The Golden Yarn Read online

  “Even if I knew, why should I tell a snail face? Read your newspapers. They’ve been full of nothing else since the Dark One left Vena.”

  “And her spells went with her!” Wenzel raised his empty glass to the Goyl. “The Man-Goyl are changing back. Your King will soon be out of soldiers.”

  The Bastard ran his claws across the counter. “There will be enough left. And who says the Man-Goyl will start fighting for you just because they have their soft skin back? Maybe they’d rather fight for a King who won’t let his soldiers be captured like cattle and who doesn’t send them to war in some faraway colony.”

  To die for a King. Will couldn’t stop staring at the black claws. Claws like that, as sharp as steel, had torn into his neck. Time opened up like a well. He was back in the cathedral, shielding Kami’en with his own body.

  The Goyl was watching him. “Well, good luck.” He reached across the counter, and before Wenzel could stop him, he’d grabbed one of the schnapps bottles. “You’ll have a lot of competition. Amalie has promised the rubies she wore at her wedding to anyone who catches the Fairy.” The Bastard put the bottle in his knapsack and dropped a couple of coins on the bar. “Those stones are worth more than all of Austry. Her mother had them stolen from one of the onyx lords.”

  Two men stepped into the taproom.

  They eyed the Goyl with the usual disgusted fear. The Bastard scowled at them as he pushed past them toward the door. He turned around once more and, with his eyes fixed on Will, slammed his fist to his chest.

  Will quickly jammed his hands into his pockets as his fingers clenched in response. Behind him he heard Wenzel cursing the stonefaces to his new guests. The three men started to conjure a glorious future in which they’d drive the stonefaces back into the earth and let them suffocate like rats. One of the men, whose pale skin actually did make him look like a snail, was going on about how handy it was that the Goyl turned to stone after death so that their corpses could be mined for gems.

  “I always find what I seek.”

  Will stepped outside. It was market day, and the farmers were putting up their stalls: fruits and vegetables, chickens and geese, but there were also Heinzel and—supposedly—talking donkeys for sale. Will looked around. He needed a horse. And supplies.

  The Goyl was leaning in a doorway on the other side of the square. Above him, the head of a unicorn stared down on the people of Schwanstein, who were all giving the Bastard a wide berth. He seemed to be enjoying himself tremendously.

  “What? I still can’t tell you where the Fairy is,” he said as Will approached him. Malachite—that’s what was tainting his dark onyx skin. Will had no idea how he knew that.

  “I am Jacob Reckless’s brother.”

  “And I’m supposed to be surprised?” The Bastard winked. “He carries a picture of you. Touching. I admit, I’ve always been grateful that my mother spared me the competition of a brother.”

  “My brother is not a thief. Why do you say he stole from you?”

  The Goyl gave him such a taunting look that Will thought he could feel it pierce his skin. To find what? Jade?

  “I don’t want to rob you of your illusions. I’m sure you’re carrying a sack-load of them. But Jacob Reckless is a thief and a liar, though of course he wouldn’t rub his little brother’s nose in it.”

  Will turned his back on the Goyl. He preferred to hide his rage, which was so like a scorpion crawling from the darkest recess of his heart that it frightened him. Nothing had made the stone more terrifying than the feeling that his rage and hatred had become uncontrollable. The Goyl savored both, like a rush.

  “Well, by my heart of stone!” The Bastard laughed behind him. “You’re much more sensitive than your brother. Shall I help you find the Dark Fairy?”

  Will turned again.

  “I have no money.”

  “I don’t want your money. Only Kings can afford the services of Nerron the Bastard.” He pushed himself off the wall. “I want what your brother stole from me. You think you can get that for me?”

  “What is it?”

  The Bastard looked at a passing girl. She quickened her steps when she noticed his golden stare. “A swindlesack. It looks empty, but what’s inside it is mine.”

  Will suppressed the urge to feel for the sack under his shirt. “What’s inside it?”

  Two women walked past. They stared daggers at Will as if he were talking to the Devil himself, but the Bastard clicked his tongue at them and they quickly stalked away.

  “A crossbow. Nothing special. A family heirloom.” He wasn’t a very good liar. Maybe he wasn’t even trying. “I think I know what you want from the Dark Fairy,” he whispered to Will. “I’ve heard a few interesting stories about the brother of Jacob Reckless. He supposedly gained the most sacred skin a Goyl can have, yet his brother purged him of it.”

  Will’s heart began to beat at a ridiculous speed.

  The Goyl pulled an amulet from under his lizard shirt. It was made of jade. “If I were you, I’d want it back as well. Who’d be so stupid to trade holy stone for a snail’s skin?”

  “Yes,” Will managed to say. “You guessed it. The Fairy is the only one who can give my jade back to me.”

  Lies... He forced himself to look at the unicorn head. Jacob had told him so many lies about the scars on his back, until Will had finally found out that they’d come from unicorns. Would Jacob have believed that he wanted his jade skin back?

  “I guess we have a deal.” The Goyl dropped the amulet into his shirt again. “And to seal it, you will show me the mirror you came through.” He smiled. “Let me guess. It’s close by, isn’t it? Look at your clothes. Nobody wears such things in Schwanstein.”

  Will stopped himself from looking toward the ruin on the hill. A Goyl in the other world…and then? A child-eating Witch? The Stilt who’d attacked him on his first trip through the mirror? He was—very briefly—tempted to ask the Bastard about the stranger who’d given him the sack with the crossbow. But he was afraid of the answer he might get.

  “What mirror?” he said. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Do we have a deal?”

  The Bastard looked toward The Ogre. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  His Roads

  Humans. They were everywhere. Like mosquito larvae on a pond. Mortality was so fertile. Fields, roads, cities... The world created anew according to their mortal tastes, groomed, straightened, pruned, and tamed. Had she always loathed humans like that, even before Kami’en discarded her for one of their women? The Dark One didn’t want to remember. She wanted to give in to the hatred, the disgust, the rage. If only all that hadn’t also washed away her love.

  She didn’t even try to avoid their settlements. Let them see she didn’t fear them, though they’d throw rocks at her, burn her effigy in straw. She saw them peering nervously from behind their curtains as Chithira drove her carriage past their houses. “There she is, the Fairy Witch!” she heard them whisper. “She murdered the child of her unfaithful lover. She has no heart.”

  So many villages. So many cities. Like a fungus sprouting mortal flesh. And they all had Amalie’s face.

  Initially, she’d let the moths weave the web under which she slept during the day in front of one of their churches or town halls, or next to one of their monuments. But after someone took a shot at Donnersmarck as he guarded her sleep, she’d begun to go into the forests for rest. There were at least some left that hadn’t been fed into their factories’ furnaces.

  Donnersmarck would sometimes ride into the nearest town to find out how things were in Vena. He reported that the rubies Amalie had pledged to the Fairy’s captor had already cost six women their lives just because they’d been mistaken for the Dark One. Crookback and the Walrus had declared that Lotharaine and Albion would grant her asylum. Asylum... How stupid did they think she was? Did they really believe she’d sell her magic to the highest bidder? Or that she was looking for another crowned lover? None of them could compare to the K
ing of the Goyl. She’d loved the best of them, only to be betrayed.

  Donnersmarck also gave her news of Kami’en. He tried to utter the name casually, as though the Goyl King was just any other man. The Dark One was touched that Donnersmarck was trying to protect her from the pain caused by her lover’s betrayal, from the humiliation that was Kami’en’s silence. The Goyl still hadn’t said a word in her defense. He’d made peace with the rebels in the north, and he was negotiating with the renegade Man-Goyl. He was so much better than his enemies. Maybe because they only fought to enrich themselves. Soldiers didn’t like to die for the gold in their officers’ pockets. But revenge was something one could fight for with passion. Kami’en only ever went to war for revenge. He was the fox who’d turned on the hunters.

  Yes. She was still on his side.

  At night, Chithira steered the carriage over the roads built by Kami’en’s soldiers, and in her heartless chest, sadness and rage rose and fell like tides. The memories followed her, no matter how hard her dead coachman drove the horses. Memories that were as alive as the present, more real than anything rushing past outside.

  Would she ever be again what she’d been before Kami’en? Did she even want to be?

  She traveled only at night, yet her carriage was often blocked by groups of men who’d drunk up enough courage in some tavern to try to earn Amalie’s reward. In most cases Donnersmarck handled them, even when they’d armed themselves with scythes and axes or hid themselves behind barrels of burning tar. Sometimes Chithira’s shifting in front of their eyes was enough to make them scatter. But one night there was a woman among the taunting masses, and the Fairy set her moths on her, imagining it was Amalie who was doubled up screaming on the muddy road.

  Of course, she wondered whether Kami’en was also looking for her. Four days after her flight from Vena, six Goyl soldiers had blocked her carriage’s path. They didn’t answer when Donnersmarck asked them if they’d been sent by their kind, and they quickly looked down when the Dark One descended from the carriage. “Don’t look at the Fairy Witch.” That’s what Hentzau had taught them. But the Dark Fairy forced them to look, and poisoned them with her beauty.

  They stumbled after the carriage for miles. Chithira ignored them, but Donnersmarck kept looking back, and when they finally disappeared into the night, it was the first time the Fairy saw a hint of fear in the soldier’s eyes, along with the stubborn warning not to try her magic on him.

  Blind

  The dogs were barking. There was no sound Jacob feared as much now that the vixen’s life meant more to him than his own. He wanted to stop, turn around, but Sylvain, who to Jacob’s silvered eyes was barely more than a broad-shouldered shadow, dragged him on. The world consisted of shadows and silver, of what his fingers could feel, and of the barking of the dogs.

  How many more times would she have to save him?…He should never have brought her into this world...Useless thoughts. Fox was so much better at suppressing those.

  He stopped again.

  Shots. The only sound worse than barking.

  Sylvain pulled him along, uttering curses in French—no, Quebecois. Behind the mirror, that part of Canada still belonged to Lotharaine. Jacob had never been there.

  Onward.

  If Jacob hadn’t known they were in his world, the dense undergrowth would have made him believe he was lost in the Black Forest again. Even the brick walls they were sneaking along felt like the weathered walls of a Witch’s house. The Elf had brought these worlds too close together. It had all been so much easier when Jacob thought the mirror was all that connected them.

  Sylvain opened a gate and quickly pushed him through. It was pitch-dark inside, and his unwilling helper stumbled around as blindly as Jacob. Jacob felt crates. And glass. He quickly pulled back his hand.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Where I was told to bring you. It’s one of their storage sheds. Bout de charge. Your pretty girlfriend, she is crazy. We should have tried our luck on the river.”

  “A storage shed for what?”

  “Their mirrors. What else? MauditTabarnak’Ostie d’Câlisse! Ciboire!” The curses flowed as inexhaustibly as brackwater. Sylvain Caleb Fowler could have easily won one of the Dwarfs’ infamous cursing competitions.

  Jacob leaned against the crates. His head hurt a little less when he closed his eyes. If this blindness was permanent, his treasure-hunting days were over. His right arm, on the other hand, felt as good as new. Maybe that needle had some good effects. The man who’d rammed it into his temple had looked like he’d been formed from clay. Maybe a cheap version of Sixteen and Seventeen. Jacob could still see the Mirrorlings in his mind’s eye: with his face, with Clara’s, his father’s. “Your mother never noticed the difference.” The man who’d gone to the park with him and Will, the man who’d kissed his mother in the kitchen…how many of his memories were actually memories of Spieler? “In this world, we can even have children with mortal women.” So often had he wished for a different father, but not like this one. Stop it, Jacob. He’s not your father, neither yours nor Will’s. Could he really be so sure, though?

  The dogs were still barking, but at least nobody was shooting anymore. Maybe because the last bullet had hit its target.

  “How did they catch you?” he asked Sylvain. He had to take his mind off things. Just listening for sounds from outside was going to drive him mad.

  “My curiosity. And I couldn’t keep my hands off their powder.”

  “Powder?”

  “Yes. They give it to their best customers. A little envelope here, another there. It brings back the lust—for life, for love, everything. It lasts for days, but then you feel rotten. As though someone has torn out your heart.”

  That sounded like elven dust. How did they make it without Grass-Elves?

  Maybe he has Grass-Elves, Jacob. Maybe he sends his clay faces through the mirror to catch them. Or Sixteen, or Seventeen, or the fifteen who came before them. But then why hadn’t he ever heard about them behind the mirror? Because they looked like humans, Jacob. Maybe...

  “I liked working for them. Not a bad job,” Sylvain muttered. “Even though I hardly ever got to see anyone. And well paid. Maybe they could’ve forgiven me the powder stuff if I hadn’t run into the Mirrorling. Ciboire. June told me a thousand times. My wife. Ex-wife. ‘Sylvain, don’t stick that flat nose of yours into things that aren’t your business.’ Simonac! I’m a curious person! Got me into a lot of trouble as a child.”

  “Who do they deliver these mirrors to?”

  “Hotels, restaurants, shops, offices... They’re very popular. Nobody thinks twice about it. And why should they? I wanted to take a closer look once. After all, I’d been hauling those crates for months, and these sheds are rarely locked. Didn’t feel good looking into them, though. I thought it must be my stupid visage. But no. The mirrors don’t just steal your face. They also bring memories back, whether you want to remember or not. Everything you’d forgotten, especially the things you wanted to forget.”

  Yes. That made sense. Jacob had been wondering why he’d suddenly been thinking of long-forgotten teachers, neighbors, and friends. And his mother. “Jacob, come here!” The images were so clear he thought he could actually feel her kisses on his face. He’d been sure he’d banished the memories of her as thoroughly as those of his father. It had helped that she’d always preferred Will over him.

  One of the dogs howled. Jacob leaped up.

  “Where are you going?” Sylvain grabbed his arm.

  “I can’t be sitting here while she’s out there. I have to look for her.”

  “Cocombre! You cannot see!” Sylvain dragged him back between the crates.

  It was quiet again outside. Hideously quiet. What was taking Fox so long?

  “Did you also see one of the Mirrorlings?” It was clear Sylvain hadn’t enjoyed his encounter.

  “Yes,” Jacob answered. But they don’t frighten me half as much as their maker.

  �
��As I was standing between all the mirrors, I thought to myself: Bring her one, Sylvain. June would like one of the smaller ones. There were so many—I was sure they wouldn’t notice. I was high on their powder. Thought the world was mine. And then I saw him lying there. A man, just all silver. And suddenly there he was, standing behind me, as if he’d been there the entire time. Everything was reflected on his skin, and then he suddenly had a face. And then another face! Simonac! Sylvain, I’m thinking, you were right. The aliens are already here. I hit him. I used to be quite a decent boxer, you see—Canadian heavyweight champion. That trophy was the only one of my things June kept. But hitting is not a good idea, when—”

  Jacob pressed his hand over Sylvain’s mouth.

  Someone had just shoved open the gate. The noise killed all hope it might be Fox. The men sounded as human as Sylvain, and luckily they didn’t grab the crate the pair was hiding behind. The gate opened twice more, and both times Jacob and Sylvain stayed undetected. But Fox didn’t come, and Jacob didn’t care what he owed the Alderelf and what that meant for him and her. He didn’t care if his eyes had to see silver for the rest of his life or whether Spieler kept walking around with his father’s face. Didn’t care. At all.

  If only Fox came back...

  Hours. And hours. And hours. While Sylvain told him about his Canadian cousins and the girl he’d moved to New York for. For the first time in years, Jacob thought about the only teacher who hadn’t thought he was an idiot. And he thought about the night Albert Chanute had nearly shot him in a drunken rage.

  And then, finally and barely audible, a sound.

  The snap of a lock. Steps, so quiet. Jacob knew only one person who could walk so quietly.

  “Jacob?” The voice was more familiar than his own. Her outline was unmistakable, even through the silver fog in his eyes. And this time he would have said it, right? I love you. So much. Too much. But that was forbidden. For all time. The Elf would take his heart in payment.