A general and three of her most powerful ministers were standing by the windows, with a view behind them of the roofs and towers of Vena—and of the distant mountains the Goyl had already conquered. Jacob recognized the adjutant talking to them when he turned and faced him. Leo von Donnersmarck. He had accompanied Jacob on three of his expeditions for the Empress. Two of them had been so successful that they had earned Jacob a lot of money, and Donnersmarck a medal. They had been friends for a long time, but the look Donnersmarck gave Jacob didn’t show it. There were a few more medals on his white uniform, and when he moved to the general’s side, he dragged his left leg. Compared to war, treasure hunting was a harmless trade.
“Unauthorized entry to the palace. Threatening my guests. One of my spies knocked unconscious?” The Empress put down her quill and waved Auberon to her side. The Dwarf kept his eyes firmly on Jacob while he pulled back his mistress’s chair. The Court Dwarfs of Austry had thwarted more than a dozen assassination attempts since they started to serve its dynasty, and Therese always had at least three of them by her side. Rumor had it they could even take on Giantlings.
Therese waited for Auberon to smooth her dress before she stepped out from behind her desk. She was still as slender as a young girl.
“I thought you were finding me an Hourglass. As I remember it, you promised to deliver that for my birthday. Instead you are fighting a duel in my palace with my future son-in-law’s bodyguard!”
Jacob bowed his head. Therese didn’t like it when you looked her in the eye. “I had no choice, Your Highness. Kami’en’s bodyguard attacked me. I only defended myself.”
Kami’en’s bodyguard. The Empress could never know that he meant his brother. She would immediately wonder how she could use Will to her advantage.
“You have to surrender him, Your Majesty.” The minister who made the suggestion despised Therese’s passion for treasure hunts.
“I suggest you have him shot, Your Majesty.” That was the general. “To prove your desire for peace.”
“Nonsense,” the Empress replied testily. “As if this war hasn’t cost me enough already. He’s the best treasure hunter I have had for years—even better than his teacher, Albert Chanute.”
She moved so close to Jacob that he could smell her perfume. One of its ingredients supposedly was the aromatic oil of Sorcerer Poppy, which had the effect that whoever inhaled the scent was far more impressionable to orders and royal demands.
“Did someone pay you who doesn’t like this peace? If so, tell them Therese of Austry doesn’t like it either.”
“Your Majesty!” All three ministers glanced at the door as if the Goyl were listening on the other side.
“Oh, be quiet!” the Empress snapped. “I’m the one who is paying for this peace with my daughter.”
Jacob looked at Donnersmarck, but his glance was not returned.
“Nobody paid me, Your Highness,” he replied. “And this fight had nothing to do with your peace. They caught me spying on the Dark Fairy.”
The Empress’s face went almost as blank as her daughter’s.
“The Fairy?” Therese tried valiantly to sound unconcerned, but her voice gave her away. Hatred and disgust, Jacob heard them both. And anger. Therese of Austry was proud of her fearlessness, and the Dark Fairy frightened her.
“Why would you spy on her?”
“I would like to do more than that. Grant me five minutes alone with her. I promise you won’t regret it. Or does it please your daughter that her groom brought his mistress to the wedding?”
Careful, Jacob. But he was too desperate to be careful.
The Empress exchanged a glance with the general.
“He’s as disrespectful as the man who taught him,” she said. “Chanute used that same impertinent tone with my father.”
“Five minutes!” Jacob repeated. “Tell Kami’en I have to meet the Fairy to discuss a surprise you plan for him. Tell him anything!”
Therese of Austry was a brilliant liar.
“Her magic cost you the war and ten thousands of your subjects. It will cost you your daughter! Don’t you want to take revenge for that? Use me! Nobody will ever know I acted on your behalf.”
Revenge. A dangerous word. Therese certainly wished for nothing more but she also wanted peace. She needed this peace.
“Your Majesty…” the general fell silent when Therese shot him a warning look.
“You’re too late, Jacob,” she said. “I wish you had come earlier, but I’ve already signed the treaty.”
She turned and walked back to her desk.
“Tell the Goyl he inhaled Elven dust,” she ordered, while one of the guards grabbed Jacob’s arm. “Take him to the gate and give orders not to let him in again.”
Jacob opened his mouth to protest, but the guards had already pushed him toward the doors.
“Oh, yes, Jacob!” Therese called after him. “Forget about the Hourglass! I want a Wishing Sack!”
45
PAST TIMES
Jacob had no idea how he found his way back to the hotel. In every shopwindow he saw his brother’s face of jade, and every woman he passed turned into the Dark Fairy. It couldn’t be over. He would break her spell. At the wedding, at the station where she’d board the Goyl train with the freshly married couple. He would follow her back to the Hanging Palace if he had to. Yes, he would, although he had to admit that he could no longer tell what was driving him: the hope of somehow getting his brother back, the hunger for revenge, or simply his injured pride.
At the hotel a group of newly arrived guests was waiting at the reception desk, surrounded by stacks of luggage and a flock of hurried bellhops. Wedding guests. A Goyl family attracted more looks and whispers than the Empress’s younger sister, who had arrived without the Wolf-Lord her father had married her to. She wore a coat tailored from black bear fur that made her look as though she was in mourning over her niece’s wedding.
The ceremony would take place the next day, that much Jacob had found out. In the cathedral where Therese of Austry had been wed as well, just like her mother and her grandmother before her.
Jacob nearly dropped the clothes the chambermaid had washed and mended when he entered his room to find a man standing by the window. Donnersmarck was in uniform. “You have to admit it,” Albert Chanute liked to mock the imperial white, “no other uniform makes a better show of the bloodstains.”
Jacob put his clothes on a chair and closed the door behind him.
“Is there any room the adjutant to the Empress does not have access to?”
“An Ogre’s cave, a Bluebeard’s red chamber. That’s where your talents are still useful.”
Leo Donnersmarck had lost his sister to a Bluebeard. They had tried to save her together but they had come too late.
“What’s your business with the Dark Fairy?”
They hadn’t seen each other for nearly a year, but hunting a Bluebeard forges a bond not easily broken and they had faced more than that together. They’d never found the Devil’s hair the Empress had wished for, but Jacob had brought her a Wishing Table, because Donnersmarck had distracted the Brown Wolf guarding it, and he certainly still remembered how Jacob had saved him in a shabby inn from being clubbed to death by a cudgel-in-the-sack.
“What happened to your leg?”
“What do you think?” Donnersmarck walked haltingly toward him. “There was a war on.”
From outside the window came the din of carriages and cursing coachmen. Not so different from the other world. But next to the bed, two Grass-Elves were swirling above a small bouquet of sweet peas. Many hotels released them in the bedrooms because their dust gave most guests enchanted dreams. It could be quite addictive, though. The Crown Prince of Lotharaine was said to consume vast amounts.
“I am here to ask you a question. You can probably guess on whose behalf.” Donnersmarck brushed a fly off his flawlessly white tunic. “If you were to get your five minutes, would Kami’en’s Fairy mistress still at
tend his wedding?”
It took Jacob a few minutes to absorb the meaning of Donnersmarck’s words. So Therese would grant him the five minutes. What if he had to get past his brother again? He would have to take that risk—hoping that Kami’en had given in to his lover’s wish and kept Will by his side.
“No, she won’t,” he answered. “I promise the Empress’s daughter won’t have to compete with an immortal lover in the future. I can’t change the fact, though, that Kami’en has at least two Goyl wives.”
Donnersmarck eyed him intently, trying to read from his face what he wasn’t saying. “You’re no longer wearing that medallion.” He pointed at Jacob’s neck. “Have you made peace with her red sister?”
They had learned a lot about each other hunting for magical treasure.
“I have. It is too dangerous to not live in peace with her.”
“Dangerous… since when do you care?” Donnersmarck gave him a mocking smile. He adjusted his saber. He had brought it back from the ruined castle where they had found the Wishing Table. Leo von Donnersmarck was quite a swordsman, but his leg injury had probably changed that.
“You make peace with one sister only to declare war on the other. It’s always like that with peace, isn’t it? Always to someone’s detriment, already sowing the seed for the next war.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Sorry, standing for hours at audiences and receptions doesn’t make this leg any better. I guess the Empress didn’t consider that when she made me her adjutant.”
He rubbed his knee and shooed one of the Grass-Elves away when she sat on his sleeve. There was still something he wished to say but Leo Donnersmarck was careful with words. He didn’t really trust them. Living at court with all its well-phrased flatteries and eloquent lies hadn’t changed that.
“I know I shouldn’t ask,” he finally said, “but I have to. As your friend. Why, Jacob? Why the Dark Fairy?”
Of course he should have just lied. But he hadn’t been able to talk to anyone since his haunting encounter with his brother. Fox. He should have asked Fox to come. No, you shouldn’t, Jacob.
“Did you see the jade Goyl?” he asked. “He is one of Kami’en’s bodyguards.”
“Of course. Everybody is talking about him. They say he was one of us. Now he is the legendary Goyl who’ll make Kami’en invincible. Maybe you and I should team up one more time, to kill him instead of the Fairy. Together we may have a chance.”
“I can’t sign up for that, Leo. He is my brother.”
Donnersmarck looked at Jacob as incredulously as if he had told him that the Dark Fairy was his sister.
“Your brother? I didn’t know you had a brother. Come to think of it, there’s probably a lot I don’t know about you.”
Yes. A lot, indeed. Jacob wondered whether Donnersmarck would have believed him if he had told him about the other world. Maybe. He was staring out of the window as absently as if he was back on the battlefields where the Goyl had beaten his Empress.
“If it hadn’t been for the Fairy, we would have won this war.”
No, you wouldn’t, Jacob thought. Because Kami’en is the better general, because my father showed them how to build better rifles and planes, because they made the Dwarfs their allies. And because you’ve been stoking their rage for centuries. Donnersmarck knew all that too, but it was so much easier to blame the Fairy.
“She walks every evening in the palace gardens, just after sunset.” Donnersmarck struggled to his feet. “Kami’en has them searched beforehand but his men aren’t very thorough. Even the Goyl are afraid of her. And they know what you should know as well: that there’s no one who can harm her.”
“There is a way.”
Why don’t you tell him, Jacob? So he can try in case you fail? No. If the Dark Fairy killed him, she would kill Donnersmarck as well and Jacob wanted him to live.
“I am not a fool, Leo,” he replied. “You can be sure of that. And I didn’t lose my mind. I just want my brother back.”
Donnersmarck nodded. He had wanted his sister back. He would have faced the Dark Fairy to save her, but the Bluebeard hadn’t given them a chance.
“What if you kill the Fairy and your brother is still a Goyl?”
“Well… their King will soon be married to your Empress’s daughter. It may soon be tougher to be human than to be Goyl in this world.”
Donnersmarck didn’t reply to that.
Someone walked down the corridor. They both listened until the steps died away.
“I will send you two men as soon as it gets dark.” Donnersmarck limped to the door. “They will take you to the gardens.”
He turned again.
“Did I ever show you this?” He pointed at a medal on his chest, a gilded star with the Empress’s crest in the center. “They gave me this after we found the Wishing Table. After you found it.”
He reached for the doorknob.
“You will die, Jacob,” he said. “You know that I would have given my life for my sister, and I understand why you have to try. After all you’re the only mortal man who survived being the lover of her red sister. But this Fairy is different. The Dark Fairy is more dangerous than anything you or I have ever encountered and your brother is gone. I have seen him. He is a Goyl. Nothing will change that. Go and look for the Wishing Sack the Empress envies the Crookback so much for, or the Tree of Life, or the Dragon’s egg you’ve always dreamed about. Anything. But please! Send me back to the palace with the message that you’ve changed your mind. Make peace with the Dark Fairy. As we all will make peace with the Goyl, even though it’s the last thing we want to do.”
Of course he knew what Jacob’s answer would be.
“I’ll be here at dusk.”
“Of course you will,” Donnersmarck replied. And closed the door behind him.
46
THE DARK SISTER
An hour had passed since sunset, and Jacob was still waiting for the men Donnersmarck had promised to send. He was just beginning to suspect that his old friend had decided to protect him from himself when he heard a knock on his door. But it was a woman who was standing in the hotel corridor.
Jacob recognized Fox only when she pushed back the veil she was wearing over her red hair. He had never seen her in city clothes: dress and gloves tailored from embroidered silk that fitted to her slender figure as perfectly as the vixen’s fur. Fox mostly wore men’s clothes when they traveled, and on rare occasions Jacob had seen her in one of the dresses peasant girls wore in the fields.
She looked so much older, so… what, Jacob?
“Don’t look at me like that,” she snapped. “It wasn’t my idea to come here. Clara wants to see your brother one last time.”
She stepped into his room.
“Why didn’t you talk her out of it?”
Fox eyed the room, the Grass-Elves, the bed. “Talk her out of it? Did that ever work with you? And I understand why she wants to see him.”
She touched the fabric of the bed curtains and ran her fingers over the embroidered flowers. “I told her how the Fairy’s magic works. That Will has probably forgotten everything. That I’ve seen it with you. She says it doesn’t matter. And the Dwarf has promised to take her to the wedding.”
Great.
Fox eyed his arm. Jacob flinched when she touched it exactly where Will’s saber had cut into his flesh.
“What happened? Jacob!” She took his face between her hands. They were much stronger than her slender form suggested. “You’re here to find the Fairy, right? Did you already try? No, you probably would be dead.”
She read him so easily. And she always knew when he was lying, but this time she couldn’t know or she would follow him. And if the Fairy killed her, he would never forgive himself. Although he was usually so good at it.
“I saw Will. That’s what I came for,” he said. The best lies stay close to the truth. “We fought and he almost killed me. He is one of them. You were right. And there is no return.”
B
elieve me, Fox. Please.
Another knock.
“Jacob Reckless? Lieutenant Donnersmarck sent us.” The two soldiers standing in the doorway were barely older than Will.
“I’m coming.” Jacob signaled Fox to follow him out into the corridor.
“I’m getting drunk with Donnersmarck,” he whispered into her ear. “There’s nothing else left to do, so whatever… I’ll see you tomorrow at the wedding. I guess you are right. Clara should see Will one more time. Maybe it will make her realize that it’s over.”
Her eyes went from him to the two soldiers.
She didn’t believe him. Of course she didn’t. She knew him better than he knew himself.
She didn’t say a word as she followed him and the soldiers to the elevator. She would be so angry, even angrier than at the brook with the Larks’ Water.
“I wish you hadn’t come,” he said when they reached the elevator. It was a terrible thought that they would part like this and that he might never see her again. But she would be alive. “She cannot follow me,” he said, turning to the soldiers. “I need one of you to stay with her to make sure of that.”
She tried to shift shape, but Jacob quickly grabbed her arm. Skin on skin, that mostly kept the fur at bay. She tried desperately to free herself, but he wouldn’t let go.
“Make sure she doesn’t leave the room before morning.” The soldier to whom Jacob handed his room key was as broad as a wardrobe, despite his boyish face. “But be careful. She’s a shape-shifter.”
The soldier didn’t look too happy about his task, but he nodded and took Fox’s arm. It hurt so much to see the anger in her eyes, but the mere thought of losing her hurt more.
“I knew it! You are going to see the Fairy!” She fought like the vixen when the soldier dragged her back to the room. “Don’t! Jacob! Don’t!”
He could still hear her voice when the elevator opened into the lobby. For one moment he actually wanted to go back up, just to wipe the anger from her face. But the Dark Fairy was surely already walking in the palace gardens.
The Petrified Flesh Page 19
