“Please. You will find someone else.” His own words. So why shouldn’t that someone be the Windhound? Because he wasn’t good enough for her. Really, Jacob? And who is?
The woman in the first tent was so old she looked like her own mummy. When she saw Jacob, she spat three times and screeched through toothless gums, “Cepedko!”—the Varangian word for silver.
The woman in the second tent quickly gave back his coins when her crystal ball filled with black moths. Did that mean Will had already found the Dark Fairy? Jacob didn’t wait to find out.
The next tent appeared to be empty. He was about to back out of it when a young woman emerged from behind a curtain. Her clothes were a mix of Mongolian and Anamian fabrics, and the butterfly-like veil over her jet-black hair was probably from Prambanan.
“We rarely have clients this early in the morning,” she said with a shy smile as she pulled the curtain over the entrance. “The glasses of others are better in the dark.”
She didn’t need glass. The third eye above her nose was like those on certain kinds of Nymphs. Even some Ogres had them, but the almost invisible eyelid and the high cheekbones made clear that the girl was the daughter of a Bamboo Woman.
“What images do you seek?” She pulled the veils over her forehead until they covered the third eye, a gesture she must have practiced since her childhood. A third eye was considered bad luck.
“I’m looking for my brother. He’s disappeared, and I would like to know where he is.”
Jacob had shown Will’s photograph in so many places that it was worn and creased. At least it made it less obvious that the picture was in color. Photographs in this world were still black and white.
The Bamboo Girl looked at the photo and returned it to Jacob. Then she closed her eyes. The eye on her forehead, however, widened. Jacob could see it even through the veils.
Outside, the whinny of a horse.
The cries of a child.
The Bamboo Girl suddenly gasped for air. “He tricked your brother... Oh, he is devious. He promised he could make everything right.”
“Make right? What?” Jacob took her hands. They were soft, like a child’s. “Can you see where my brother is? Is he alone?”
She shook her head and shuddered.
“Is the Goyl with him?”
She didn’t hear him. “They are silver and glass,” she whispered, “and so empty, despite all their faces.” She pressed her hand to her forehead and looked around as though the images she’d just seen had entered the dark tent. “He has a skin of stone,” she whispered. “And he will kill her. She always knew he would.”
Then she dropped to her knees and pressed her head to the floor. Jacob knelt down next to her, but he couldn’t understand what she was muttering. It was not a language he understood. The girl rocked back and forth like a child. She began to hum a melody, a lullaby, as though she were trying to put herself to sleep.
A man entered the tent. Jacob had seen him outside, juggling with Thumblings. “She’ll now sit like that for hours,” he said. “I hope you paid her well?”
“Certainly,” Jacob lied.
He left the tent. Two men, probably casting agents for one of Moskva’s theaters, were watching a hair-raising performance in which six children were contorting themselves to form an almost real-looking Dragon.
“He promised he could make everything right.” What? Jacob couldn’t even be sure it was Will she was speaking about. It had been a stupid idea to come here.
Jacob stood and watched as the “Dragon” unformed to become six children, who bowed and nervously awaited the verdict of their audience. They hadn’t learned yet that these spectators never showed their enthusiasm, in order to keep the price low.
“They are silver and glass.” Good. And bad. If Seventeen and his sister were Will’s bodyguards, that explained why Jacob hadn’t seen them since the attack. “He has a skin of stone.” That was the worst sentence. Had the girl seen the present or the past?
No. This couldn’t have been for nothing. All the pain and the fear... Almost having died. You did die, Jacob.
The Thumbling-juggler was standing once more in front of the Bamboo Girl’s tent. His face said it clearly: He wasn’t letting anyone in anytime soon.
“But you’d rather take the advice of a former lover.” Spieler was right. Who cared if Will killed the Dark Fairy? She more than deserved it. And if she’d turned Will into a Goyl again, Jacob too wanted to see her dead, together with all her sisters.
“He has a skin of stone.”
Jacob had never more felt the need to speak to Fox. Nobody could sort his thoughts better; nobody had better advice. The walk back to Baryatinsky’s palace seemed to take forever. His relief when he finally saw the gilded gates was almost comical. But Fox was not in her room, and the maid making her bed only mumbled in broken Varangian that Mademoiselle Auger had gone out.
Jacob didn’t ask the girl whether Mademoiselle Auger had been alone.