Reckless

He cut off another finger as one of the blades hacked into the bark right next to him. The Tailor howled like a wolf, yet he slashed at him with even greater rage — and there was no blood running from his wounds.



You will end up as a pair of pants! Jacob's breathing grew labored. His heart was racing. He stumbled over a root, and before he could catch himself, the Tailor stabbed one of his needles deep into Jacob's shoulder. The pain buckled his knees, and he had no breath left to call Fox back as she jumped at the Tailor and sunk her teeth deep into his leg. She had so often saved Jacob's skin, but never quite so literally. The Tailor tried to shake her off. He had forgotten about Jacob, and as he angrily struck out to hack his blades into her furry body, Jacob slashed off his left arm with Chanute's knife.



The Tailor's scream echoes through the dark forest. He stared at the useless stump of his arm and at the bladed hand lying on the moss in front of him. Then he spun around, wheezing, to face Jacob. The remaining hand came down on Jacob with deadly force. Three steel needles, murderous daggers. Jacob thought he could already feel their metal inside him, but before they could pierce his flesh, he rammed his knife deep in the Tailor's chest.



The Tailor grunted, pressing his fingers to his terrible shirt. The his knees buckled.



Jacob staggered to the nearest tree, fighting for breath while the Tailor thrashed in pain on the wet moss. One final gasp and then silence. Jacob did not drop his knife, even though the glazed eyes stared emptily skyward out of the grimy face. He wasn't convinced there was such a thing as death for the Tailor.



Fox shivered as if the hounds had been after her. Jacob let himself drop to his knees next to her and stared at the now lifeless body of the Tailor. Jacob had no idea how long he remained crouched there. His skin was burning as if he'd been rolling around in broken glass. His shoulder was numb with pain, and in front of his eyes the blades were still performing their murderous dance.



"Jacob!" Fox's voice seemed to come to him from afar. "Get up. It's safer at the house!"



He got to his feet.



The Tailor still wasn't moving.



* * * * *



The journey back to the gingerbread house seemed very long, and when it finally appeared between the trees, Jacob saw Clara waiting behind the fence.



"Oh, God!" was all she murmured when she saw the blood on his shirt. She fetched water from the well and washed the cuts. Jacob flinched as her fingers probed his shoulder.



"This one is deep," she said as Fox anxiously crouched by her side. "I wish it would bleed more freely."



"There's iodine and some bandages in my saddlebag." Jacob was grateful that she was used to the sight of bloody wounds. "What about Will? Is he asleep?"



"Yes." And the stone was still there. She didn't have to say it.



Jacob could see from the expression on her face that she wanted to know what had happened in the forest, but that was the last thing he wanted to remember.



Clara fetched the iodine from his saddlebag and dripped the tincture on his wound, but she still looked worried.



"Fox, what plants do you usually roll in when you're wounded?" she asked.



The vixen showed her some herbs in the Witch's garden. They gave off a bittersweet aroma as Clara plucked them apart and pressed them against Jacob's pierced skin.



"Like a born witch," he said. "I thought Will said he met you in a hospital."



She smiled. It made her look very young.



"In our world, the Witches work in hospitals. Remember?"



Clara noticed the scars on Jacob's back as she pulled the shirt over his bandaged shoulder. "How did those happen? Must have been terrible injuries."



Fox shot him a knowing look, but Jacob just buttoned his shirt with a shrug.



"I survived."



Clara looked at him pensively.



"Thank you," she said. "For whatever you did out there. I'm so glad you came back."



10



Fur And Skin



Jacob knew too much about gingerbread houses to be able to find any sleep under the sugar-icing roof. He took the tin plate from his saddlebag and sat down with it in front of the well, polishing it until it filled with bread and cheese. It wasn't a five-course dinner, like the one provided by the wishing table he had found for the Empress, but at least the plate could fit into a saddlebag.



The red moon splashed rust into the night, and dawn was still hours away, but Jacob didn't dare go see whether the stone in Will's skin had vanished. Fox sat down next to him and licked her fur. The Tailor had kicked her, and she had several cuts on her body, but she was all right. Human skin was so much more fragile than fur — or Goyl skin.



"You should try to sleep," she said.



"I can't sleep."



Jacob's shoulder ached, and he imagined he could feel the Witch's black magic battling the Dark Fairy's spell.



"What are you going to do if the berries do work? Take them back?"



Fox tried hard to sound unconcerned, but Jacob heard the unspoken question behind her words. No matter how often he told Fox how much he liked her world, she never lost the fear that one day he would climb up the tower and never return.



"Of course," he said. "And they'll live happily ever after."



"What about us?" Fox snuggled against him as he shuddered in the cold night air. "Winter's coming. We could go south, to Granady or Lombardia, and look for the hourglass."



The hourglass that stopped time. Just a few weeks back, it had been all Jacob could think about. The talking mirror. The glass slipper. The spinning wheel that spun gold. There was always something he could hunt for in this world. And most of the time it helped him forget that he had never been able to find the one thing he really wanted.



Jacob took a piece of bread from the plate and offered it to Fox. "When did you last shift?" he asked as she greedily snapped at it.



She tried to scamper away, but he grabbed her fur. "Fox!"



She tried to bite his hand, but then the fox-shaped shadow, cast by the moonlight of the wall of the well, began to stretch, and Jacob felt himself being pushed away by the strong hands of a girl kneeling next to him.



Her hair was as red as the pelt she so much preferred to her human skin. It fell down her back so long and thick that it looked almost as though she were still wearing her fur. Even the russet dress that covered her freckled skin glistened in the moonlight like the coat of a fox. Its fabric seemed to have been woven from the same silky hair.



She had grown up in these past months, nearly as suddenly as a fox cub becomes a vixen. But Jacob still saw the ten-year-old girl he had found one night, crying at the bottom of the tower because he had stayed much longer in the world he had come from than he had promised. She had been following Jacob for nearly a year by then, without ever showing him her human form. He kept reminding her that she would one day lose her human form if she kept wearing her fur too long, even though he knew that, should Fox ever be forced to decide, she would always choose the fur. At the age of seven she had saved a wounded vixen from her two elder brothers and their sticks, and the next day she had found the furry dress on her bed It had given her the body she had come to regard as her true self, and Fox's greatest fear was that someday someone might steal the dress and take the fur away from her.