Reckless

"They had a fight," Fox said. "He no longer knows what he's doing."



The stone is faster than you, Jacob.



* * * * *



Jacob found Will in the darkest corner of the cave. He was sitting on the floor, his back against the rock.



The roles have been switched, Jacob. It had always been he who, after doing some mischief, had sat in the dark — in his bedroom, in the laundry room, in his father's study. "Jacob? Where are you? What have you done now?" Always Jacob, but not Will. Never Will.



His brother's eyes gleamed in the dark like gold coins.



"What did you say to Clara?"



Will looked at his fingers and clenched them into a fist.



"I can't remember."



"Don't give me that!"



Will had never been a good liar.



"You're the one who wanted to bring her along. Or can't you remember that, either?"



Jacob, stop it. But his shoulder was throbbing with pain, and he was sick and tired of having to look after his brother.



"Fight it!" he yelled at Will. "You can't always count on me to do it all for you."



Will slowly got to his feet. His movements had become more sinewy, and the times when he had barely reached up to Jacob's shoulders had long passed.



"Count on you?" he said. "I quit doing that when I was five. Our mother took a little longer, though. And it was I who got to listen to her crying herself to sleep at night for years."



Brothers.



It was as if they were back in the apartment, in the wide hallway with all the empty rooms and the dark spot on the wallpaper where their father's photograph had once hung.



"Since when does it make any sense to trust someone who is never there?"



Will's voice dispensed his splinters casually, but they still stung.



"You have a lot in common with him, not just your looks."



He scrutinized Jacob as if he were comparing his brother's face with their father's.



"Don't you worry. I am fighting it," he said. "After all, it's my skin, not yours. And I'm still here, right? Doing what you tell me to do. Riding behind you. Sucking it up."



Valiant's voice could be heard outside. He was trying to convince Fox to free him from his silver shackles.



Will nodded toward the exit. "Is that the guide you were talking about?"



"Yes." Jacob forced himself to look at this stranger with his brother's features.



Will walked toward the opening, shielding his eyes with his hand as the sunlight found his face. "I am sorry for what I said to Clara," he said. "I'll talk to her."



Then he stepped outside. And Jacob stood in the darkness, still feeling the splinters — as if Will had smashed the mirror.



22



Dreams



It was night, but the Dark Fairy did not sleep. The night was too beautiful to sleep it away. But she still saw the Man-Goyl anyway. By now she dreamed of him whether she was asleep or not. Her curse had already turned most of his skin to jade. Jade. Green. Like life itself. Petrified abundance. Heart-stone, sown by the heartless. He would be so much more beautiful once the jade had replaced all his human skin, and once he fulfilled the promise of his new flesh. The future, as decided by the past, all those things hidden in the folds of time. They could only be known in dreams, which revealed so much more to her than to men or Goyl, perhaps because time meant so little when you were immortal.



She should have stayed in the castle with the bricked-up windows and waited there for news from Hentzau, but Kami’en had wanted to get back to the mountains where he was born and return to his fortress under the earth. He longed for the deep as she longed for the night sky and for white lilies floating on water — although she still tried to convince herself that love alone could feed her soul.



All she saw in the train window was her own reflection, a pale phantom on a pane of glass, behind which the world slipped past far too quickly. Kami’en knew that she disliked trains almost as much as she disliked the depths of the earth, so he'd had the walls of her carriage decorated with intarsia: ruby blossoms and malachite leaves, a sky of lapis lazuli, hills of jade, and, inlaid with moonstone, the shimmering surface of a lake. That was love, wasn't it?



The stone images were beautiful, very beautiful, and whenever she no longer could bear seeing the hills and fields rush by as if they were dissolving into the fabric of time, she would run her fingers over the inlaid blossoms. And yet the noise of the train still hurt her ears, and all the metal around her made her Fairy skin crawl.



Yes. He loved her. But he was still going to marry the dollface, the human princess with the blank eyes and the beauty she owed to the lilies of the Fairies. Amalie. Her name sounded as bland as her face looked. How she would have loved to kill her. A poisoned comb, a dress that would eat into her flesh while she twirled in it in front of her golden mirrors. How she would scream and tear at her skin, which was so much softer than that of her bridegroom.



The Fairy pressed her forehead against the cool glass. She couldn’t understand where all that jealousy was coming from. After all, it wasn't the first time Kami’en had taken himself another woman. No Goyl loved only once. Nobody loved only once... Fairies least of all.



The Dark Fairy knew all the stories about her kind: that those who loved one of them invariably fell into madness; that they had no hearts, just as they had neither fathers nor mothers. At least that part was true. She pressed her hand against her chest. No heart. So where did the love she felt come from?



Outside, the stars were floating like blossoms on the inky waters of a river. The Goyl feared water, even though it had created their caves, and the sound of its dripping was as natural a part of their cities as the sound of the wind above the ground. They feared water so much that the sea had restricted Kami’en's conquests, making him dream of the power of flight. But she couldn't give him wings, any more than she could give him children. She was born of the water he feared so much, and all the words that so much to them — sister, brother, daughter, son — meant nothing to her.



The dollface couldn't give him children, either, unless he wanted to sire one of those crippled monsters some human women had borne his soldiers. "How often do I have to tell you? I couldn’t care less about her, but I need this peace." He actually believed every one of his words, but she knew him better than that. He did want peace, but even more than that he yearned to caress human skin and to make one of them his wife. His fascination with all things human had begun to concern her as much as it did his people.



Where did the love come from? What was it made of? Stone, like him? Water, like her?



When she had first set out to find him, it had just been a game. A game with the toy her dreams had shown her. The Goyl who was smashing the world to pieces, who disregarded its rules, just as she did. The Fairies played with this world; the last one to have done so now wore a skin of bark. And yet she had still dispatched her moths to find Kami’en. The tent in which she first met him had smelled of blood, of the death she did not understand, and still she had thought of it all as a game. She had promised him the world. His flesh in the flesh of his enemies. And much too late had she realized what he had sown in her. Love. Worst of all poisons.



"You should wear human dresses more often,"