The Golden Yarn (Mirrorworld 3)

The Moonstone Prince

The doll-princess was not having an easy labor. Not even the palace garden offered a refuge from her screams, and the Dark Fairy listened, and she hated how those groans and whimpers made her feel. She hoped Amalie would die. Of course. She’d been hoping ever since Kami’en had said yes to the other one in her bloody wedding gown. Yet there was more: an unreasonable longing for the infant who was pushing those screams from Amalie’s vapid, pretty mouth.

Through all these months, only her magic had kept the unborn child alive. The child that could not be. “You will save it. Promise me!” The same whispered plea, every time after he’d made love to her. Only that had made Kami’en return to her bed at night. The desire to meld his flesh with human flesh—it made him so helpless.

Oh, how the Doll screamed. As though the infant were being carved with a knife from her body, the body that only a Fairy lily could make desirable.

Kill her already, Skinless Prince. What gives her the right to call herself your mother?

He would have rotted inside her, like a forbidden fruit, if it hadn’t been for the magic the Dark One had spun around Amalie. Yes, the infant was a boy. A son. The Dark Fairy had seen him in her dreams.

Kami’en did not come for her help himself. Not this night. He sent his bloodhound to find her instead. His milky-eyed jasper shadow. Hentzau stopped in front of her, and as usual he avoided looking in her eyes.

“The midwife says she’s losing the child.”

Why did she go with him?

For the child.

It filled the Fairy with quiet satisfaction that Kami’en’s son chose the night to come into the world. Amalie feared the darkness so much, she always kept a dozen gaslights burning in her bedchamber, even though their pale light hurt her husband’s eyes.

Kami’en was standing next to Amalie’s bed. He turned as the servants opened the door for his mistress. For an instant, the Fairy thought she could see in his eyes a shadow of the love she used to find there. Love. Hope. Fear. Dangerous emotions for a King, though Kami’en’s stone skin helped him hide them. More and more, he was starting to resemble one of the statues his human enemies erected for their Kings.

The startled midwife toppled a basin with bloody water as the Fairy approached Amalie’s bed. Even the doctors backed away from her. Goyl doctors, human doctors, Dwarf doctors. Their black frocks made them look like a murder of crows drawn in by the scent of death rather than anticipation of a new life.

Amalie’s doll face was swollen with fear and pain. The lashes around her violet-blue eyes were congealed with tears. Fairy-lily eyes...The Dark Fairy thought she could see in those eyes the water of the lake that had once delivered her.

“Go away!” Amalie’s voice was hoarse from screaming. “What do you want? Who called you?”

The Dark One pictured those violet eyes being snuffed out and that soft skin Kami’en so loved to touch turning cold and flaccid. The temptation to make her dead was so sweet. Too bad the Fairy couldn’t indulge it, for a dead Doll would take Kami’en’s son with her.

“I know why you’re not letting the child out!” the Dark One whispered in Amalie’s ear. “You’re afraid to look at him. But I won’t allow you to kill him with your dying flesh. Deliver him, or I will have him cut out of you.”

How the Doll stared at her. The Fairy wasn’t sure whether the hatred in Amalie’s eyes revealed more fear or jealousy. Maybe love bore fruit even more poisonous than fear.

Amalie squeezed the infant out. The midwife’s face turned into a contorted mask of horror and disgust. On the streets, they already called him the Skinless Prince. But he did have a skin. The Fairy’s magic had given him one, as hard and as smooth as moonstone, and just as transparent. His skin revealed everything it covered: every sinew, every vein, the small skull, the eyeballs. Kami’en’s son looked like Death—or at least like his youngest spawn.

Amalie groaned and pressed her hands over her eyes. Kami’en was the only one who looked at the baby without dread. The Dark Fairy took the slithery body and stroked the transparent skin with her six-fingered hand until it turned as red as his father’s, giving such beauty to the small face that now all the averted eyes turned back in enchantment to admire the newborn prince. Amalie reached out for her son, but the Fairy placed the baby in Kami’en’s arms. She did so without looking at the King, and when she stepped out into the dark hallway, he didn’t stop her.

The Dark Fairy had to pause halfway and struggle for breath on a balcony. Her hands trembled as she wiped her fingers on her dress, again and again, until she could no longer feel the warm body they’d touched.

There was no word for child in her language. There hadn’t been in a long time.

An Alliance of Old Foes

John Reckless had stood in Charles de Lotharaine’s audience chamber before, once, with a different face and a different name. Was that five years ago? He found it hard to believe it hadn’t been longer, but those past years had taught him much about time, about yearlong days and years that passed as quickly as a day.

“These will be better?”

Charles, the Crookback, frowned as his son tried to hide another yawn behind his hand. It was an open secret that the crown prince Louis was suffering from the Snow-White Syndrome. The palace kept silent about where and how the prince had contracted that malady (as was, in these days of progress, the preferred term for the effects of black magic). Yet the parliament of Albion had already seen debates on the dangers (and opportunities) of a King on the throne in Lutis who could at any moment fall into a sleep lasting days at a time. The Albian secret service claimed that Crookback had even gone so far as to secure the services of a child-eater to heal the crown prince. Judging by the yawns Louis tried to hide behind his dark red sleeves, she’d not been very successful.

“You have my word, and that of Wilfred of Albion, Your Majesty. The machines I will build for you will not only fly higher and faster than the airplanes of the Goyl but will also be much better armed.”

What John did not mention was that he could only be so confident because those Goyl airplanes had been designed by him as well. Not even Wilfred of Albion knew of his famous engineer’s past. His stolen name and new face had shielded John from such exposure, just as they protected him from the Goyl, who were supposedly still looking for him. A different nose and a different chin were a small price to pay for days spent free of fear. His nights were still shattered by dreams that were the legacy of years spent in Goyl prisons. But he’d learned to make do with little sleep. Yes, the past five years had

indeed taught him a lot. Not that they had made him a better person—he was still a self-serving coward, relentlessly driven by ambition (some truths were best faced straight on). His imprisonment had taught him that, but also a lot about this world and its inhabitants.

“Should your generals be concerned that airplanes may not be the answer to the military superiority of the Goyl, then I can assure you that the parliament of Albion shares these concerns and has authorized me to address them by presenting two of my most recent inventions.”

The authorization had, in fact, been issued by King Wilfred himself, but it seemed best to maintain appearances. Albion was proud of its democratic traditions, though the true power still rested with the King and the nobility. It was no different in Lotharaine, though here the people had a less romantic view of noble and crowned heads—one of the reasons for the armed riots that were currently plaguing the capital.

Louis yawned again. The crown prince had a reputation for being as stupid as he looked. Stupid, moody, and with cruel tendencies that worried even his father. And Charles of Lotharaine was getting old, though he dyed his hair black and was still a handsome man.

John motioned one of the guards who had accompanied him from Albion to come closer. The Walrus (this moniker for Wilfred the First was so fitting, John was perpetually worried he might one day actually use it to address his royal employer) had him well guarded. Albion’s King had insisted, over John’s well-known dislike for ships, that his best engineer go in person to sell Crookback on the idea of an alliance. The construction plans, which the guard now handed to the King’s adjutant, had been drawn by John especially for this audience, leaving out a few vital details he would supply after the alliance was completed. Crookback’s engineers wouldn’t notice. After all, John was confronting them with the technology of another world.

“I call these ‘tanks.’” John had to suppress a smile as his Lotharainian competition leaned over the drawings with an obvious mix of envy and incredulous awe. “Not even the Goyl cavalry can withstand these machines.”

The second drawing showed rockets with explosive warheads. There were indeed moments when John’s conscience tried to put him on trial. He could have brought inventions into this world that would have made it healthier and more just for its people. He usually soothed his conscience with a generous donation to an orphanage, or to Albion’s suffragettes, though that of course brought up memories of his wife, Rosamund, and of Jacob and Will.

“Who is going to manufacture these valves?” an engineer asked doubtfully.

John returned to the present, where he was a man without sons and where the woman in his life was the daughter of a Leonese diplomat and fifteen years his junior.

“If they can make those valves in Albion,” Crookback barked at the engineer, “then we can damn well do it here. Or will I have to recruit my engineers from the universities of Pendragon and Londra?”