Reckless (Free Preview) (13 page)

Clara's scent
was the same one Fox smelled on
herself
whenever she
lost her fur.
 
Girl.
 
Woman.
 
So much more vulnerable.
 
Strong and yet weak.
 
A heart that knew no armor.
 
The scent told Fox about all the things she
feared and from which the fur protected her.
 
Clara's hasty steps wrote them onto the dark soil, and Fox didn't need
her nose to know why Clara was running.
 
She herself had tried to run away from pain before.

The hazel
bushes and wild apple trees were harmless, but between them grew trunks with
bark as spiny as the shell of a chestnut.
 
Bird-trees.
 
Under their branches the sunlight dissolved into a gloomy brown, and
Clara had stumbled right into the wooden claws of one of them.
 
She screamed for Jacob, but he was far
away.
 
The tree curled its roots around
her arms and ankles, and its feathery servants already descended on her body,
their plumage as white as virgin snow, birds with sharp beaks and eyes like red
berries.

Fox jumped
among them, her teeth bared, deaf to their angry cries.
 
She snapped one of the birds in midjump,
before it could escape to the safety of the branches.
 
She felt its heart racing between her jaws,
but she did not bite; she just held on firmly, very firmly, until the tree let
go of Clara with an angry groan.

The roots slid
off Clara like snakes, and as she struggled back to her feet, they were already
slipping beneath the autumn-brown leaves, where they would be in wait for their
next victim.
 
The other birds chattered
angrily from the branches, ghostly white creatures among the yellowing
foliage.
 
But Fox held on to her quarry
until Clara staggered to her side.

Her face was
as white as the feathers that stuck to her dress.
 
Fox could smell not only the mortal fear on
her body but also the pain in her heart, raw, like a fresh wound.

They barely
spoke a word on their way back to the cave.
 
At one point Clara stopped, as if she could not go on, but then she did,
wordlessly.
 
When they reached the cave,
she looked at the dark entrance as if she hoped to see Will there, but then she
just crouched down in the grass next to the horses, with her back to the
cave.
 
She was unharmed, apart from a few
small grazes on her throat and ankles, but Fox saw how ashamed she was, of her
aching heart and for having run away.

Fox didn't
want her to leave.
 
She shifted her shape
and put her arms around Clara, who pressed her face against the furry dress that
so much resembled the vixen's coat.

"He
doesn't love me anymore."

"He
doesn't love anybody anymore," Fox whispered back.
 
"He's forgetting who he is."

She knew how
it felt.
 
Another skin,
another person.
 
But the fur she
had grown was soft and warm.
 
The stone
was hard and cold.

Clara looked
toward the cave.
 
Fox picked a feather
from her hair.

"Don't
leave!
"
Fox whispered to her.
 
"Jacob will help him.
 
You'll see."

If only he
were back already.

21

His Brother's Keeper

As Jacob rode
toward the cave, Fox came running to him.
 
Will and Clara were nowhere to be seen.

"Will you
look at
that!
 
That mangy vixen still following you around?
"
Valiant
jeered as Jacob lifted him from the horse.
 
Jacob had tied him with a silver chain, the only metal that Dwarfs could
not snap like thread.

Jacob would
not have been surprised if Fox had replied to Valiant's remark with a bite, but
she seemed not to have even noticed the Dwarf.
 
Something had happened.
 
Her fur
was standing on end, and she had some white feathers stuck to her back.

"You have
to talk to your brother," she said while Jacob tied the Dwarf to a nearby
tree.

"What
happened?"
 
Jacob cast a worried
glance at the cave where Will was hiding, but Fox pointed toward the
horses.
 
Clara was there, sleeping in the
shade of a beech.
 
Her shirt was torn,
and Jacob could see blood on her throat.

"They had
a fight," Fox said.
 
"He no
longer knows what he's doing."

The stone is faster than you, Jacob
.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Jacob found
Will in the darkest corner of the cave.
 
He was sitting on the floor, his back against the rock.

The roles have been switched, Jacob
.
 
It had always been he who, after doing some
mischief, had sat in the dark — in his bedroom, in the laundry room, in his
father's study.
 
"Jacob?
 
Where are you?
 
What have you done now?"
 
Always Jacob, but not Will.
 
Never Will.

His brother's
eyes gleamed in the dark like gold coins.

"What did
you say to Clara?"

Will looked at
his fingers and clenched them into a fist.

"I can't
remember."

"Don't
give me that!"

Will had never
been a good liar.

"You're
the one who wanted to bring her along.
 
Or can't you remember that, either?"

Jacob, stop it
.
 
But his shoulder was throbbing with pain, and
he was sick and tired of having to look after his brother.

"Fight
it!" he yelled at Will.
 
"You
can't always count on me to do it all for you."

Will slowly
got
to his feet.
 
His
movements had become more sinewy, and the times when he had barely reached up
to Jacob's shoulders had long passed.

"Count on
you?" he said.
 
"I quit doing
that when I was five.
 
Our mother took a
little longer, though.
 
And it was I who
got to listen to her crying herself to sleep at night for years."

Brothers.

It was as if
they were back in the apartment, in the wide hallway with all the empty rooms
and the dark spot on the wallpaper where their father's photograph had once
hung.

"Since
when does it make any sense to trust someone who is never there?"

Will's voice
dispensed his splinters casually, but they still stung.

"You have
a lot in common with him, not just your looks."

He scrutinized
Jacob as if he were
comparing
 
his
brother's face with their father's.

"Don't
you
worry.
 
I am
fighting it," he said.
 
"After
all, it's my skin, not yours.
 
And I'm
still here, right?
 
Doing what you tell
me to do.
 
Riding behind
you.
 
Sucking it
up."

Valiant's
voice could be heard outside.
 
He was
trying to convince Fox to free him from his silver shackles.

Will
nodded
toward the exit.
 
"Is that the guide you were talking about?"

"Yes."
 
Jacob forced himself to look at this stranger
with his brother's features.

Will
walked
toward the opening, shielding his eyes with his hand
as the sunlight found his face.
 
"I
am sorry for what I said to Clara," he said.
 
"I'll talk to her."

Then he
stepped outside.
 
And Jacob stood in the
darkness, still feeling the splinters — as if Will had smashed the mirror.

22

Dreams

It was night,
but the Dark Fairy did not sleep.
 
The
night was too beautiful to sleep it away.
 
But she still saw the Man-Goyl anyway.
 
By now she dreamed of him whether she was asleep or not.
 
Her curse had already turned most of his skin
to jade.
 
Jade.
 
Green.
 
Like life itself.
 
Petrified abundance.
 
Heart-stone, sown by the heartless.
 
He would be so much more beautiful once the
jade had replaced all his human skin, and once he fulfilled the promise of his
new flesh.
 
The future, as decided by the
past, all those things hidden in the folds of time.
 
They could only be known in dreams, which
revealed so much more to her than to men or Goyl, perhaps because time meant so
little when you were immortal.

She should
have stayed in the castle with the bricked-up windows and waited there for news
from Hentzau, but Kami’en had wanted to get back to the mountains where he was
born and return to his fortress under the earth.
 
He longed for the deep as she longed for the
night sky and for white lilies floating on water — although she still tried to
convince herself that love alone could feed her soul.

All she saw in
the train window was her own reflection, a pale phantom on a pane of glass,
behind which the world slipped past far too quickly.
 
Kami’en knew that she disliked trains almost
as much as she disliked the depths of the earth, so he'd had the walls of her
carriage decorated with intarsia:
 
ruby
blossoms and malachite leaves, a sky of lapis lazuli, hills of jade, and,
inlaid with moonstone, the shimmering surface of a lake.
 
That was love, wasn't it?

The stone
images were beautiful, very beautiful, and whenever she no longer could bear
seeing the hills and fields rush by as if they were dissolving into the fabric
of time, she would run her fingers over the inlaid blossoms.
 
And yet the noise of the train still hurt her
ears, and all the metal around her made her Fairy skin crawl.

Yes.
 
He loved her.
 
But he was still going to marry the dollface, the human princess with
the blank eyes and the beauty she owed to the lilies of the Fairies.
 
Amalie.
 
Her name sounded as bland as her face
looked.
 
How she would have loved to kill
her.
 
A poisoned comb,
a dress that would eat into her flesh while she twirled in it in front of her
golden mirrors.
 
How she would
scream and tear at her skin, which was so much softer than that of her
bridegroom.

The Fairy
pressed her forehead against the cool glass.
 
She couldn’t understand where all that jealousy was coming from.
 
After all, it wasn't the first time Kami’en
had taken himself another woman.
 
No Goyl
loved only once.
 
Nobody loved only
once...
Fairies least of all.

The Dark Fairy
knew all the stories about her kind:
 
that those who loved one of them invariably fell into madness; that they
had no hearts, just as they had neither fathers nor mothers.
 
At least that part was true.
 
She pressed her hand against her chest.
 
No heart.
 
So where did the love she felt come from?

Outside, the
stars were floating like blossoms on the inky waters of a river.
 
The Goyl feared water, even though it had
created their caves, and the sound of its dripping was as natural a part of
their cities as the sound of the wind above the ground.
 
They feared water so much that the sea had
restricted Kami’en's conquests, making him dream of the power of flight.
 
But she couldn't give him wings, any more
than she could give him children.
 
She
was born of the water he feared so much, and all the words that so much to them
— sister, brother, daughter, son — meant nothing to her.

The dollface
couldn't give him children, either, unless he wanted to sire one of those
crippled monsters some human women had borne his soldiers.
 
"How
often do I have to tell you?
 
I couldn’t
care less about her, but I need this peace."
 
He actually believed every one of his words,
but she knew him better than that.
 
He
did want peace, but even more than that he yearned to caress human skin and to
make one of them his wife.
 
His
fascination with all things human had begun to concern her as much as it did
his people.

Where did the
love come from?
 
What was it made
of?
 
Stone, like him?
 
Water, like her?

When she had
first set out to find him, it had just been a game.
 
A game with the toy her dreams had shown
her.
 
The Goyl who was
smashing the world to pieces, who disregarded its rules, just as she did.
 
The Fairies played with this world; the last
one to have done so now wore a skin of bark.
 
And yet she had still dispatched her moths to find Kami’en.
 
The tent in which she first met him had
smelled of blood, of the death she did not understand, and still she had
thought of it all as a game.
 
She had
promised him the world.
 
His flesh in the flesh of his enemies.
 
And much too late had she
realized what he had sown in her.
 
Love.
 
Worst of all poisons.