Reckless (Free Preview) (3 page)

The guards nervously ducked their heads.
 
Any other Goyl would have paid for that remark
with his life.
 
Kami’en, however, just
shrugged.

“Find him!” he said.
 
“She
dreamed of him.”

She.
 
The Fairy
smoothed the velvet of her dress.
 
Six
fingers on each hand
. Each one for a different curse.
 
Hentzau felt the rage rise in him.
 
It was the rage they all bore in their stony
flesh, like the heat in the depths of the earth.
 
He would die for his King if necessary, but to
have to search for the daydreams of his mistress was something else.

“You need no Jade Goyl to make yourself invincible!”

Kami’en eyed him like a stranger.

Your
Majesty.
 
Hentzau now often caught himself not wanting
to call him by his name.

“Find him,” Kami’en repeated.
 
“She says it’s important, and so far she’s
always been right.”

The Fairy stepped to his side.
 
Hentzau pictured himself squeezing her pale
neck.
 
But not even that gave him
comfort.
 
She was immortal, and one day
she would watch him die.
 
Him and the King.
 
And Kami’en’s children and his children’s children.
 
They all were nothing but her mortal stone
toys.
 
But the King loved her.
 
More than his two Goyl wives, who had given
him three daughters and a
son.

Because she has hexed him!
 
Hentzau
heard a whisper inside him
.
But he bowed his head and
pressed his fist over his heart.
 
“Whatever you command!”

“I saw him in the black forest.”
 
Even her voice sounded like water.

“That’s more than sixty square miles!”

The Fairy smiled.
 
Hentzau
felt rage and fear choking his heart.

Without another word, she undid the pearl clasp with which
she pinned her hair like a human woman, and brushed her hand through it.
 
Black moths fluttered out from between her
fingers; the pale spots on their wings looked like skulls.
 
The guards quickly opened the doors as the
insects swarmed toward them, and even Hentzau’s soldiers, who had been waiting
outside in the dark corridor, recoiled as the moths flew past.
 
They all knew that their sting penetrated even
Goyl skin.

The Fairy put the clasp back in her hair.

“Once they find him,” she said, without looking at Hentzau,
“they will come to you.
 
And you will
bring him to me.
 
Immediately.”

His men were staring at her through the open door, but they
quickly lowered their heads as Hentzau turned around.

Fairy.

Damn her and the night she had suddenly appeared among their
tents.
 
The third
battle,
and their third victory.
 
She had walked
toward the King’s tent as if the groans of their wounded and the white moon
above their dead had summoned her.
 
Hentzau
had stepped into her path, but she had just walked through him, like liquid
through porous stone, as if he, too, were already among the dead, and she had
stolen his King’s heart to fill her own heartless bosom with it.

Even Hentzau had to admit that the best weapons combined did
not spread as much fear as her curse, which turned the flesh of their enemies
into stone.
 
Yet he was certain they
would have still won the war without
her,
and that
victory would have tasted so much sweeter.

“I will find the Jade Goyl without your moths,” he said.
 
“If he really is more than
just a dream.”

She answered him with a smile, which followed him back into
the daylight that clouded his eyes and cracked his skin.

Damn her.

4

On The Other Side

Will’s voice had sounded so different, Clara had barely
recognized it.
 
Nothing
for weeks, and then this stranger on the phone who wouldn’t really say why he
had called.

The streets seemed even more congested than usual, and the
trip was endless, until she finally stood in front of the old apartment
building where he and his brother had grown up.
 
Stone faces stared down from the gray facade,
their contorted features eroded by exhaust fumes.
 
Clara couldn’t help but look up at them as the
doorman held the door for her.
 
She was
still wearing the pale green surgical gown under her coat.
 
She had not taken the time to change.
 
She had just run out of the hospital.

Will.

He had sounded so lost.
 
Like someone who was drowning.
 
Or someone who was saying
farewell.

Clara pulled the grilled doors of the elevator shut behind
her.
 
She’d worn the same gown the first
time she’d met Will, in front of the room where his mother had lain.
 
Clara often worked weekends at the hospital,
not only because she needed the money.
 
Textbooks
and universities made you forget all too easily that flesh and blood were
actually very real.

Seventh floor.

The copper nameplate next to the door was so tarnished that
Clara involuntarily wiped it with her sleeve.

RECKLESS.
 
Will had
often made fun of how that name did not suit him at all.

Unopened mail was piled up behind the door, but there was
light in the hall.

“Will?”

She opened the door to his room.

Nothing.

He wasn’t in the kitchen, either.

The apartment looked as if he hadn’t been there in weeks.
 
But Will had told her he was calling from
here.
 
Where was he?

Clara walked past his mother’s empty room, and that of his
brother, whom she had never met.
 
“Jacob
is traveling.”
 
Jacob was always
traveling.
 
Sometimes she wasn’t sure
whether he actually existed.

She stopped.

The door to his father’s study was open
.
Will
never entered that room
.
He ignored anything that had
to do with his father.

Clara entered hesitantly.
 
Bookshelves, a glass
cabinet, a desk.
 
The model planes
above it wore dust on their wings, like dirty snow.
 
The whole room was dusty, and so cold that she
could see her breath.

A mirror hung between the shelves.

Clara stepped in front of it and let her fingers run over the
silver roses that covered the frame.
 
She
had never seen anything so beautiful.
 
The glass they surrounded was dark, as if the
night had spilled onto it.
 
It was misted
up, and right where she saw the reflection of her face was the imprint of a
hand.

5

Schwanstein

The light of the lanterns filled Schwanstein’s streets like
spilled milk.
 
Gaslight, wooden wheels
bumping over cobblestones, women in long skirts,
their
hems soaked from the rain.
 
The damp
autumn air smelled of smoke, and soot blackened the laundry that hung between
the pointy gables.
 
There was a railway
station right opposite the old coach station, a telegraph office, and a
photographer who fixed stiff hats and ruffled skirts onto silver plates.
 
Bicycles leaned against walls on which posters
warned of Gold-Ravens and Watermen.
 
Nowhere
did the Mirrorworld emulate the other side as eagerly as in Schwanstein, and
Jacob, of course, asked himself many times how much of it all had come through
the mirror that hung in his father’s study.
 
The town’s museum had many items on display
that looked suspiciously like objects from the other world.
 
A compass and a camera seemed so familiar to
Jacob that he thought he recognized them as his father’s, though nobody had
been able to tell him where the stranger who had left them behind had vanished
to.

The bells of the town were ringing in the evening as Jacob
walked down the street that led to the market square.
 
A Dwarf woman was selling roasted chestnuts in
front of a bakery.
 
Their sweet aroma
mixed with the smell of the horse manure that was scattered all over the
cobblestones.
 
The idea of the combustion
engine had not yet made it through the mirror, and the monument on the square
showed a King on horseback who had hunted Giants in the surrounding hills.
 
He was an ancestor of the reigning Empress,
Therese of Austry, whose family had hunted not only Giants but also Dragons so
successfully that they were considered extinct within her realm.
 
The
paperboy
who was
standing next to the statue, shouting the news into the gathering dusk, had
definitely never seen more than the footprint of a Giant or the scorch marks of
Dragon fire on the town walls.

DECISIVE
BATTLE
.
TERRIBLE LOSSES
.
GENERAL AMONG
THE FALLEN
. SECRET NEGOTIATIONS.

This world was at war, and it was not being won by humans.
 
Four days had passed since he and Will had run
into one of their patrols, but Jacob could still see them come out of the
forest:
 
three soldiers and an officer,
their stone faces wet from the rain.
 
Golden eyes.
 
Black
claws that tore into his brother’s throat — Goyl.

“Look after your brother, Jacob.”

He put three copper coins into the boy’s grubby hand.
 
The Heinzel sitting on the boy’s shoulder eyed
them suspiciously.
 
Many Heinzel chose
human companions who fed and clothed them
—
though that did
little to improve their crabby dispositions.

“How far are the Goyl?”
 
Jacob took a newspaper.

“Less than five miles from here.”
 
The boy pointed southeast.
 
“With the wind right, we could hear their
cannons.
 
But it’s been quiet since
yesterday.”
 
He sounded almost
disappointed.
 
At his age, even war
sounded like an adventure.

The imperial soldiers filing out of the tavern next to the
church probably knew better.
 
THE OGRE.
 
Jacob had
been witness to the events that had given the tavern its name and had cost its
owner his right arm.
 
Albert Chanute was
standing behind the counter, wearing a grim expression, as Jacob entered the
dingy taproom.
 
Chanute was such a gross
hulk of a man that people said he had Troll blood running through his veins,
not a compliment in the Mirrorworld.
 
But
until the Ogre had chopped off his arm, Albert Chanute had been the best
treasure hunter in all of Austry, and for many years Jacob had been his
apprentice.
 
Chanute had shown him
everything he had needed to gather fame and fortune behind the mirror, and it
had been Jacob who had prevented the Ogre from also hacking off Chanute’s head.

Mementos of his glory days covered the walls of Chanute’s
taproom:
 
the head of a Brown Wolf, the
oven door from a gingerbread house, a cudgel-in-the-sack that jumped off the
wall whenever a guest misbehaved, and, right above the bar and hanging from the
chains with which he used to bind his victims, an arm of the Ogre who had ended
Chanute’s treasure-hunting days.
 
The
bluish skin still shimmered like a lizard’s hide.

“Look who’s here!
”
Chanute said, his
grouchy mouth actually stretching into a smile.
 
“I thought you were in Lotharaine, looking for
an hourglass.”

Chanute had been a legendary treasure hunter, but Jacob had
meanwhile gained an equally famous reputation in that line of work, and the
three men sitting at one of the stained tables curiously lifted their heads.