The Petrified Flesh Page 5

  His foe wasn’t very tall, and Jacob was more nimble, yet soon he felt the first cuts on his arms and shoulders. Come on, Jacob. Look at his clothes. Do you want to end up like that? He hacked off one of the needle-fingers with his knife, using the ensuing howls of rage to catch his breath—and barely managed to yank up his saber as the blades slashed at his face. Two needles cut his cheek like the claws of a cat. A third neatly pierced his arm. Jacob retreated between the trees, letting the blades cut into the bark and not his skin. But the Tailor freed himself again and again and didn’t seem to tire, while Jacob’s arms grew ever heavier.

  He cut off another finger as one of the blades hacked into the bark right next to him. The Tailor howled like a wolf, yet slashed at him with even greater rage—and there was no blood running from his wounds.

  You will end up as a pair of pants, Jacob! His breathing grew labored. His heart was racing. He stumbled over a root, and before Jacob could catch himself, the Tailor stabbed one of his needles deep into his shoulder. The pain buckled Jacob’s knees, and he had no breath left to call Fox back, as she jumped at the Tailor and sunk her teeth deep into his leg. She had so often saved Jacob’s skin, but never quite so literally. The Tailor tried to shake her off. He had forgotten about Jacob, and as he angrily struck out to hack his blades into the vixen’s red fur, Jacob slashed off his left lower arm with Chanute’s knife.

  The Tailor’s scream echoed through the Hungry Forest. He stared at the useless stump of his arm and at the bladed hand lying on the moss in front of him. Then he spun around, wheezing, to face Jacob. The remaining hand came down on him with deadly force. Three steel needles, murderous daggers. Jacob thought he could already feel their metal inside him, but before they could pierce his flesh, he rammed his knife deep in the Tailor’s chest.

  His enemy grunted, pressing his fingers to his terrible shirt. Then his knees buckled.

  Jacob staggered to the nearest tree, fighting for breath, while the Tailor thrashed in pain on the wet moss. One final gasp and then silence. Jacob did not drop his knife, even though the glazed eyes in the grimy face stared emptily skyward. He wasn’t convinced there was such a thing as death for the Tailor, but he let himself drop to his knees and stared at the lifeless body. He had no idea how long he remained crouched there. His skin was burning as if he’d been rolling around in broken glass. His shoulder was numb with pain, and in front of his eyes, the blades were still performing their murderous dance.

  “Jacob!” Fox’s voice seemed to come to him from afar. She was shivering as if the hounds had been after her. “Get up. It’s safer at the house!”

  He barely managed to get to his feet.

  The Tailor still wasn’t moving.

  *

  It seemed a very long way back to the gingerbread house, and when it finally appeared between the trees, Jacob saw Clara waiting behind the fence.

  “Oh, God!” was all she murmured when she saw the blood on his shirt. She fetched water from the well and washed the cuts. Jacob flinched as her fingers probed his shoulder.

  “This one is deep,” she said, as Fox anxiously crouched by his side. “I wish it would bleed more freely.”

  “There’s iodine and some bandages in my saddlebag.” Jacob was grateful that she was used to the sight of bloody wounds. “What about Will? Is he asleep?”

  “Yes.” And the jade was still there. She didn’t have to say it.

  Of course she wanted to know what had happened in the forest, but that was the last thing Jacob wanted to remember.

  Clara fetched the iodine from his saddlebag and dripped the tincture on his wound, but she still looked worried.

  “Fox, what plants do you usually roll in when you’re wounded?” she asked.

  The vixen found the herbs in the Witch’s garden. They gave off a bittersweet aroma as Clara plucked them apart and pressed them against Jacob’s pierced skin.

  “Like a born Witch,” he said. “Didn’t Will meet you in a hospital?”

  “Have you forgotten?” she replied. “In our world, the Witches work in hospitals.”

  She noticed the scars on his back when she pulled the shirt over his bandaged shoulder. “Those must have been terrible injuries.”

  Fox shot him a knowing look, but Jacob just buttoned his shirt with a shrug.

  “I survived.”

  Another event he didn’t want to remember.

  Clara handed back to him the key that opened every gate. Magical tools. Without Chanute’s knife he probably wouldn’t have come back.

  “Thank you,” Clara said. “I really don’t know what I would have done, if…” She didn’t finish. As if it could still come true in this world where things proved to be real that on the other side filled books and nightmares.

  Then she got up and went back into the house where Will was still sleeping.

  10

  FUR AND SKIN

  Jacob knew too much about gingerbread houses to sleep under the sugar-icing roof. He took the tin plate from his saddlebag and sat down with it in front of the well, polishing it until it filled with bread and cheese. It wasn’t a five-course dinner, like the one provided by the Wishing Table he had found for Therese of Austry, but at least the plate fit into a saddlebag.

  The red moon splashed rust into the night, and dawn was still hours away, but Jacob didn’t dare to go and find out whether the jade in Will’s skin had vanished. The vixen was licking her fur. The Tailor had kicked her, and she had several cuts on her body, but she would be fine. Human skin was so much more fragile than fur—or Goyl skin.

  “You should try to sleep,” she said.

  “I can’t sleep.”

  His shoulder ached, and he imagined the Witch’s black magic battling the Dark Fairy’s spell.

  “What are you going to do if the berries do work? Take them back?”

  Fox tried hard to sound unconcerned, but Jacob heard the unspoken question behind her words. Will you go with them? No matter how often he told her that he considered this world his true home, she still feared that one day he would climb up the tower to never return.

  “First of all: no, I won’t go with them,” he said. “But yes: I’ll bring them back to the ruin. And then, hopefully… happily ever after.”

  It is not easy to read a vixen’s face, but Jacob knew her well enough to feel her relief.

  “So once they’re gone…” She nestled close to his side when he shuddered in the cold night air, “what about us? Winter’s coming. We could head south, to Granady or Lombardia, and look for the Hourglass.”

  The Hourglass that stops time. Just a few weeks back, it had been all Jacob could think about. The Talking Mirror. The Glass Slipper. The Spinning Wheel that spun gold. There was always something to hunt for in this world. The fact that he did it so successfully made him forget most of the time that he still hadn’t found any trace of his father.

  He took a piece of bread from the plate and offered it to the vixen. “When did you last shift?”

  She backed away.

  “Fox!”

  She gave a sharp bark of disapproval, but then her shadow, cast by the moonlight, began to change its shape.

  Fox. The girl rising to her feet just a few steps away from him had hair as red as the pelt she so much preferred to her human skin. It fell down her back as though she was still wearing her fur. Even the russet dress she wore over her freckled skin shimmered in the moonlight as if it had been woven from the silky hair of the vixen.

  She had changed in these past months, nearly as suddenly as a fox cub becomes a vixen. But Jacob still saw the ten-year-old girl he had found one night crying at the bottom of the tower because he had stayed much longer in that other world than he had promised. The vixen had been following him for nearly a year by then without ever showing Jacob her human form, which he often reminded her she would one day lose if she kept wearing her fur too long. Although he knew she would always choose the fur should anything force her to decide. She had been seven years old when s
he had saved a vixen’s cubs from the sticks of her elder brothers. The next day she had found the furry dress on her bed. It had given Fox the body she had come to regard as her true self, and her greatest fear was that some day someone might steal the dress and take the fur away from her.

  Jacob leaned back against the well. The berries will work, Jacob. But the night seemed endless and finally he fell asleep, next to the girl who did not want the skin that his brother had to fight for. His sleep was troubled. Even his dreams were made from stone. Chanute, the paperboy on the square in Schwanstein, his mother, his father… they all froze into statues standing among the trees next to the dead Tailor.

  “Jacob! Wake up!”

  The vixen was standing beside him as if he had dreamed her human form as well. The first light of dawn was seeping through the pine trees and his shoulder ached so much that he barely managed to get to his feet. Everything will be fine, Jacob. Chanute knows this world like no one else. Remember how he exorcised the Gold-Raven’s spell from you? You were already half-dead.

  His heart beat faster nevertheless with every step he took toward the gingerbread house.

  The sweet smell inside nearly choked him. It was probably the reason that Will and Clara were still fast asleep. She had her arms wrapped around Will, whose face was so peaceful that it was as if he were sleeping in the bed of a prince, not a child-eater. But his left cheek was speckled with jade as if it had spilled onto his skin, and the nails on his left hand were nearly as black as the claws that had sown the Petrified Flesh into his neck.

  How loud a heart can beat.

  The berries will work.

  Jacob was still staring at the jade, when Will finally stirred. Jacob’s eyes told him everything. Will put his hand to his neck and traced the stone up to his cheek.

  Think, Jacob. But his mind drowned in the fear that was flooding his brother’s face.

  They let Clara sleep. Will followed Jacob outside like a sleepwalker caught in a nightmare.

  Fox backed away from him. The look she gave Jacob said only one thing.

  Lost.

  And that was how Will stood there. Lost. He touched his face, and for the first time Jacob could not find the trust his brother had always granted him so freely. Instead, he believed he saw all the blame he put on himself. All the If only you’d been more careful, Jacob… If you only hadn’t taken him so far east… If only…

  Will walked to the window behind the oven, and stared at the image the dark panes threw back at him. Above him the sugared roof was lined with soot-blackened cobwebs. Jacob couldn’t take his eyes off them. They reminded him of other webs, just as dark, spun to catch the night.

  What an idiot he was. What was he doing at a Witch’s house? This was the curse of a Fairy. A Fairy!

  Fox was watching him.

  “No!” she barked. “Forget it!”

  Sometimes she knew what he was thinking even before he himself could give voice to his thoughts.

  “She will definitely be able to help him. After all, she is her sister.”

  “You can’t go back to her! Ever.”

  Will turned around. “Go back to whom?”

  Jacob didn’t answer. He reached for the medallion beneath his shirt. His fingers still remembered picking the petal that he kept inside it. Just as his heart remembered the one from whom the leaf protected him.

  “Go and wake Clara,” he said to Will. “We’re leaving.”

  It was a long way—four days, maybe more—and they had to be faster than the jade.

  Fox was still looking at him.

  No, Jacob! No! Her eyes pleaded with him.

  Of course she remembered it all as well as he did, if not better.

  Must have been terrible injuries. Oh, yes. He had almost died.

  But this was the only way, if he wanted to save his brother.

  11

  HENTZAU

  The Man-Goyl they found in a deserted coach station was growing a skin of malachite. Half of his face was already grained with the dark green stone. Hentzau had let him go, like all the others they had found, with the advice to seek refuge in the nearest Goyl camp—before his own kind murdered him. But there was no gold yet in his eyes, and he still missed his human skin, so he ran away as if there was still a chance to return to his older life. Hentzau shuddered while he watched him stumble away over the barren fields. What if the Fairy one day decided to sow human flesh into his jasper skin?

  Malachite, bloodstone, carnelian… they had found the King’s color quite often. The Fairy seemed to make sure that many of the sons she gave to Kami’en resembled him. So far no trace of the stone they were looking for, though.

  Jade. The sacred stone of the Goyl.

  Their old women wore it as talismans around their necks and knelt before idols carved from it. Mothers sewed jade into their children’s clothes so the stone would grant them protection and make them fearless. But there had never been a Goyl with jade skin.

  How long would the Dark Fairy have him search? How long would he have to act like a fool in front of his soldiers and his King? What if she had invented the dream to separate him from Kami’en? Yes, that’s what she was after. She despised his devotion and his influence on the King. And instead of saying No, he’d run off, ever loyal and obedient, like a dog.

  Hentzau eyed the trees lining the deserted road. His soldiers were growing nervous. The Goyl avoided the Hungry Forest as much as the humans did. The Fairy knew that very well. This was a game. Her game. He was so tired of dancing like a puppet when she pulled the strings. And to watch Kami’en getting caught in them too, more and more every day.

  The moth settled on Hentzau’s chest just as he was about to give the order to mount up. It clawed itself onto his gray uniform, right above his heart, and Hentzau saw the jade Goyl just as clearly as the Fairy had in her dreams.

  The pale green stone ran through his human skin like a promise.

  It could not be.

  But then the deep brought forth a King, and when there came a time of great peril for him, the jade Goyl was summoned to come to his aid, born from glass and silver and a Fairy’s magic, and he protected the King from his enemies and made him invincible, even to death.

  Old women’s tales. As a child, Hentzau had loved nothing more than listening to them, because they gave the world meaning and a happy ending. A world that was clearly divided into above and below and was ruled by soft-fleshed gods. But since then Hentzau had sliced their soft flesh and learned that they weren’t gods, just as he had learned that the world made no sense and there were no happy endings.

  The images the moth made him see told another story. They claimed that the fairy tales were telling the truth. The jade Goyl… Hentzau saw him as clearly as if he could reach out and touch the pale green stone in his skin. A Fairy’s curse had brought the oldest myth of the Goyl to life. Had this been her plan all along? Had she sown all that petrified flesh only to reap him?

  What do you care, Hentzau? Find him!

  The moth spread its wings one more time, and he saw the fields he had fought on just a few months earlier. Fields that bordered the eastern boundary of the Hungry Forest. He was searching on the wrong side.

  Hentzau suppressed a curse and swatted the moth dead.

  His soldiers mounted their horses only reluctantly when he gave the order to ride east, as that meant they would have to continue through the Forest. Hentzau wiped the crushed moth from his uniform as he swung himself into the saddle. None of his men had seen the moth. They would all confirm he had found the jade Goyl without the Fairy’s help—just as he kept telling everyone that it was Kami’en who was winning the war, and not the curse of his immortal beloved.

  The jade Goyl.

  She had indeed dreamed the truth.

  Or spun the truth from a dream.

  12

  HIS OWN KIND

  It was early afternoon by the time they finally left the Hungry Forest behind. Dark clouds hung above fields and meadows,
patches of green, yellow, and brown that stretched to the horizon. Elderberry bushes bore heavy clusters of black berries, and Grass-Elves, their wings wet with rain, fluttered among the wildflowers by the roadside. One of them landed on Clara’s shoulder and for the first time she felt the enchantment that had been drawing Jacob through the mirror all these years. However, the farms they passed were deserted, and in the fields, cannons were rusting in the unharvested wheat.

  Jacob was grateful for the abandoned farms. Not even the hooded cloak could hide the jade any longer, and the dense rain pouring down made it shimmer on Will’s face like the glaze of a sinister potter.

  Jacob still hadn’t told Will where he was leading him, and he was grateful Will didn’t insist on knowing. Fox punished him with a frosty silence for his decision to seek help in the only place in this world that he had sworn never to go back to.

  The rain was falling by now so mercilessly that even the vixen’s fur no longer gave her any protection. Jacob’s wound throbbed, as if the Tailor was once again jabbing his needles into his shoulder, but every glance at Will’s face made him push away any thought of rest. They were running out of time. Sometimes the transformation took less than a week, but some bodies could resist longer. Jacob still hoped that his brother got some kind of protection from the fact that he hadn’t been born in this world, but it was a feeble hope. After all it hadn’t protected Will from the Fairy’s curse.

  Maybe it was the wounds that made Jacob careless. He had developed a fever and the pain numbed all his senses. He barely noticed the abandoned farm when it appeared by the side of the road. They had passed so many, and Fox only caught the men’s scent when it was already too late. There were eight of them, ragged but armed. They emerged so suddenly from the ruined barn that they had aimed their rifles at them before Jacob could draw his pistol. Two of them were wearing the long coats of the imperial troops, and a third the gray jacket of a Goyl soldier. Plunderers and deserters. The human debris of war. One of them had the trophies hanging from his belt that many imperial soldiers liked to display: the fingers of their stone-skinned enemies, in all the colors they could find.