Chapter 10 – The Inkworld

Thus sharply did the terrified three learn the difference between an island of make-believe and the same island come true.

– J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

It was bright. Sunlight filtered through countless leaves.

Shadows danced on a nearby pool, and a swarm of tiny red elves was whirring above the dark water.

I can do it! That was Meggie’s first thought when she sensed that the letters on the page really had let her through and she wasn’t in Elinor’s house anymore, but somewhere very, very different. I can do it. I can read myself into a story. She really had slipped through the words, as she’d so often done in her mind.

But this time she wouldn’t have to slip into the skin of a character in the story – no, this time she would be in the story herself, part of it. Her very own self. Meggie. Not even that man Orpheus had done it. He had read Dustfinger home, but he couldn’t read himself into the book, right into it. No one but Meggie had ever done it before, not Orpheus, not Darius, not Mo.

Mo.

Meggie looked around almost as if she hoped he might be standing behind her, as usual when they were in a strange place. But only Farid was there, looking around as incredulously as she was. Elinor’s house was far, far away. Her parents were gone. And there was no way back.

Quite suddenly, Meggie felt fear rise in her like black, brackish water. She felt lost, terribly lost, felt it in every part of her. She didn’t belong here! What had she done?

She stared at the paper in her hand, so useless now, the bait she had swallowed. Fenoglio’s story had caught her. The sense of triumph that had carried her away just now was gone as if it had never been. Fear had extinguished it, fear that she had made a terrible mistake and it could never be put right. Meggie tried desperately to find some other feeling in her heart, but there was nothing, not even curiosity about the world now surrounding her. I want to go back! That was all she could think.

But Farid turned to her and smiled.

“Look at those trees, Meggie!” he said. “They really do grow right up to the sky. Look at them!”

He ran his fingers over his face, felt his nose and mouth, looked down at himself, and on realizing that he was obviously entirely unharmed began leaping around like a grasshopper. He made his way over the tree roots that wound through the moss that grew thick and soft between them, jumped from root to root – and then turned around and around, laughing, arms outstretched, until he was dizzy and staggered back against the nearest tree. Still laughing, he leaned against its trunk, which was so vast that five grown men with their arms stretched out could hardly have encompassed it, and looked up into the tangle of twigs and branches.

“You did it, Meggie!” he cried. “You did it! Hear that, Cheeseface?” he shouted at the trees.

“She can do it, using your words. She can do what you’ve tried thousands of times! She can do it, and you can’t!” He laughed again, as gleefully as a small child. Until he noticed that Meggie was perfectly silent.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, indicating her mouth in alarm. “You haven’t. . ?”

Lost her voice, like her mother? Had she? Her tongue felt heavy, but the words came out. “No.

No, I’m all right.”

Farid smiled with relief. His carefree mood soothed Meggie’s fears, and for the first time she really looked around her. They were in a valley, a broad, densely wooded valley among hills with trees standing so close together on their slopes that the crowns grew into one another.

Chestnut and oak on the hillsides, ash and poplar farther down, mingling their leaves with the silvery foliage of willows. The Wayless Wood deserved its name. It seemed to have no end and no beginning, like a green sea where you could drown as easily as in the wet and salty waves of its sister the ocean.

“Isn’t this incredible? Isn’t it amazingly wonderful?” Farid laughed so exuberantly that an animal of some kind, invisible among the leaves, snarled angrily down at them. “Dustfinger told me about it, but it’s even better than he said. How can there be so many different kinds of leaves?

And just look at all the flowers and berries! We won’t starve here!” Farid picked a berry, round and blue-black, sniffed it, and put it in his mouth. “I once knew an old man,” he said, wiping the juice from his lips, “who used to tell stories at night by the fire. Stories about paradise. This is just how he described it: carpets of moss, pools of cool water, flowers and sweet berries everywhere, trees growing up to the sky, and the voices of their leaves speaking to the wind above you. Can you hear them?”

Yes, Meggie could. And she could see elves, swarms of them, tiny creatures with red skins. Resa had told her about them. They were swirling like midges above a pool of water, only a few steps away, which reflected the leaves of the trees. It was surrounded by bushes that bore red flowers, and the water was covered with their faded petals.

Meggie couldn’t see any blue fairies, but she did see butterflies, bees, birds, spiders’ webs still silvery with dew although the sun was high in the sky, lizards, rabbits .. There was a rustling and a rushing all around them, a crackling and a scratching and a pulsing; there was a hissing and a cooing and a chirping. This world seemed to be bursting with life, and yet it seemed quiet as well, wonderfully quiet, as if time didn’t exist, as if there were no beginning or end to the present moment.

“Do you think he came here, too?” Farid looked around wistfully, as if hoping that Dustfinger would appear among the trees at any moment. “Yes, of course. Orpheus must have read him to this very place, don’t you think? He told me about that pool, and the red elves, and the tree over there with the pale bark where you can find their nests. ‘And then you must follow a stream,’ he said, ‘a stream going north. For in the south lies Argenta where the Adderhead rules, and you’ll be hanged from a gallows there quicker than you can say your name.’ But I’d better take a look from up there!” Quick as a squirrel, he climbed a sapling, and before Meggie knew it he had caught hold of a woody vine and was hauling himself up to the top of a gigantic tree.

“What are you doing?” she called after him. “You can always see more from farther up!”

Farid was hardly visible among the branches now. Meggie folded up the sheet of paper with Orpheus’s words on it and put it in her bag. She didn’t want to see the letters anymore; they seemed to her like poisonous beetles, like Alice in Wonderland’s bottle saying, “Drink me!” Her fingers touched the notebook with its marbled paper cover, and suddenly she had tears in her eyes. “When you come to a charcoal-burner’s hut, Dustfinger said, then you know you’re out of the Wayless Wood.” Farid’s voice came down to her like the sound of a strange bird. “I remember every word he said. If I want them to, words stick in my memory like flies sticking to resin. I don’t need paper to put them on, not me! You just have to find the charcoal-burners and the black patches they leave on the forest floor, he said, and then you know the world of humans isn’t far off. Follow the stream that springs from the water-nymphs’ pool. It will lead you straight to Lombrica and the Laughing Prince’s realm. Soon you’ll see his castle on the eastern slope of a hill, high above a river. It’s gray as a wasp’s nest, and the city is all around it, with a marketplace where you can breathe fire right up to the sky. . ”