Hentzau ran his fingers along the old-fashioned barrel. "He wasn't half as stubborn as you when it came to answering our questions. What he taught us turned out to be very useful in the war. But then he disappeared. I searched for him for months but never found a trace of him. And now I have his sons."

He turned to the guards.

"Keep him alive until I get back from the wedding," he said. "There are a lot of questions I want to ask him."

"And the girl?" The guard who was pointing at Clara had a skin of moonstone as pale as if it had never seen the sun.

"Keep her as well," Hentzau replied. "And the fox girl, too. The two of them will probably loosen his tongue much faster than the scorpions."

Hentzau's steps receded into the darkness. Through the barred windows came the sounds of the underground city. But Jacob was far away, in his father's room, touching the frame of the mirror with a child's hands.

40

The Strength of Dwarfs

Jacob heard Clara's breathing in the darkness — and her crying. They were still separated by iron bars, but even more by their thoughts of Will. In Jacob's mind, the kisses Clara had given him merged with the kiss that had awoken his brother. And he kept seeing Will opening his eyes and drowning in jade.

He choked on his own despair. The Dark Fairy had been so close, just a few steps away. Had Miranda watched it in her dreams? Seen how miserably he had failed?

Jacob slammed his manacles against the bars, though all that had gotten him so far were more kicks from the guards.

Clara wiped the tears from her face. How she melted his heart. It's nothing, Jacob. Nothing but the Larks' Water.

Through the barred window, the hanging palace shimmered like a forbidden fruit. Will was probably there already...

Clara lifted her head. From outside the window came a scraping sound, a dull grinding, the sound of something climbing up the wall. A hairy face squeezed through the bars of the cell's window.

Valiant's beard was already sprouting as luxuriantly as in the old days, when he'd still worn it with pride. His short fingers easily bent the iron bars apart.

"You're lucky the Goyl haven't had many Dwarf prisoners yet!" he whispered as he climbed through the warped bars. "The Empress has silver added to all bars in her cells."

He dropped down from the window as nimbly as a weasel and took a deep bow in front of Clara.

"What are you looking at?" he said to Jacob. "It really was too funny when the snakes grabbed you. Absolutely priceless."

"I'm sure the Goyl paid you quite well for that show." Jacob got to his feet and quickly checked the corridor, but there were no guards in sight. "And just when did you sell me out? While I spent hours waiting in front of the jeweler's shop? Or was it at the tailor, who supplies the palace?"

Valiant just shook his head while he pulled open Clara's manacles as easily as he'd bent the window bars. "Will you listen to that!" he whispered to Clara. "Can't trust a soul. I told him it was an imbecile idea to go crawling all over the King's palace like a roach. Did he listen to me? No."

The Dwarf pressed the bars between the two cells open and stood in front of Jacob. "I suppose you're going to blame me for the girls, as well? It wasn't my idea to leave them in the wilderness. And it was definitely not Evenaugh Valiant who told the Goyl where they were."

He leaned over Jacob with a knowing smirk. "They put the scorpions on you, didn't they? Oh, I do admit I would’ve loved to have seen that."

There were voices from the other cells. Clara cowered beneath the window, but no one came down the corridor.

"I saw your brother," Valiant whispered to Jacob as he forced open his handcuffs. "If you can still call him that. Every inch of his skin is now Goyl, and he follows the Dark Fairy like a dog. She took him with her to the wedding of her beloved. Half the garrison went. That's why I could risk coming here."

Clara did not take her eyes off the stone bench where Will had lain.

"Up with you, M'lady!" Valiant whispered. He helped her up to the window as though she didn't weigh any more than a child. "There a rope out there that does almost all the climbing for you, and this building doesn't have any snakes."

"What about Fox?" Jacob hissed.

Valiant pointed to the ceiling. "Right above us."

The façade of the prison stalactite was fissured and craggy, like dripstone, and it offered plenty of footholds, but Clara trembled as she leant out the window. She held on tight to the balustrade while her feet sought purchase between the stones. Valiant, however, gripped the wall as if he'd been born to it.

"Slowly!" he whispered to her as he grabbed her arm. "Just don't look down."

The Dwarf had rappelled from a narrow bridge barely wider than a footpath. The Rapunzel-rope was stretched taut between the prison wall and the bridge's iron girders, and it was ten steep yards to the bridge.

"Valiant's right!" Jacob said, closing Clara's hands around the rope. "Just look straight up. And stay under the bridge until we come back with Fox."

The golden rope was no more than a spider's thread in the huge cavern. Clara climbed painfully slowly, and Jacob followed her with his eyes until she finally pulled herself onto one of the metal struts of the bridge.

Dwarfs and Goyl were well known for their climbing skills. Jacob, however, had never even liked hiking in the hills, let alone free climbing on the inwardly tapering façade of a building hanging hundreds of feet above a hostile city. But luckily they didn't have to climb far. Valiant had been right. Fox was imprisoned in the cell right above theirs.

She was in her human form, and when Jacob knelt down beside her, she wrapped her arms around him and sobbed like a child. Valiant quickly undid her chains.

"They said they'd skin me if I changed shape!" she sobbed. All her anger was gone.

"It's all right!" Jacob said soothingly, stroking her red hair. "Everything will be all right."

Really, Jacob? How?

Fox, of course, saw the despair on his face.

"You didn't find Will," she whispered.

"I did, but he's gone."

A door slammed farther down the corridor. Valiant cocked his rifle. But the guards were dragging some other prisoner out into the corridor.

Fox climbed as swiftly as the Dwarf. Clara looked very relieved when she and Jacob pulled themselves up onto the iron beam next to her. Valiant swung himself onto the bridge while Jacob rubbed the Rapunzel-rope until it was again nothing more than a golden hair. Some time passed before the Dwarf finally waved them up to the bridge. Beneath them, a platoon of Goyl was marching across one of the lower bridges, and a freight train belched black smoke into the huge cavern as it crossed the abyss. Except for two shafts through which a hint of daylight entered the cave, there was no indication of how the Goyl dealt with their exhaust fumes. Your father will probably have shown them, Jacob, he thought as he followed Valiant across the iron planks of the footbridge. But he pushed the thought out of his head. He didn't want to think about his father. He didn't even want to think about Will. He just wanted to go back to the island and forget everything — the Larks' Water, the jade, and the iron bridges that looked as if John Reckless had left his signature all over this world.

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