Reckless (Free Preview) (19 page)

"What's
she still doing here?
"
Valiant asked in a whisper
one morning while the bone-weary Clara struggled to mount her horse.
 
"The things you humans do to your
females.
 
She belongs in a house.
 
Nice dresses, servants, cakes, a soft bed —
that's what she needs."

"And a
Dwarf for a husband, and a golden lock on her door to which only you have the
key," Jacob retorted.

"And why
not?
"
Valiant replied, giving Clara his most
ravishing smile.

The nights
were so cold that they stayed in inns.
 
Clara shared her bed with Fox, and Jacob slept next to the snoring
Dwarf.
 
But that was not the only reason
he slept badly.
 
In his dreams he was
smothered by red moths, and he would wake up drenched in sweat, tasting his own
blood in his mouth.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

On the evening
of the fourth day, they saw the first of the towers the Goyl had built along
their borders.
 
Slender stalagmites with
fibrous walls and windows of onyx, but Valiant knew a path through the
mountains to avoid them.

For centuries
the Goyl had been just one of the terrors of these lands, mentioned in the same
breath as Ogres and Brown Wolves.
 
All
along, their worst crime had been to look too human.
 
They were the despised twins, stone cousins
who dwelled in the dark.
 
Nowhere had
they been hunted as mercilessly as in the mountains they came from, and now the
Goyl were paying back in kind; it was in their old homeland that their rule was
most merciless.

Valiant
avoided the highways used by their troops, but they still kept meeting Goyl
patrols.
 
The Dwarf introduced Jacob and
Clara as rich clients who were planning to build a glass factory near the royal
fortress.
 
Jacob had bought Clara one of
the gold-embroidered skirts worn by the rich women of the area, and he had
swapped his own clothes for those of a wealthy merchant.
 
He barely recognized himself in the
fur-collared coat and the soft gray trousers.
 
Riding had become even more cumbersome for Clara in the wide skirt, but
at least the Goyl always waved them past after Valiant had told them his story.

On an evening
that already carried the scent of snow, they finally reached the river beyond
which the royal fortress lay.
 
The ferry
crossing was in Blenheim,
an
town the Goyl had taken
many years before.
 
Nearly half the
houses had bricked-up windows.
 
The
conquerors had even canopied many of the roads to protect themselves from the
sun.
 
And behind the harbor wall there
was a heavily guarded manhole, indicating that this town now also had an
underground district.

Fox
disappeared between the houses to catch herself one of the scrawny chickens
that were pecking at the cobblestones.
 
Jacob walked with Valiant and Clara across the square toward the ferry
landing.
 
The evening sky was glistening
on the murky waters, and on the opposite shore he could see a rectangular gate
gaping in the mountainside.

"Is that
the entrance to the fortress?
"
Jacob asked the
Dwarf.

But Valiant
shook his head.
 
"No.
 
No.
 
That's just one of the cave cities they built aboveground after the
fortress that got too crowded.
 
What you
want is farther inland, and it lies so deep underground that you'll wish you
could unlearn to breathe."

Jacob tethered
the horses and walked with Clara toward the jetty.
 
The ferryman was already padlocking his
boat.
 
He looked nearly as hideous as the
Trolls in the north, who were constantly being frightened by their own
reflections.
 
His boat had also seen
better days.
 
The shallow hull was clad
in iron, and when Jacob asked the ferryman whether he could take them across
before nightfall, his face warped into a scornful grin.

"This
river ain't a very hospi’able place after dark."
 
He spoke so loudly, as if he wanted to be
heard clear across the river.
 
"And
as of tomorrow, all crossings are to be suspended because the crowned Goyl will
emerge from his den to go to his wedding."

"Wedding?"
 
Valiant shrugged in response to Jacob's puzzled look.

"Where
have you been?" the ferryman sneered.
 
"Your Empress is giving him her daughter to buy peace from the
stone faces.
 
Tomorrow they'll swarm out
of their holes like termites, and the Goyl will ride to Vena on his Devil-train
and take the ‘Loveliest Princess in the Land’ with him to his burrow."

"Will the
Fairy go with him?"

Valiant cast
Jacob a curious glance.

The ferryman,
however, just shrugged.
 
"Sure.
 
The Goyl goes nowhere without her.
 
Not even when he marries another woman."

Once again, time is running out on you,
Jacob.

Jacob put his
hand in his pocket.
 
"Did you take a
Goyl officer across today?"

"What?"
 
The ferryman held a hand behind his ear.

"A Goyl officer.
 
Jasper skin?
 
Nearly blind in one eye.
 
He had a prisoner with him."

The ferryman
shot a sideways glance at the Goyl sentry by the wall, but the soldier was out
of earshot and had his back to them.
 
"Why?
 
You
one of them headhunters?"
 
The ferryman had lowered his voice, but he was still speaking so loudly
that now it was Jacob's turn to cast a worried glance at the sentry.
 
"His prisoner would fetch you a fine
price.
 
He had a color I ain't seen on
any of them yet."

Jacob would
have loved to punch his ugly face.
 
Instead, he pulled a gold sovereign from his handkerchief.
 
"You'll get another one on the other
side — if you take us across tonight."

The ferryman
eyed the coin greedily, but Valiant grabbed Jacob's arm and pulled him
aside.
 
"Let's wait until
tomorrow," he hissed at him.
 
"It's getting dark, and this river is swarming with Lorelei."

Lorelei.
 
Jacob looked
at the languid water.
 
His grandfather
had sometimes sung him a song about Lorelei.
 
The words had made him shudder as a child, but the stories told about
the Lorelei in this world were even more sinister.

Still.

He didn't have
much choice.

"No
worries!"
 
The ferryman put out his
calloused hand.
 
"We won't wake
them."

But once Jacob
had dropped the gold sovereign into his palm, the ferryman reached into his
baggy pockets, handing him and Valiant each a pair of wax earplugs, which
looked distinctly as if they had been used before.

"Just to
be on the safe side," he said.
 
"You never know."

He flashed
Clara a sly grin.

"You
won't need them.
 
The Lorelei
are
only after us men."

Fox came
running down the jetty as they led the horses onto the ferry.
 
She licked a few feathers from her fur before
jumping aboard the shallow boat.
 
The
horses were restless, but the ferryman pushed the gold coins into his pocket
and untied the ropes.

The ferry
drifted out onto the river.
 
Behind them the
houses of Blenheim dissolved into the twilight, and the only sound was the
lapping of the water against the metal-clad hull.
 
The opposite shore was slowly coming closer,
and the ferryman gave Jacob a wink.
 
But
the horses were still restless, and Fox was standing with pricked ears.

A voice wafted
across the water.

At first it
sounded like a bird singing, but then more and more like a woman's voice.
 
The voice coming from the direction of the
rocks that protruded from the water to their left, gray boulders that made it
seem as if the twilight itself had been turned to stone.
 
A shape moved on the rock and slid into the
water.
 
A second followed.
 
And then they were everywhere.

Valiant
uttered a curse.
 
"What did I tell
you?" he hissed at Jacob.
 
"Faster!" he shouted at the ferryman.
 
"Come on!"

The man seemed
to hear neither the Dwarf nor the voices that drifted ever more enticingly
across the water.
 
It was only when Jacob
put a hand on his shoulder that he spun around.

"He can't
hear!
"
Valiant screamed, already stuffing the wax
into his ears.
 
"That cunning dog is
nearly as deaf as a dead fish!"

The ferryman
just shrugged and clutched his oar more tightly.
 
Jacob, pushing the grimy earplugs into his
ears, wondered how often the ferryman had come back without his passengers.

The horses
shied.
 
Jacob could barely control
them.
 
The last daylight was fading, and
the shore inched toward them so painfully slowly, as if the water was dragging
them back again.
 
Clara stood close by
Jacob's side, and Fox posted herself protectively in front of him, though he
could see that her fur was bristling with fear.
 
The voices grew so loud that Jacob could hear them through the earplugs,
luring him into the water.
 
Clara pulled
him back from the guardrail, but the singing seeped through his skin like sweet
venom.
 
Heads emerged from the waves,
hair drifting on the water like spun gold, and as Clara let go of him for one
second to press her hands over her own aching ears, Jacob felt his fingers
reaching for the protective wax, pulling it out of his ears and throwing it
overboard.

The singing
ran through his brain like honey-coated knives.
 
Clara tried to hold him back as he staggered toward the edge of the
ferry, but Jacob shoved her away so hard that she stumbled against the ferryman.

Where were
they?
 
Jacob leaned over the water, and
at first he saw only his own reflection, but then it melted into a face.
 
It looked like the face of a woman except it
didn't have a nose.
 
The eyes were
silver, and fangs pushed over the pale green lips.
 
Arms reached out of the river, and fingers
closed around Jacob's wrist.
 
Another
hand grabbed his hair.
 
Water lapped into
the ferry.
 
The were
everywhere, reaching out for him, their scaly bodies pushed halfway out of the
water, their teeth bared.
 
Lorelei.
 
Much worse than the song.
 
Reality always was so much worse.

Fox dug her
teeth into one of the scaly arms that had grabbed him, but the other Lorelei
were
already pulling Jacob over the guardrail.
 
He struggled against them, but finally he lost
his footing.
 
Then he heard a shot, and
the mermaid sank back into the murky water, a gaping hole in her head.

Clara was
standing behind him, holding the pistol he had given her.
 
She shot another Lorelei who tried to pull
the Dwarf into the water.
 
The ferryman
got two with a knife, and Jacob himself killed one that had struck her claws
into Fox's hide.
 
As the dead bodies
drifted through the water, the other Lorelei backed off and set about devouring
their dead kin.

The sight made
Clara drop the pistol.
 
She buried her
face in her hands while Jacob and Valiant calmed the panicked horses and helped
the ferryman steer the wildly pitching boat toward the jetty.
 
The Lorelei screamed after them, but now
their voices merely sounded like a swarm of shrieking gulls.

They were
still howling as Jacob led the horses ashore.
 
The ferryman stepped in his way and held out his hand.
 
Valiant shoved him so hard that the man
nearly stumbled into the river.

"Oh, so
did you hear the bit about the second sovereign, did you?" the Dwarf
yelled at him.
 
"How about you give
us back the first one, or do you always get paid for delivering dinner to the
Lorelei?"

"What do
you want?
 
I took you across!" the
ferryman merely retorted.
 
"That
damn Fairy put them in the river.
 
Am I supposed
to let her ruin my business?
 
A deal's a
deal."

"All
right, then."
 
Jacob produced
another gold sovereign from his pocket.
 
They were on the other side, and that was all that mattered.
 
"But is there anything else we should be
on the lookout for?"