Inkheart 1 - Inkheart by Cornelia Funke

Author:Cornelia Funke
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781906427979
Publisher: Chicken House
Published: 2003-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

27

A Good Place To Stay

I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

and How and Where and Who.

Rudyard Kipling,

The Elephant’s Child

They did not set off to join Elinor after Dustfinger had left them. ‘Meggie, I know I promised we would,’ said Mo, as they stood in the square in front of the war memorial, feeling rather at a loss. ‘But I’d like to leave the journey until tomorrow. As I told you before, there’s something else I have to discuss with Fenoglio.’

The old man was still standing where he had been when he spoke to Dustfinger, staring down the road. His grandchildren were pulling at him and talking to him, but he didn’t seem to notice them.

‘What exactly do you want to discuss with him?’

Mo sat on the steps in front of the memorial and made Meggie sit down beside him. ‘Do you see those names?’ he asked, pointing up at the chiselled letters listing people no longer alive. ‘There’s a family behind every name – a mother or father, brothers and sisters, perhaps a wife. If one of them were to find out that letters can be brought to life, that someone who’s only a name now could become flesh and blood again, don’t you think he or she would do anything, anything at all, to make it happen?’

Meggie looked at the long list. Someone had painted a heart next to the name at the top, and there was a bunch of dried flowers on the stone steps in front of the memorial.

‘No one can bring back the dead, Meggie,’ Mo went on. ‘Perhaps it’s true that death is only the beginning of a new story, but no one has ever read the book in which it’s written, and the writer of that book certainly doesn’t live in a little village on the coast playing football with his grandchildren. Your mother’s name isn’t on a stone like this but hidden somewhere in a book, and I have an idea which just might make it possible to alter what happened nine years ago.’

‘You’re going back!’

‘No, I’m not. I gave you my word. Have I ever broken it?’

Meggie shook her head. You broke your word to Dustfinger, she thought, but she didn’t say so out loud.

‘There you are, then,’ said Mo. ‘I want to talk to Fenoglio. That’s the only reason why I want to stay.’

Meggie looked at the sea. The sun had broken through the clouds, and all of a sudden the water was glistening and shining as if someone had poured paint into it.

‘It’s not far from here,’ she murmured.

‘What isn’t?’

‘Capricorn’s village.’

Mo looked eastward. ‘Yes, it’s odd that he felt drawn here of all places, don’t you think? As if he were looking for somewhere resembling the countryside of his own story.’

‘Suppose he finds us?’

‘Nonsense. Do you know how many villages there are along this coast?’

Meggie shrugged her shoulders. ‘He found you before, even when you were far, far away.

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