The Petrified Flesh Page 12

  “Look at him, Nesser,” Hentzau said, forcing Will’s face toward her. “The jade Goyl… I admit I still had doubts. But it looks like he is not just a fairy tale.”

  Will tried to ram his head into the Goyl’s face, but he could barely keep his eyes open and Hentzau laughed.

  “Yes, you’re one of us!” he said. “Even though you may not admit it yet. Tie his hands!” he ordered the She-Goyl.

  “Do we take him to the Fairy?” she asked, while she grabbed Will. “Or to the King?”

  “Is there still a difference?” Hentzau replied. He went over to Jacob’s body and eyed him as a hunter would his prey.

  “His face looks familiar. What’s his name?” he asked Will.

  Will didn’t answer.

  “Never mind,” the Goyl said, turning away. “You Slugskins all look the same, anyway. Round up the horses.”

  Nesser obeyed, but her eyes were still on Fox and Clara. Human women… so different and still so disturbingly similar when they cried.

  “No!” Clara sobbed when Hentzau pushed Will toward Jacob’s mare. “Where are you taking him?”

  “What does it matter to you?” the Goyl said over his shoulder. “Forget him! He will soon forget you.”

  30

  A SHROUD OF RED WINGS

  The gunshot wound looked much less harmful than the injuries Jacob had suffered from the unicorns. Back then, however, he had been breathing, and Fox had felt his faint pulse. Now he was just still.

  So much pain. She wanted to dig the vixen’s teeth into her human flesh and just not feel it anymore. But her fur wouldn’t come back, and she felt as vulnerable and lost as an abandoned child.

  Clara was cowering next to her, her arms clasped around her knees. She had stopped crying, but just sat there, as if someone had cut out her heart. She was the first to see the Dwarf.

  Valiant did his best to look as innocent as if they’d caught him picking mushrooms, but he was coming closer. Who else but a Dwarf could have told the Goyl that the only way out of the Fairy realm was through the unicorn graveyard?

  Fox wiped the tears from her eyes and felt in the wet grass for Jacob’s pistol.

  “Wait! Wait! What are you doing?” Valiant yelled as she pointed the muzzle at him, and he disappeared with surprising agility behind the nearest bush. “How could I know they’d shoot him right away? I thought they just wanted his brother.”

  Clara got to her feet.

  “Shoot him, Fox,” she said. “If you don’t, I will.”

  “They caught me on my way back to the gorge!” Valiant clamored. “What was I supposed to do? Get myself killed as well?”

  “And now? Why are you still here?” Fox yelled at him. “Come to plunder a corpse on your way back?”

  “That’s outrageous! I’m here to rescue you!” the Dwarf retorted with genuine indignation. “Two beautiful girls, all alone, lost and helpless…”

  “… so helpless that we’ll surely pay you to save us?”

  The silence answering from the bush was very telling, and Fox lifted the pistol again. If only she could stop the tears. They blurred everything: the valley, the bush where the treacherous Dwarf was hiding, and Jacob’s silent face.

  “Fox!” Clara put a hand on her arm.

  A red moth had landed on Jacob’s blood-soaked chest. Another spread her wings on his brow.

  Fox dropped the pistol and chased them away.

  “Go and tell your mistress he’s never coming back!” she shouted, her voice drowning in tears. “Didn’t I tell you,” she whispered leaning over Jacob, “don’t go back to the Fairies! This time it’ll kill you.”

  Another moth landed on the lifeless body. More and more of them fluttered out from under the trees. They settled on him in such profusion that they looked like flowers sprouting from his shattered flesh.

  Clara helped Fox to drive them away, but there were so many that finally they had to give up and simply watched as the moths covered Jacob thoroughly with their wings, as if the Red Fairy was claiming him even in death.

  “We have to bury him, Fox,” Clara whispered.

  Fox pulled Jacob’s coat over the terrible wound. Bury him. No. No, she couldn’t.

  “I’ll do it.” Valiant had actually dared to come closer. He picked up the rifle Jacob had dropped, and slapped the barrel flat with his bare hand, as if the metal were as soft as clay.

  “Bloody waste!” he muttered, shaping the rifle into a spade. “Now none of us will get those two pounds of red moonstone! But no! Why listen to a Dwarf? We could have just shared the reward and the fool would still be alive!”

  He dug the grave as effortlessly as if he’d dug many graves in his life, while Fox was sitting by Jacob’s side holding his hand. So cold. So lifeless. The pain devoured her heart. It made her remember the other pain that had brought them together. She remembered the iron teeth in her flesh, the steps approaching, and then, for the first time, Jacob’s face and his hands when he had freed her leg. He couldn’t be gone. He couldn’t.

  The moths were still covering him like a shroud, when Valiant threw down the rifle-turned-shovel and brushed the soil off his hands.

  “Right,” he said. “Let’s get him in there.” He leaned over Jacob. “But first we should check his pockets. No point in letting perfectly good gold sovereigns rot in the ground.”

  That brought Fox’s fur back in an instant.

  “Don’t touch him!” She bared her fangs. Oh, she wanted to tear him to shreds, the treacherous Dwarf. Why didn’t she do it? Bite him, Fox. Tear his flesh off his bones. Maybe that will ease the pain.

  Valiant tried to fend her off with the shovel-rifle, but the vixen tore his coat and jumped at his throat. She already felt his skin under her teeth when Clara grabbed her by the fur and pulled her back.

  “Fox, he is right!” she whispered, while the vixen was trembling with blood lust. Yes, she wanted the Dwarf’s blood in return for Jacob’s. A river of his blood. But Clara still held her back.

  “We may need the Dwarf alive, Fox. As a guide. And we’ll need Jacob’s money. His weapons. The compass… everything he had with him. To find Will. Jacob would have wanted us to find him, wouldn’t he?”

  Behind them Valiant snorted in disbelief. “Will? Are you talking about the jade Goyl?”

  Clara bent over Jacob and put her hand in his coat pocket. Her fingers found the handkerchief and two gold coins dropped into the grass.

  “They looked so different, didn’t they?” Clara murmured. “Do you have siblings, Fox?”

  The vixen pressed against the lifeless body.

  “Yes, three brothers. But two of them are worthless.”

  The moths rose like red smoke, swirling above them. Then they fluttered toward the trees as if they had heard their mistress’s voice. Or had done what they had come for.

  “Fox!” Clara whispered.

  The vixen had seen it too. She backed away from Jacob.

  His torn body shuddered. His lips gasped for air.

  No. The Dead don’t come back.

  Fox took another step back, her fur on end.

  Even the Dwarf’s face was gray with fear. And Clara stared at Jacob, as if she was watching his ghost stirring in his blood-soaked clothes.

  He slowly sat up and looked around as disoriented as if someone had woken him too abruptly from a dream. Not a bad dream, it seemed. Just a dream. Then he noticed the blood on his shirt. He touched it as if it was another man’s.

  “What happened?”

  His eyes were on Fox, as if she was the only thing he remembered. She shifted shape and knelt down by his side.

  His hand was warm again when she grabbed it. He was not gone. He was still here. The joy cut into her heart as sharply as the pain.

  “You were dead,” she said.

  It felt strange to say it, while looking at him so alive.

  “The Goyl shot you.” Clara’s voice was barely a whisper. “It was a terrible wound.”

  Jacob looked at
them both incredulously. His eyes were still dazed, his movements slow as if he had to get used to his body again. He barely managed to unbutton the torn and bloody shreds of his shirt.

  There was no wound. Not a trace of it. Instead right above his heart there was the imprint of a moth, as dark as a birthmark. Jacob drove his fingers over its wings. He was not fully back yet. Fox could see that in his eyes. Where had he been? She didn’t ask. There would be time for it. But not now.

  For Jacob had noticed that someone was missing.

  “Where’s Will?”

  Yes, Fox had feared that question.

  Jacob struggled to his feet. He had noticed the Dwarf. “What is he doing here?”

  Valiant took a few steps back.

  “I heard rumors that the Fairies sometimes bring their lovers back,” he said picking up the shovel-rifle, “but I wouldn’t have thought it includes the ones who run out on them…”

  “Where’s my brother?” Jacob took an unsteady step toward the Dwarf, but Valiant managed to evade him with a quick leap across the empty grave.

  “Easy now!” he called, waving the rifle at Jacob. “How am I supposed to tell you if you break my neck?”

  Clara still held the handkerchief and the gold sovereigns in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, holding both out to Jacob, “I took these to find Will.”

  Jacob didn’t move his eyes away from Valiant, while he pushed the coins and the handkerchief back into his pockets. “So the Goyl took him. Do I have that right? And I guess the Dwarf told them where to find him?”

  He reached for his pistol, still lying in the grass where Fox had dropped it.

  “Don’t shoot him yet,” she said, stepping to his side. “He probably knows where they took your brother.”

  “That’s right. I do.” Valiant snapped the bent barrel off the rifle as if it were a brittle twig. “And I had the muzzle of a Goyl rifle at my head when I told them where to find him. What would you have done? Well, probably you’d let them shoot you as your old lover can bring you back from the Dead. Most of us are not that fortunate.”

  “So where did they take him?” Clara asked.

  “The Goyl’s Royal Fortress,” Valiant purred. “The last human who tried to sneak in there was an imperial spy. Kami’en had him cast in amber and put on display right next to the main gate. Terrible sight.”

  Jacob picked up the pistol. “But of course you know a way to get in.”

  Valiant’s mouth stretched into such a smug grin that Fox would have been tempted to shoot him after all. “Of course.”

  “How much?” Jacob sounded as if he was still somewhere else.

  Fox grabbed his arm when she felt him sway. He was back, as pale as a ghost, but back and breathing. She wanted to hold him and feel his heart beating against hers. The vixen didn’t have wishes like that. It was the human skin. It made life complicated. Life, friendship, love… She loved him so much.

  Valiant formed the metal of the broken rifle into a pistol.

  “How much? That gold tree you sold to the Empress last year… word is she gave you a cutting.”

  Fox cast Jacob a glance that only he could read. There was indeed a cutting. He had planted it in the ruin’s overgrown gardens. It had grown fast but so far the only gold the young tree had yielded was its foul-smelling pollen.

  Still, Jacob managed to produce an expression of honest indignation.

  “That’s an outrageous price!”

  “On the contrary.” Valiant’s eyes were glinting as if he could already feel the gold raining down on his shoulders. “It’s a very modest demand, considering that we’ll probably all end up cast in amber.”

  Fox would have loved to push him into the empty grave.

  31

  WHAT IF…

  Without the horses it took them hours to reach a road that led from the valley up into the mountains. Jacob missed the mare and hoped the Goyl were as kind to their horses as rumors said. One’s horse was, if well chosen, a treasured companion behind the mirror, and Jacob remembered them all, the ones he had lost, the ones that had run away… The two horses he finally bought from a farmer were no competition for any of those but better than walking. The Dwarf protested elaborately when Jacob acquired a donkey for him, but he soon was so pleased with it that he filled their ears with musings about the advantages of a smaller body.

  The paths leading north got steeper with every mile, but Jacob only stopped when even the donkey was stumbling in the dark. They found shelter beneath a ledge that shielded them from the wind, and soon Valiant was snoring as loudly as if he had crawled into one of the soft beds Dwarf inns were famous for. The vixen disappeared into the night to hunt and Jacob advised Clara to sleep behind the horses so that they could keep her warm.

  He himself lit a fire with some dry wood he’d found among the rocks, and stared into the night, listening to his own heartbeat, as probably anyone does if he has come back from the Dead. He remembered darkness. And then light. The feeling of having left something important unfinished, and the wish to forget about it and to get lost in the light. Peace. Yes, he remembered that feeling of peace very clearly. Of being everything and nothing. And then… he had heard the voice of the Fairy. Miranda’s voice, calling him. And there had been wings. Red wings. And Fox. Yes, she was what he had come back for. Not the Fairy, not even Will, just the vixen.

  But now everything was coming back, while the fire was dancing away the night: the unicorn graveyard, the rose, and the way his brother had looked at him when he had felt its spell. When you wake up, all this will be over, I promise.

  How, Jacob? Even if the Dwarf didn’t double-cross him again. Even if he managed to find the Dark Fairy in the Goyl’s Royal Fortress. How was he going to get close enough to her to use what her sister had revealed to him?

  “Jacob?” Clara was standing behind him, a horse blanket around her shoulders. “You can’t sleep?”

  Jacob could still hear the disbelief in her voice that he was actually alive. And how much it frightened her. It frightened him too.

  “Yes. That is to be expected, isn’t it?” he answered. “A few minutes in Death make up for many hours of sleep, I guess.”

  An owl was screaming above them. In this world, owls were regarded as the souls of dead Witches. Clara knelt down next to him and held her hands above the warming flames.

  “Please tell me. What did you learn on that island?”

  She looked terribly tired.

  “I can’t tell you. I had to promise.” Still only half the truth, but he wouldn’t tell her what he hadn’t told Fox. Although at some point he would need her help.

  Her eyes were as blue as Will’s. Before they had been drowned in gold.

  “What if he likes the jade?” She spoke the words so softly that he could barely hear them. “Did you ever ask yourself that question?”

  The flames striped her face with dancing shadows.

  “What if… what if Will doesn’t want us to help him?”

  Yes, what if…

  Of course, Jacob wanted to reply, of course, I have asked myself that question. But he couldn’t offer Clara any answer. And certainly not this night with a heart still beating in his chest as if it had forgotten how to do so.

  32

  THE RIVER

  The Goyl’s Royal Fortress lay deep under a mountain range that rose more than two hundred miles north of the Fairies’ valley. It soon showed in the weather. Jacob was not the only one who wished for the warmth on the Fairy’s island when their blankets were covered with frost in the mornings and the rain fell so relentlessly from a gray sky that their clothes wouldn’t dry.

  “What’s she still doing here?” Valiant asked, when after another cold night Clara struggled to mount her horse. “Do all humans treat their women like this? 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?” Fox
snapped.

  “Why not?” Valiant replied, giving Clara his most ravishing smile.

  After two days she looked so pale with exhaustion that even Jacob started to worry and had them spend the nights under the warming roofs of inns. Fox shared the bed with Clara while he put up with the Dwarf, but it was not Valiant’s snoring that kept him awake. He still sometimes believed he tasted his own blood in his mouth, and sometimes he felt the gaping wound over his heart that the others had told him about.

  On the evening of the fourth day, they reached one of the towers the Goyl built to guard their aboveground borders with walls bricked so seamlessly that most human buildings looked primitive in comparison. Behind its onyx windows usually at least a dozen guards were keeping watch, but Valiant got them past unseen. In these lands the Goyl had been mentioned for centuries in the same breath as Ogres and Brown Wolves, but their worst crime had always been their resemblance to humans. They were the stone-skinned cousins who dwelled in the deep, mankind’s reflection in a black mirror. Nowhere had they been hunted as mercilessly as in the mountains from which they came, and the Goyl were paying back everyone by ruling their old homeland with even less mercy than their other conquests.

  Valiant avoided the highways used by their troops, but from time to time they couldn’t avoid crossing paths with Goyl patrols. While the vixen just slipped past them, Valiant 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, while he had swapped his clothes for those of a wealthy merchant, though he barely recognized himself in the fur-collared coat and the soft gray trousers. Riding became even more cumbersome for Clara in the long skirt, but the Goyl waved them past each time Valiant told his story.

  The air carried the scent of snow the evening that they finally reached the river beyond which the Royal Fortress lay. The ferry crossing was in Blenheim, a town the Goyl had captured many years before. Nearly half the houses had bricked-up windows; they had canopied many roads to protect themselves from the sun; and behind the harbor wall, Jacob spotted a heavily guarded manhole, indicating one of the underground districts Kami’en had ordered built beneath many human cities.