
The one-eyed soldier blinked at him through one thick lens and grinned. "I can see all your lies. All your black lies!"
Laughing, he threw the glasses at Darius’s feet.
"Wherever you come from," he said, reaching out for Cerberus’s collar, "you’re going back without any dog. Dogs belong to princes. This one’s an ugly brute, but the Milksop will like it all the same."
Cerberus bit the gloved hand so hard that the soldier screamed and fell to his knees.
The other man drew his sword, but Orpheus’s dog wasn’t half as stupid as he was ugly. With the soldier’s glove still in his jaws, he turned and ran for his life.
"Quick, Elinor!" Darius swiftly snatched up his twisted glasses and dragged her away with him, while the soldiers, cursing, stumbled off in pursuit of the hellhound. Elinor couldn’t remember when she had last run so fast — and even if her heart still felt like a young girl’s, her legs were the legs of a rather too stout old woman.
Elinor, this was not the way you imagined your first hours in Ombra, she told herself as she followed Darius down an alley so narrow that she was afraid of getting stuck between the houses. But even if her feet hurt, and she could still feel the tip of that one-eyed oaf’s sword in her stomach—never mind! She was in Ombra! At last she was behind the letters on the page! That was all that mattered. And it was hardly to be expected that life would be as tranquil here as in her house at home — leaving aside the fact that recently it hadn’t been so tranquil there, either. Well, never mind that. . . she was here! She was here at last! In the only story with an ending that she really wanted to know, because all the people she loved were in it.
But it’s a pity the dog has gone, she thought, as Darius stopped at the end of the alley, unsure which way to go. Cerberus’s ugly nose would have come in very useful in this maze of alleyways and she was probably going to miss him, too. Resa, Meggie, Mortimer — she felt like shouting their names through the streets. Where are you? I’m here, I’m here at last!
But perhaps they’re not here anymore, Elinor, a voice inside her whispered, while the strange sky above them grew dark. Perhaps the three of them died long ago. Hush, she thought. Hush, Elinor. That thought wasn’t allowed. It simply was not allowed.
CHAPTER 33
HERBS FOR HER UGLINESS
Several times a day, Violante went down to the dungeons where the Milksop had imprisoned the children. She always brought along two maids who were still loyal to her, and one of the boys who served her as soldiers. Child-soldiers, the Piper called them, but her father had made sure that these boys weren’t children anymore when he had their fathers and brothers slaughtered in the Wayless Wood. And the children in the dungeons soon wouldn’t be children, either. Fear was making them grow up fast.
The mothers stood outside the castle, begging the guards at least to let them go in to see their youngest children. They brought clothes, dolls, food, in the hope that at least some of it might end up in the hands of their sons and daughters. But the guards threw most of these things away, although Violante kept sending her maids to them to collect what the mothers had brought.
Fortunately, the Piper did at least allow her to do that. Fooling the Milksop was easy.
He was even more stupid than his doll-like sister and had never realized how Violante was spinning her web behind his back. But the Piper was clever, and only two things made it possible to manipulate him: his fear of the Adderhead and his vanity. Violante had flattered the Piper from the day he first rode into Ombra. She acted as if she were glad he had come, saying she was tired of the Milksop’s feeble stupidity. She told the Piper how he squandered money, and commissioned Balbulus to write out the Piper’s dark songs on his best parchment and illuminate them (even though the commission made Balbulus so furious that he broke three of his most valuable brushes before her eyes).
