The Petrified Flesh Read online

  For one brief moment, Jacob nursed the foolish hope that they wouldn’t notice the jade. Will had drawn the hood of his cloak deep over his face. However, a scrawny weasel of a man saw the stone on Will’s hand as he dragged him from his horse.

  He yanked the hood off Will’s head.

  Clara attempted to shield Will, but the one with the Goyl jacket slapped her and pushed her roughly out of the way. Will’s face turned into that of a stranger. It was the first time Jacob saw such a powerful desire to hurt someone in his brother’s gentle features. Will freed himself and drove his elbow so violently into the man’s face, that blood poured out of his nose. Jacob wanted to come to Will’s aid, but the gang’s leader put the muzzle of his rifle to his chest.

  He was a heavyset fellow with only three fingers on his left hand. His threadbare coat was covered with the semiprecious stones Goyl officers wore on their collars to denote rank. There was a lot of booty to be grabbed on the battlefields once the living left the dead behind.

  “Why haven’t you shot that Man-Goyl yet?” the leader asked while he searched Jacob’s pockets. “Haven’t you heard? There are no more rewards to be had for them now that our Empress started negotiating with their King.”

  “Really?” Jacob said. “I heard in Terpevas the Dwarfs still pay very well for them.”

  Threefingers pulled out the gold-making handkerchief. Luckily he shoved it back heedlessly before it dropped coins into his callused hand.

  Distract him, Jacob. Talk.

  Behind them, the vixen scurried into one of the ruined stables. Jacob could feel Clara looking at him pleadingly, but what did she expect? That he could take on eight men at once?

  “Terpevas?” Threefingers poured out the contents of Jacob’s purse and gave a disappointed grunt when all he found were a few copper coins. “That’s where you were heading? Bad luck. No Goyl gets past us alive, even if those damned Dwarfs pay their weight in gold.”

  The others were still staring at Will, as if they had called up a rabid dog. They were going to kill him. Out of hatred or just for the fun of it. They would adorn their belts with his brother’s fingers.

  Do something, Jacob! But what?

  “OK, I lied. We are not heading for Terpevas.” The rain was running down his face, and the weasel was jabbing his rifle under Will’s chin.

  Talk, Jacob.

  “He is my brother. I am taking him to someone who will give him back his human skin. Let us go, and in a week’s time I’ll be back with a sack of gold.”

  “Sure!” Threefingers nodded to the others. “Take them behind the barn. Burn the Goyl. The girl is mine. And this one—” he pointed at Jacob, “—shoot him in the head. I like his clothes.”

  Jacob pushed away the two men who reached out to grab him, but a third put a knife to his throat. He was wearing the clothes of a peasant because most plunderers hadn’t always been robbers.

  “What are you talking about?” he hissed into Jacob’s ear. “Nothing can give them their skin back. I shot my own son when the moonstone started growing on his forehead!”

  The blade pushed against his throat with such ferocity that Jacob could barely breathe.

  “It’s the curse of the Dark Fairy!” he croaked. “So I’m taking him to her red sister. She’ll break it.”

  Now they all backed away. Fairy. Five letters, melting all the magic and all the terror of this world into one word. And surely they had all heard about the Dark Fairy’s red sister, although she rarely showed herself amongst mortals.

  The pressure of the knife eased, but the man’s face was still contorted with rage and helpless grief. Jacob was tempted to ask him how old his son had been.

  “You’re lying! Nobody just goes to see a Fairy.” The boy who stammered these words was fifteen at the most. “They come and get you.”

  “I know a way.” Keep talking, Jacob. “I’ve visited the Red One before.”

  “Really? So why aren’t you dead then?” The knife was breaking his skin. “Or crazy, like the ones who come back and then drown themselves in the nearest pond?”

  Jacob felt Will staring at him. What was he thinking? That his older brother was telling fairy tales, just as he had done when they were young and Will couldn’t sleep?

  “They say the Red Fairy is not as powerful as her dark sister,” said one.

  “She is powerful enough and she will get rid of the stone,” Jacob replied, hoarse from the pressure of the knife. But before that, you’ll kill us. And it still won’t bring back your son.

  The weasel pushed the muzzle of his rifle into Will’s jade-speckled cheek. “Going to see the Fairies? Can’t you see he’s making fun of you? Come on. I want to see the Goyl burn!”

  He shoved Will in the direction of the barn. Two of the others grabbed Clara. Now, Jacob. What have you got to lose?

  But Threefingers suddenly spun around and stared past the stable to the south. Through the rain came the snorting of horses.

  Riders.

  They came over the fallow fields on horses as gray as their uniforms, and Will’s face said very clearly who they were, even before the weasel yelled it to the others.

  “Goyl!”

  The peasant pointed his rifle at Will, as if he should have been the one to call them, but Jacob shot him before he could pull the trigger. Three of the Goyl drew their sabers. They still preferred fighting with their swords, though they won their battles by now with guns and cannons.

  Clara stared, dumbfounded, at the stone faces. Then she looked at Jacob. Yes, that’s what he’s becoming. You still love him?

  The bandits sought cover behind a toppled cart. They had clearly forgotten about their prisoners, and Jacob quickly pushed Will and Clara toward the horses.

  “Fox!” he yelled, grabbing the mare’s reins. Where was she?

  Two of the Goyl fell off their horses; the others took cover behind the barn. Threefingers was a good shot.

  Clara was already sitting on her horse, but Will was just standing there, staring across the yard at the Goyl.

  “Get on your horse, Will!” Jacob screamed as he swung himself onto his mare.

  But his brother didn’t stir.

  Jacob was about to drive his horse toward Will when he saw Fox scamper out of the barn. She was limping, and the weasel was aiming his rifle at her. Jacob shot him down, but just as he reined in the mare and leaned forward to grab the vixen, he was hit on his injured shoulder by the butt of a rifle. The boy. He was holding his empty weapon by the barrel, ready to strike out again, as if by killing Jacob he could slay his own fear.

  The pain made everything swim in front of Jacob’s eyes. He managed to draw his pistol, but the Goyl were quicker. They swarmed out from behind the barn, and one of their bullets struck the boy in the back.

  Jacob managed to grab Fox and lifted her into the saddle. Will had also swung himself back onto his horse, though he was still staring at the Goyl.

  “Will!” Jacob yelled again. “Ride, dammit!”

  His brother didn’t even look at him.

  “Will!” Clara screamed, glancing desperately at the fighting men.

  But Will only came to his senses when Jacob snatched his reins.

  “Ride!” he yelled at him once more. “Ride, and don’t look back.”

  And at last his brother turned his horse.

  13

  THE USE OF DAUGHTERS

  Defeated. Therese of Austry was standing by the window, staring down at the palace guards. They were patrolling in their white uniforms as if nothing had happened. All of Vena lay below her as if nothing had happened, with its cupolas and towers, its pride and bombast of a triumphant past. But she had lost a war. For the first time. And every night she dreamed she was drowning in bloody water, which invariably turned into the pale-red carnelian skin of her foe.

  For the past hour, her ministers and generals had been explaining to her why she couldn’t blame them for the defeat. They were all gathered in her audience chamber, decorated with th
e medals she’d given them, and they tried to put the blame on her. “We warned you, Your Majesty!” “The Goyl have better rifles.” “Our troops’ weapons are obsolete. Their trains are faster. Their roads are better…” But the King with the carnelian skin was winning this war because he had a better grasp of strategy than all of them put together. And because he had a mistress who, for the first time in more than three hundred years, had used the magic of the Fairies in the service of a mortal king.

  A carriage drew up to the gate.

  There they were. Her enemies. Three Goyl officers. They acted so civilized. They weren’t even in uniform. How she would have loved to order her guards to drag them through the courtyard and club them to death, as her grandfather would have done. But these were different times. Now it was the Goyl who did the clubbing. So her counselors would sit down with them, offer them food that they despised, and negotiate terms of surrender.

  The servants opened the coach’s doors, and the Empress turned her back to the window as the Goyl climbed the steps of the palace.

  They were still talking, all her useless, bemedaled generals, while her ancestors stared down at her from the golden silk-draped walls. Right next to the door was a portrait of her father, gaunt and upright like a stork, continuously at war with his royal brother from Lotharaine, just as she had been fighting his son, the Crookback, for years. Next to her father was his father who, like the Goyl King, had once had an affair with a Fairy. His yearning for her had finally driven him to drown himself in the lily pond behind the palace. He’d had himself portrayed as a knight who had caught one of the Fairies’ unicorns. His favorite horse had played the unicorn, with a narwhal horn attached to its head. The portrait looked as ludicrous as the one that showed another of her ancestors standing next to a slain Giant’s head. Therese had always preferred the painting at the very end of the illustrious row of her great-grandfather with his elder brother, who had been disinherited because he had taken his alchemical experiments too seriously. Her father had been outraged that the painter had shown his great-uncle’s blind eyes so realistically. Therese, though, would push a chair under the picture as a child, to get a closer look at the scars around those empty eyes. He’d supposedly been blinded by an experiment in which he had tried to turn his own heart into gold, and yet of all her ancestors, he was the only one of all the portraits who was smiling—which had always made her think that his experiment must have been successful and that he indeed had a golden heart beating in his chest.

  Men. All of them. Crazy or sane. Always just men.

  For centuries they had claimed the exclusive right to ascend to the throne of Austry. That had changed only because her father had sired four daughters but not a single son.

  Therese, too, had no son, just a daughter. But she had never intended to turn Amalie into a bargaining chip, as her father had done with her younger sisters. One for the Crookback in his sinister castle in Lotharaine; one for her cousin in Albion who paid far more attention to his dogs and the hunting season than to his wife; the youngest had been bartered away to one of the eastern Wolf-Lords who had already buried two wives.

  No. Therese had wanted to put her daughter on the throne, to see her portrait on that wall, framed in gold, between all those men. Amalie of Austry, daughter of Therese, who had once dreamed of being called “The Great” as she had defeated so many men. But not the one with the carnelian skin. And now she would have to give him her daughter or they would all drown in that bloody water—she, her daughter, her people, her throne, this city, and the whole country, together with those idiots who were still holding forth about why they hadn’t been able to win this war. Therese’s father would have had them all executed. But then what? The next lot wouldn’t be any better, and their blood would not bring back all the soldiers she had lost, the provinces that now belonged to the Goyl, nor her pride, which in the past six months had been choked in the mud of four battlefields.

  “Enough!”

  One word, and the room where her great-grandfather used to sign death warrants fell silent. Power. It still intoxicated Therese like a good wine.

  Look at them, Therese. How they drew their vain heads between their shoulders. Wouldn’t it be nice to have them all chopped off after all?

  The Empress adjusted the tiara of Elven glass that her great-grandmother had worn, and waved one of the Court Dwarfs to her desk. They were the only Dwarfs in Austry who still wore beards. Servants, bodyguards, confidants. Generations of service to her family, and still in the same livery they had worn for over two hundred years. Lace collars over black velvet, and then those ridiculously wide breeches. Tasteless and completely unfashionable, but you couldn’t argue with Dwarfs about tradition any more than you could argue with priests about religion.

  “Write,” she ordered.

  The Dwarf climbed onto her chair. He had to kneel on the pale golden cushion. Auberon, her favorite and the smartest of them all. The hand that reached for the quill was as small as a child’s, but his hands would break iron chains as easily as her cook’s hands cracked an egg.

  “We, Therese of Austry—” Her ancestors stared down at her disapprovingly. What did they know of kings brought forth from the bowels of the earth and a Fairy who turned human skin to stone to make it resemble the skin of her lover? “—herewith offer to Kami’en, King of the Goyl, our daughter Amalie’s hand in marriage, to bring an end to the war and to bring peace to our two great nations.”

  How the silence erupted. As if her words had shattered the glass house in which they had all been sitting. But it wasn’t she, it was the Goyl who had struck the blow, and now she had to give him her daughter.

  The Empress turned her back on them, silencing their angered voices. Only the rustle of her dress followed her as she moved toward the doors, so tall that they seemed to be built not for humans but for the Giants who, thanks to her great-grandfather’s efforts, had been driven to extinction fifty years ago.

  Power. Intoxicating like wine when one possessed it. Like poison when it was lost. Therese already felt it eating away at her.

  Defeated.

  14

  THE CASTLE OF THORNS AND ROSES

  “But it’s been too long. He just won’t wake up!” The voice sounded worried. And familiar. Fox.

  “That’s all I can do. Please don’t worry. I think he’s just sleeping.” That voice he recognized as well. Clara.

  Wake up, Jacob. Fingers touched his searing shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw the silver moon drifting into a cloud, as if trying to hide from its red twin. It rusty light shone down into the dark courtyard of a castle, reflecting from countless high windows. They were all dark. No lanterns were casting their light above the stucco-framed doors or under the overgrown archways. No servant hurried across the yard, where the layer of wet leaves was so thick that surely no one had raked it in years.

  “Finally! I thought you’d never wake up.”

  Jacob groaned as the vixen nudged her nose into his shoulder.

  Clara helped him sit up. There was a fresh dressing on his shoulder, but the wound hurt more than ever. The bandits, the Goyl… the pain brought it all back but Jacob couldn’t remember when he had lost consciousness.

  “That wound doesn’t look good.” Clara got up. “I wish I had some antibiotics from the hospital.”

  Jacob wished for those too but he had given the last ones to Will.

  “Where are we?” he asked her.

  “At the only hiding place I could find. The castle is deserted. At least by the living.” Fox pushed aside the leaves, revealing a shoe.

  Jacob looked around. In many places the leaves lay suspiciously deep, as if covering outstretched bodies.

  Which castle was this?

  He sought support from a wall to pull himself to his feet, and immediately drew back his hands, cursing. The stones were covered in vines. They were everywhere, as if the entire castle had grown a hide of thorns.

  “Roses,” he muttered, picking one of the
rose hips that grew from the twisted branches. “I’ve been searching for this castle for years! Sleeping Beauty’s bed. The Empress would pay a fortune for it.”

  Clara stared incredulously across the silent courtyard.

  “It is said that anyone who sleeps in her bed will find true love. But it seems—” Jacob gazed at the dark windows, “—the prince never came.”

  Or he had perished on the thorns like a skewered bird. A mummified hand stuck out from between the roses. Jacob covered its stiff fingers with leaves before Clara noticed them.

  A mouse scampered across the courtyard. The vixen jumped after it but stopped with a whimper.

  “What is it?” Clara asked.

  “Nothing.” Fox licked her side. “Threefingers kicked me.”

  “Let me have a look.” Clara leaned over her and carefully prodded her silky fur.

  “Come on. Lose the fur, Fox,” Jacob said. “Clara knows more about humans than about foxes.”

  Fox hesitated. She didn’t like to share her secret. The only other man who knew about it was Chanute. But finally she shifted shape and Clara stared incredulously at the girl who suddenly stood just a few steps away from her.

  What kind of world is this? her face asked as she turned to Jacob. If fur turns to skin, and skin to stone, what remains? Fear. Bewilderment. And enchantment. All of that was in her eyes. She touched her own arms as if she felt the fur spreading there too. Then she moved toward Fox and examined the body that just a moment ago had been the body of a vixen.