But Violante smiled. "Then what my father’s librarian told me is indeed true," she said, as softly as if the dead could overhear her. "When my father began feeling unwell he thought at first that one of his maids had poisoned him."

"Mortola" Whenever Mo said her name he pictured her raising her gun.

"You know her?" Violante seemed as reluctant as he was to utter that name. "My father had her tortured to make her say what poison she’d given him, and when she didn’t confess she was thrown into a dungeon under the Castle of Night, but she disappeared one day. I hope she’s dead. They say she poisoned my mother." Violante stroked the black fabric of her dress as if she had been speaking of the quality of the silk and not her mother’s death. "Whether or not that’s true, my father knows by now who’s to blame for the way his flesh is rotting on his bones. Soon after your flight, Taddeo noticed that the Book was beginning to smell strange. And the pages were swelling. The clasps concealed it for a while, which presumably was your intention, but now they can hardly hold the wooden covers together. Poor Taddeo almost died of fear when he saw the state the Book was in. Apart from my father himself, he was the only one who was permitted to touch it and who knew where it was hidden. . . .

He even knows the three words that would have to be written in it! My father would have killed anyone else for possessing that knowledge. But he trusts the old man more than anyone else in the world, perhaps because Taddeo was his tutor for many years and often protected him from my grandfather when he was a child. Who knows? Of course, Taddeo didn’t tell my father what state the Book was in. He’d have hung even his old tutor on the spot for bringing him such bad news. No, Taddeo secretly summoned every bookbinder between the Wayless Wood and the sea to the Castle of Night, and when none of them could help him, he took Balbulus’s advice to bind a second book looking just like the first, which he showed my father when he asked for it. But meanwhile my father was feeling worse every day. Everyone knows about it by now. His breath stinks like stagnant pond water, and he’s freezing, as if the White Women’s breath is already wrapping him in their deadly cold. What a revenge, Bluejay! Endless life with endless suffering. That doesn’t sound like the doing of an angel, more like the work of a very clever devil. Which of the two are you?"

Mo didn’t answer. Don’t trust her, a voice inside him said. But his heart, strangely enough, told him something else.

"As I said, it was a long time before my father suspected anyone but Mortola,"

Violante went on. "His suspicions even made him forget his search for you. But a day came when one of the bookbinders Taddeo had summoned to his aid told him what was wrong with the Book, presumably hoping to be rewarded with silver for the news. My father had him killed— after all, no one must know about the threat to his immortality — but word soon spread. Now there’s hardly a bookbinder left alive in Argenta. Every one of them who couldn’t cure the book went to the gallows. And Taddeo has been thrown into the dungeons under the Castle of Night. ‘So that your flesh will rot away slowly like mine,’ my father’s supposed to have said. I don’t know if Taddeo is still alive. He’s old, and the dungeons of the Castle of Night are enough to kill much younger men.

Mo felt sick, just as he had in the Castle of Night when he was binding the White Book to save Resa, Meggie, and himself. Even then he had guessed that he was buying their lives at the cost of many others. Poor, timid Taddeo. Mo saw him in his mind’s eye, crouching in one of those windowless dungeons. And he saw the bookbinders, he saw them very clearly, desolate figures swaying back and forth high in the air. . . . He closed his eyes.

"Well, imagine that. Just as it says in the songs," he heard Violante say. "‘A heart more full of pity than any other beats in the Bluejay’s breast.’ You’re really sorry that other people had to die for What You did. Don’t be foolish. My father loves killing. If it hadn’t been the bookbinders he’d have hung someone else! And in the end it wasn’t a bookbinder but an alchemist who found a way to preserve the book.

It’s rumored to be a very unappetizing way, and it couldn’t reverse the harm you’d already done, but at least the book isn’t rotting anymore — and my father is looking for you harder than ever, because he still thinks only you can lift the curse you hid so skillfully between the empty pages. Don’t wait for him to find you! Steal a march on him! Ally yourself with me. You and I, Bluejay — his daughter and the robber who has already tricked him once. We can be his downfall! Help me to kill him. Together we can do it easily!"

How she was looking at him — expectant as a child who has just told her dearest wish. Come with me, Bluejay, let’s kill my father! What does a man have to do to his daughter, wondered Mo, to make her want something like that?

"Not all daughters love their fathers, Bluejay," said Violante, as if she had read his thoughts, just as Meggie so often did. "They say your daughter loves you dearly —

and you love her. But my father will kill them, your daughter, your wife, everyone you love, and last of all he’ll kill you, too. He won’t let you go on making him a laughingstock to his subjects. He’ll find you even if you go on hiding as cleverly as a fox in its den, because with every breath he draws, his own body reminds him of what you’ve done to him. Sunlight hurts his skin; his limbs are so bloated that he can’t ride anymore. He even finds walking difficult. Day and night he pictures what he wants to do to you and yours. He’s made the Piper write songs about your death, such terrible songs that anyone who hears them can’t sleep, or so they say, and soon he’ll send the silver-nosed man to sing them here as well — and to hunt you down.

The Piper has been waiting a long time for that order, and he’ll find you. His bait will be your pity for the poor. He’ll kill so many of them that their blood will lure you out of the forest at last. But if I help you—"

A voice interrupted Violante, a childish voice that was clearly used to getting a hearing from adults. It echoed down the endless stairway leading to the vault.

"He’s bound to be with her, you just wait and see!" How excited Jacopo sounded!

"Balbulus is a very good liar, especially when he’s lying for my mother. But when he does it he plucks at his sleeves and looks even more pleased with himself than usual.

My grandfather’s taught me to notice that kind of thing."

The soldiers at the door looked inquiringly at their mistress, but Violante took no notice of them. She was listening to Jacopo outside the door, when another voice was heard and Mo saw, for the first time, a trace of fear in her fearless eyes. He knew the voice himself, and his hand went to the knife at his belt. Sootbird sounded as if the fire that he played with so clumsily had singed his vocal cords. "His voice is like a warning," Resa had once said of him, "a warning to be on guard against his pretty face and the eternal smile on it."

"What a clever lad you are, Jacopo!" Did the boy hear the sarcasm in his voice? "But why don’t we go to your mother’s rooms?"

"Because she wouldn’t be stupid enough to have him taken there. My mother is clever, too, much cleverer than any of you!"