Someone was coming through the church door.
Louis stumbled over the first skull in his path. He reached for a hold on the nearest pillar. ‘The wine around here is even more sour than my mother’s lemonade,’ he babbled. ‘And the girls are even uglier than you, Eaumbre.’
And of course he had to throw up over the bones they hadn’t searched yet.
‘How much longer are you going to be doing this?’ He wiped his tailored sleeve over his mouth and tottered towards Nerron. ‘And anyway . . . all that treasure hunting . . . the magical crossbow . . . My father should be looking for engineers that are as good as Albion’s instead.’
He stopped abruptly and stared at a pile of skulls to his left. Something was moving beneath them. Eaumbre drew his sabre, but Louis waved him away impatiently.
‘I’ll break his neck myself,’ he shouted drunkenly. ‘Can’t be that hard. Nasty little . . .’
Lelou shot Nerron an alarmed look. A yellow follet’s bite was nearly as dangerous as that of a viper. But what came crawling out from between the bones had neither a yellow skin nor legs or arms.
‘Don’t!’ Nerron yelled as the Waterman lifted his sabre.
Three fingers, pale as wax.
They moved as fast as locust legs. Nerron tried to grab them – and immediately let go with a curse. His arm was numb all the way up to the shoulder. The hand of a Warlock – what were you thinking, Nerron?
The fingers scurried towards Louis. He stumbled back, but something was crawling down the pillar behind him. Thumb and forefinger. The second piece. Eaumbre hacked at them with his sabre, but the fingers skilfully dodged the blade. Louis tugged at his dagger, but he was too drunk to get it out of the scabbard.
‘Damn it!’ he screeched. ‘Do something!’
A piece of the hand was crawling up his boot.
‘Grab it!’ Nerron barked at him. ‘Do it now!’
There wasn’t much of Guismond’s blood flowing through Louis’s veins. Still, maybe it would give him enough protection. If not . . . but Louis was already leaning down. The fingers kept twitching like the legs of an unappetisingly large beetle, but they didn’t give Louis a jolt. So the princeling was useful after all! Things were now crawling from all directions towards him. The two halves of the wrist slithered like turtles across the flagstones.
Louis put the pieces together like a child playing with a grisly model kit. The dead flesh stuck together like warm wax. There was still gold on the stump and the fingernails. Nerron smiled. Yes, this was the right hand.
The swindlesack he pulled from his jacket was from the mountains of Anatolia, a place from which one didn’t easily return alive. Still, every treasure hunter had to own at least one of these sacks. Whatever was put inside disappeared and would re-emerge only when one reached for it deep within the sack.
Nerron held out the sack to Louis.
The prince flinched away from him, and he hid the hand behind his back like a spoilt child.
‘No,’ he said, yanking the swindlesack from Nerron’s fingers. ‘Why should you have it? The hand came to me!’
Lelou couldn’t hide his gleeful grin. The Waterman, however, exchanged a look with Nerron, and floating in that look like pebbles in a pond was the memory of every one of Louis’s insults.
Good.
One day that might save him the trouble of having to snap the princeling’s neck himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
IMPOSSIBLE
What would you do without her, Jacob? Fox was looking out the train window, but he wasn’t sure whether she was gazing at the fields drifting past outside or at the reflection of her face in the glass. Jacob often caught her staring at her human form as if she were staring at a stranger.
Fox noticed his look, and she smiled at him with that mix of confidence and bashfulness only her human self knew. The vixen was never bashful.
The steam of the locomotive drifted past the windows, and a coat-tailed waiter balanced cups and plates through the swaying dining car. Jacob felt as though the previous night’s pain had sharpened his senses. The world around him seemed just as wondrous and strange as when he he’d seen it the first time he came through the mirror. He touched the teacup the waiter brought him. The white porcelain was painted with Elves, the kind that were still found on many flowers in Albion. At the next table, two men were arguing over the use of Giantlings in the Albian navy, and nearby a woman’s neck glistened with Selkie-tears, which were found all along the island’s southern shores, like unshelled pearls. He still loved this world, even though it was trying to take his life.
The tea was bitter, despite the elven cup. So bitter that he barely managed to get it down, but it helped against the fatigue the moth’s bite had left inside him.
Fox reached for his hand. ‘How are you feeling? We’ll be there soon.’