The Petrified Flesh Page 7

  “Where’s Will?” Jacob asked, looking for him in vain in the silent courtyard.

  Clara pointed to one of the castle towers. “He’s been up there for hours. He hasn’t said a word since he saw them.”

  They all knew what she was talking about. The Goyl had saved their lives, but Jacob doubted they had come for that.

  *

  The roses covering the tower’s walls were of a red so dark that the night almost dyed them black, and the scent they wove into the cold air was as heavy and sweet as if they didn’t sense the autumn yet.

  Jacob already guessed what he would find under the tower’s pointed roof before he started climbing the steep spiral stairs. The rose tendrils clung to his clothes and he had to keep freeing his boots from their thorny stems, but finally he reached the room where, two hundred years earlier, a Fairy had delivered her birthday present.

  The spinning wheel stood next to a narrow bed that had never been meant for a Princess. She was still sleeping in it, rose petals covering her body. The Fairy’s curse had kept her from aging, but her pale skin was like parchment and nearly as yellow as the dress she’d been wearing for two centuries. While the pearls it was embroidered with had kept their lustrous white, the lace at the hem had turned as brown as the petals covering the dress.

  Will was standing by one of the windows, as if the Prince had finally arrived after all. Jacob’s steps made him spin around. The jade now also tainted his forehead, and the blue of his eyes was drowning in gold. The bandits had robbed them of their most precious possession—time.

  “This doesn’t look like ‘happily ever after,’” Will said, looking over at the Princess. “And as far as I remember it was also a Fairy’s curse that did this to her.” He leaned his back against the rough wall. “Are you feeling better?”

  “Yes,” Jacob lied. “What about you?”

  Will didn’t answer right away. And when he did, his voice sounded as cool and smooth as his new skin.

  “My face feels like polished stone. The night grows brighter with every passing day, and I could hear you long before you reached the stairs. I don’t just feel it on my skin now. It’s inside me as well.”

  He approached the bed and stared down at the mummified body. “I’d forgotten everything. You. Clara. Myself. All I knew was I wanted to join them.”

  Jacob searched for words, but he found none.

  “Is that what’s happening? Tell me the truth.” Will looked at him. “I won’t just look like them. I’ll be like them, won’t I?”

  Jacob had the lies ready on the tip of his tongue, all the Nonsense! Everything will be fine! I’ll make sure it will. But he couldn’t say them. His brother’s stare wouldn’t allow it.

  “Do you want to know what they’re like?” Will plucked a rose leaf from the dead Princess’s straw hair. “They’re angry. Their rage bursts inside like a flame. But they are also as calm and strong as the stone that speaks to them, in many voices. They miss the caves it forms for them, and they yearn for the warmth underground. I always thought stone was cold but they hate the cold.”

  He eyed the black nails on his hand.

  “They are darkness,” he said quietly. “And heat. And the red moon is their sun.”

  Jacob shuddered when he heard the stone in his voice.

  Say something, Jacob. Anything.

  “But you are not one of them. And you never will be.” His own voice sounded like a stranger’s, so hoarse with fear. “Because I won’t allow it.”

  “How?” There it was again, the look that held none of the trust Will had once granted his older brother without question. “Is it true, what you told those bandits? You’re taking me to another Fairy?”

  “Yes.”

  Will touched the dead Princess’s parchment face. “One as dangerous as the one who did this? Look out the window. There are corpses hanging in the thorns. You think I want you to end like that for my sake?”

  His eyes belied his words. Help me, they said, although they were drowning in gold.

  Jacob gently pulled him away from the bed and the mummified body.

  “This Fairy is different.” Is she, Jacob? He heard a whisper inside him, but he ignored it. He put all the hope he possessed into his voice. And all the confidence his brother yearned to hear: “She’ll help us, Will, I promise!”

  15

  SOFT FLESH

  Threefingers with the butcher’s face was the first to speak. Humans so liked to choose the wrong men as their leaders. Every Goyl could see his cowardice as clearly as the watery blue of his eyes. But at least he had told them a few interesting details Hentzau hadn’t learned from the moth.

  The jade Goyl was not alone. He was with a girl and—far more important—he had a brother who was determined to rid him of the jade. If Threefingers was telling the truth, that brother was planning to take the jade Goyl to the Red Fairy. Desperate but probably the right idea. The Red One despised her sister as much as the other Fairies did. Still, Hentzau was sure she wouldn’t be able to break the curse. The Dark Fairy’s magic was much more powerful than her sisters’.

  No Goyl had ever seen the island where they dwelled, let alone set foot on it. The Dark Fairy guarded their secrets even though they had cast her out, and every fool knew you could only reach the Fairies’ island if they wanted you to.

  “How is he going to find her?”

  “He didn’t say!” Threefingers stammered. “I swear!”

  Hentzau nodded to the only She-Goyl he had included in his search squad. He himself didn’t enjoy striking human flesh. He could kill them, yes, but he avoided touching them. Nesser had no such qualms.

  She kicked Threefingers in the face with such force that Hentzau gave her a look of warning. For a brief moment, Nesser held his gaze. She could be quite stubborn, but then she lowered her head. Her sister had been killed by humans, that’s why she tended to overdo it. Hatred covered them all like slime by now.

  “He didn’t say,” Threefingers stammered again, blood pouring out of his broken nose. “I promise. Not a word!”

  His flesh was as pale and soft as a snail’s. Hentzau turned away in disgust. He was certain they had told him all they knew, but thanks to them the jade Goyl had gotten away.

  “Shoot them!” he ordered, and went outside.

  The shots sounded strange in the silence, like something that didn’t belong in this world. Guns, steam engines, trains—to Hentzau all of it still felt unnatural. He was getting old, that was the trouble. The sunlight had clouded his eyes, and his hearing had been so damaged by all the battle noise that Nesser had to raise her voice whenever she addressed him. Kami’en pretended to not notice. He hadn’t forgotten that Hentzau had grown old in his service. But the Dark Fairy would make sure everybody else saw it, as soon as she found out that he had allowed a bunch of plunderers to stand in his way when the jade Goyl had been so close that even his clouded eyes couldn’t overlook him.

  Hentzau still saw him, standing behind the fighting men, staring over at the Goyl, his human skin suffused with the most sacred of stones. No. His own eyes must have betrayed him. It was impossible. He must be as fake as one of those wooden fetishes that swindlers covered with gold leaf to sell them as solid gold. “Behold, the jade Goyl has come to make our King invincible. But don’t cut too deep, or you will find human flesh.” Yes, that’s what it was. Nothing but another attempt by the Fairy to make herself indispensable.

  Hentzau squinted into the gathering night but all he saw was the boy with the skin of jade.

  What if you’re wrong, Hentzau? What if he is the real thing? What if your King’s destiny depends on him?

  And he had let him get away.

  When the scout finally returned, Hentzau read from his face that he had lost the trail, even before he stammered his excuses. Once he would have killed the man on the spot, but he’d learned to control the rage that lurked in all of them, although not half as well as his King did.

  That meant all he had to go on w
as what Threefingers had told them about the brother and the Red Fairy. May all the Lava Devils underground come to his aid! He would have to swallow his pride once more and ask the Dark Fairy for help to find her red sister.

  “How could you lose their tracks?” he barked at the scout. “Three horses and a fox. Even my horse would be able to find that track!”

  How he squirmed in his moonstone skin. All moonstones were idiots.

  Hentzau was considering several punishments when Nesser approached him. She was like himself a Jasper Goyl, but her skin was darker and, as the skin of all Goyl women, veined with amethyst. Nesser had only just turned thirteen. At that age Goyl were considered grown-ups, but most of them didn’t join the army until they were at least fourteen. Nesser was neither very good with the saber nor a particularly good shot, but her courage more than made up for those shortcomings. At her age, fear was an unfamiliar concept; at thirteen you didn’t have to be a Fairy to consider yourself immortal. Hentzau remembered the feeling all too well.

  “Commander?”

  He loved the reverence in her young voice. It was still the best antidote for the doubts the Dark Fairy sowed in him.

  “What?”

  “I know how to get to the Fairies. Not to the island… but to the valley from where it can be reached.”

  “Is that so?” Hentzau’s heartbeat quickened, but he didn’t show his relief. He had a soft spot for the girl, and that made him even more strict with her.

  “I was part of the escort the King sends with the Dark Fairy when she goes traveling. I accompanied her on her last visit to her sisters. She left us to wait for her in the ravine through which you reach the valley. I am sure I can remember the way…”

  This was too good to be true. He would not have to beg the Fairy for help. He might even be able to make sure she’d never learn of the jade Goyl’s escape. For next time he wouldn’t let him get away. No, he would not.

  “All right,” he said, his tone studiously uninterested when he met Nesser’s eager gaze. “Tell the scout you’ll be leading the way from now on. But you’d better not get us lost.”

  “I won’t, Commander!” Nesser’s golden eyes glistened with confidence as she quickly walked away.

  Hentzau stared down the unpaved road on which the jade Goyl had escaped. One of the looters had claimed that the brother was injured, and at some point they would need to rest and sleep, whereas Hentzau and his men could go for days without it. They would soon catch up with them and this time that gentle-faced boy with the jade in his skin would not escape.

  He had to be fake.

  He couldn’t wait to be the one to prove it.

  16

  NOT EVER

  It was still dark when Jacob made them set off again. He desperately needed rest, but not even Fox could convince him to stay longer, and Clara had to admit that she was glad to get away from the rose-covered castle and all its sleeping dead.

  It was a clear night and the stars were pearls stitched by an embroiderer onto the black velvet of the sky. The trees and hills were like the cutout silhouettes she remembered from her childhood’s fairy-tale books, and Will was riding by her side, so distant although he was so close. Clara could feel him drifting away, from her, from his brother. He smiled at her when he felt her gaze, but it was a mere shadow of the smile she knew. It had always been so easy to get a smile from Will. He gave love so freely. At least that’s what she had come to believe. And it was so easy to love him back. Nothing else had ever been that easy. She didn’t want to lose him, but the world that had lured them through the mirror wove its net around him and Clara was meant to hear its whisper: “He belongs to me.” All she wished for was to ride back to the ruin and press her hand against the dark glass, that had brought them here. Instead they left it farther behind every day, riding on and on, as if they needed to find the very heart of this world to free Will from its sinister spell.

  “Let him go!” Clara begged, as with each mile it was enveloping her in its frightening beauty. “Please. Let him go!”

  But the strange night whispered back: “Which skin shall I give you, Clara Ferber? Do you want fur? Do you want stone?”

  “No,” she whispered back. “All I want is that you give me back what’s mine.”

  Yet she already felt her new skin growing. So soft. Far too soft.

  She was so afraid.

  17

  A GUIDE TO THE FAIRIES

  It was true what they said about the Fairies. You could only find their realm if one of them showed you the way. Jacob had faced that problem before—when he had set out three years ago to steal a Fairy lily for the Empress from their enchanted lake. There was one solution for the problem. You had to bribe the right Dwarf.

  There were many Dwarfs who bragged about trading with the Fairies and proudly displayed their lilies in their family crests.

  Therese of Austry, who was known for her beauty, hadn’t passed it on to her daughter. Rumors said she blamed her husband for Amalie’s ugliness. When he died in a suspicious hunting accident shortly after Amalie’s twelfth birthday, Therese of Austry had offered a fortune in gold for whoever brought her the lily. Fairy lilies had the reputation to turn even the ugliest girl into a beauty. So Jacob, who at that time was already treasure hunting without Chanute, had set off to find a Dwarf. Most of them after telling a few dusty tales about a great-grandfather entering the Fairy realm usually revealed that he had been the last family member to actually see a Fairy. It had been one of Therese’s Court Dwarfs, Auberon, who mentioned the name Evenaugh Valiant to Jacob.

  Valiant resided in Terpevas, the biggest Dwarf city in Austry, and for a sizable amount of gold, he had actually led Jacob to the valley from where one could reach the Fairies’ realm. Valiant hadn’t mentioned its Guardians though—and Jacob had nearly died, while the Dwarf had sold the lily to the Empress, which had turned Amalie into an even more celebrated beauty than her mother, and Evenaugh Valiant into a purveyor to the court.

  Jacob had often dreamed of paying the Dwarf back for his betrayal, but after his return from the Fairies he had lost his taste for revenge, and in the end he had erased Evenaugh Valiant as thoroughly from his mind as he suppressed the memory of the island, where he had been so happy that he had forgotten himself. Now this renounced revenge might save his brother.

  So what does that teach you, Jacob Reckless? he wondered, as the first Dwarf dwellings appeared among the fields and hedgerows. That, on the whole, revenge is not such a great idea. Nevertheless. He still longed to break Valiant’s greedy neck.

  By now there was no way to conceal the jade, so Jacob decided to leave Will and Clara behind with Fox while he rode into Terpevas (which, in the language of its inhabitants, means nothing else but “Dwarf City”). In a piece of woodland Fox found a cave that the local shepherds used as a shelter, and Will followed her into its shade as if he couldn’t wait to get out of the daylight. There was only a small patch of human skin left on his right cheek. He looked like his own sculpture, chiseled from jade. Both eyes were now drowning in gold, and Jacob found it harder and harder to convince himself that he hadn’t already lost the fight.

  Clara didn’t follow Will into the cave. When Jacob walked to the horses, she was standing among the trees, looking so lost in her men’s clothes that Jacob almost mistook her for one of the homeless boys one found everywhere in this world, orphaned and looking for work. Her hair was the same color as the autumn grass growing between the trees, and by now one could barely see that she was a stranger to this world. The city they all had grown up in, its lights and noise, and the girl she had been there—all but faded, faraway. The present so swiftly becomes the past.

  “Will doesn’t have much time left, right?”

  She faced things, even if they scared her. Jacob liked that about her, even though she approached life too pragmatically for his taste. Clara wanted to understand while Jacob mostly took things the way they were. He liked to be enchanted, seduced, bewitched, and usually he
found the questions more enticing than the answers, which he mostly didn’t trust anyway. Clara on the contrary loved answers. She found secrets and magic to be exhausting as far as he could see and what was happening to Will would certainly not change that.

  “It will be time enough,” he replied, although he was more and more convinced that might be a lie.

  He barely made it into the saddle. The flowers, leaves, and roots Fox continued to show Clara for treating his wound calmed the infection. But he could barely move his left arm, and the fever weakened him more than he would admit.

  “You should see a doctor in Terpevas,” said Fox, when he flinched with pain picking up the reins. “You know the Dwarfs have better doctors than the Empress.”

  “Yes, if you’re a Dwarf. Their only ambition with human patients is to make them pay and then send them to an early grave. Dwarfs don’t think very highly of us,” he added when he saw Clara’s puzzled look. “We give them plenty of reason, one has to admit.”

  “But you still know one you can trust?”

  “Trust? On the contrary.” The vixen bared her teeth. “The Dwarf he’s going to see is less trustworthy than a viper. Ask him where he got the scars on his back.”

  “That’s a long time ago.” Jacob turned the mare. “And this time I know whom I am dealing with.”

  The vixen answered that with a contemptuous purr and Clara grabbed his reins.

  “Why don’t you at least take Fox with you?”

  The vixen cast her an affectionate glance. She had grown fond of Clara. She even shifted into her human form more often, as if Clara was proof that being a woman might not be such an unattractive existence after all.