Sixteen hesitated. Will felt she wanted to protest. Her face flushed with silver as if in anger. But then she stepped back and became the grass and the sky, the weathered pavilion, the overgrown garden.
Will saw her again in his dreams the next night. And the night after that. But now she also showed herself to him during the day. Whenever he turned, she was there, like a flower of glass and silver. But there was more bark, and more colorless blood on her skin.
And Will rode faster.
“You’ll never find the Fairy, will you?”
He had to find her.
As though only now did he really know why.
No, Will.
For Clara. He still did it only for Clara. He repeated it to himself, over and over, but Clara’s face had turned into silver and glass.
Home
Caution! Dogs!
When he saw the sign on the fence on the northern edge of Parramatta, Robert Dunbar was tempted to order the taxi driver to turn around. Beyond the fence, he could see the kind of house found all over Tasmania, an adventurous mix of wood, stone, and wrought iron. The white struts of the terrace and the iron borders under the roof reminded Dunbar of the sugar icing on the houses of Witches. The houses were shipped as kits from Albion, halfway around the world, to make a strange land feel like home. Under the wide blue sky and surrounded by eucalyptus trees, they’d quickly become part of that strange land.
Dunbar cursed his myopic eyes as he tried to see whether there were indeed dogs lurking under the flowering bushes in front of the house. Too many evenings spent reading in dim light... Soon enough he’d be as blind as a bat (of which there were irritatingly many in Tasmania). Fir Darrig didn’t get along too well with dogs, but Dunbar reminded himself of how much Jacob had risked when he’d rescued him from the drunken sailors. He opened the gate. The barks and yelps that greeted him as he climbed the steps to the front door almost made him turn around after all, but then he lifted his hand and knocked. There were four dogs, ranging in size from sand-mouse to brown wolf, and they painted their excitement in streaks of drool on his clothes. Their mistress called them off. Dunbar had to admit that none of them seemed particularly frightening.
Jocelyn Bagenal seemed not to be as tidy as librarians usually were, at least in Dunbar’s experience. The room he entered resembled the lab of the archaeological institute in Pendragon, where the staff kept all the pieces of pottery, crafted objects, and strange weapons they’d stolen from all over the world. (Dunbar didn’t have a high opinion of archaeologists.) Jocelyn Bagenal’s collection was at least as diverse. Dunbar spotted a bran-kettel from Eire (which Miss Bagenal had clearly used for cooking—the archaeologists would have crucified her for that), Stilt-spindles from Bavaria, bufana-pots from Lombardia (here used as flowerpots), a Varangian Dragon-samovar, and a spear from Tilafegia.
“I know,” Jocelyn Bagenal said, frowning at her treasures. “Travel mementos, terrible dust traps, but I simply can’t get myself to lock them behind glass. I don’t want to just look at them. How can you understand something without touching it every now and then?”
An interesting theory. Dunbar wasn’t sure he agreed. He remembered a snapping box from Caledonia that had nearly taken off one of his hands when he’d given in to the temptation to touch it. Dunbar was curious to see how Jocelyn Bagenal kept her books. The long corridor down which she now led him was filled with hot and stuffy Tasmanian air, and the door at the end was decorated with a thief-deterring mask from Nihon.
Home... There was no place in the world Dunbar really considered home, but whenever he stepped into a room full of books, that word did come to mind. Jocelyn Bagenal’s collection of lost stories was one of the most wondrous book places Robert Dunbar had ever entered. In the center of the room stood a weathered wooden signpost with countless arms. It looked as though she’d stolen it from a highway crossing, but the inscriptions seemed to be hers. Dunbar saw the names of existing lands and places, but also those of mythical cities, sunken islands, forgotten oceans. Many of the names were also written on the shelves, so that the reading traveler wouldn’t get lost, because Jocelyn Bagenal’s collection was sorted by country.
Oh, the temptation to spend a few days in this treasure chamber! Dunbar found it hard to remember he’d come here with a mission. With a heavy heart, he ignored the yellow shelf for Tasmania and the blue-green planks from which Aotearoa whispered its stories. The information he was after was probably hidden in the stories of the Old World. Albion was fittingly stored on a bright green shelf. The green for Caledonia was a little darker. Helvetia was on pale gray, Bolanda on blue. Dunbar found fairy tales from Leon, legends from Sveriga and Norga, folk tales from Hellas, but there were also travel journals, newspapers, biographies of explorers and adventurers, diaries, illuminated atlases, and nature guides. Many of the books looked well read, some little more than a collection of loose pages, but the breadth of the collection was as impressive as its order. Dunbar found the system much more stimulating than that of the
historic library of Pendragon.
“I like that expression on your face!” Jocelyn Bagenal straightened a few stray spines. “A little better organized than the rest of the house, isn’t it? Remind me—what are we looking for?”
One of the dogs snuck through the door, but not even that could dampen Dunbar’s joy.
“Creatures of mirrored glass who can turn things and beings into silver with their touch. And how to protect yourself from them. A friend of mine had a very unpleasant encounter with such creatures.”
“Encounter? Intriguing.” Dunbar thought he detected a trace of sadness in Jocelyn Bagenal’s voice, perhaps because she’d never had such an encounter.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she mumbled. “No, probably not. But I think I know where we should look. Didn’t you mention something else? Alderelves?”
Dunbar nodded. Librarians. He’d never met one with a bad memory. He had a theory that words stuck to their minds like flies to flypaper.
“King Arthur’s father… That kind of Elf?”
“Exactly.”
Jocelyn Bagenal cast a doubtful glance along her shelves. “That is the most lost of all stories. I fear my books may not be old enough for that. But...let’s try.”
The Gift of the Goyl
No lies. Jacob hadn’t forgotten his promise to Fox, nor the night on which he’d made it. But he also remembered the Bluebeard’s blood chamber and her silver face. The Magic Collection was not the hut of a Baba Yaga, but it was still a dangerous place, and he couldn’t bear the thought of having to be afraid for her, even if it was her lover he was risking his own skin for.
He mixed the sleeping powder into the pea puree Baryatinsky’s cook had prepared to go with the stuffed pheasant. The apothecary had assured him the powder would make a person sleep for at least twenty hours without feeling any after effects. If that was true, then the Windhound would be free by the time Fox woke up—or Jacob would be in prison with him, or dead. To Jacob, the latter seemed the most likely scenario.