“We’re turning around.” He got up. “We tried. Chanute is right. Will’s not a child anymore. He decided to come here. Maybe he wants the jade back. Maybe he wants to take revenge on the Fairy. What do I know?”
He avoided looking her in the eyes; he always did when he was trying to fool her.
She took his face in both her hands, forcing him to look at her. “We don’t run from anyone or anything. That’s still true, isn’t it?”
Jacob held her hand against his cheek. She loved him so much. Maybe even more now that she didn’t have to hide it any longer. But what if they ended up betraying each other, just as Kami’en and the Dark One had?
Her heart pounded as he kissed her. Or was it his heart? She hadn’t been able to tell the difference ever since he’d freed her from that trap.
Exposed
The spider was tugging on the web through which the Fairy had disappeared. The longer Donnersmarck watched it, the more he felt he was caught in its web himself. The stag now came almost every day. Leo Donnersmarck was keeping a journal of all the lost hours in an attempt to make them his again. The stag didn’t count them. Donnersmarck tried to remember, but all he got were smells, images, the taste of grass, his quickened heartbeat as he scented a wolf, the memory of wind and rain. And her. But now she was gone.
A beetle had gotten caught in the spider’s web. Was he dreaming or was it really a stag beetle? Its helpless buzzing grated at Donnersmarck’s soul, but when he reached out to free the beetle, Chithira held him back.
“You still want to live, don’t you? That door is not for mortals.”
Chithira’s voice always sounded like it was coming from far away. Hardly surprising, since he barely belonged to this life anymore. How could one choose to become a fluttering insect, a bodiless shadow of one’s former self—for love? Donnersmarck had never loved like that.
One got used to talking to a dead man, and it had been a long journey. Donnersmarck had learned Chithira had been married at the age of eight and his bride had died young. He’d told Donnersmarck how he met the Fairy. He’d described his birthplace and his place of death. But every time Donnersmarck had asked him about the other side, the land of the dead, Chithira had only smiled and talked instead of the green parrots in the temples and of his tame elephants that could wash pain and guilt off any human heart.
The beetle stopped humming. The spider was wrapping it in her silk threads until it looked like a cocoon. Life and death were so eerily similar. Donnersmarck had never noticed that before. Had the stag taught him that? He hated how the two overlapped, man and beast. She would’ve laughed at him for his useless resistance. Would she ever come back? What if not?
Would her dead coachman remind him of his name?
The Weaver
The Weaver’s lake was much bigger than the lake from which the Dark One had been born. No trees lined its shores, just reed-like grasses and countless ponds reflecting the night sky. There were so many they reminded the Fairy of the eyes of the spider whose web she’d passed through to come here.
The webs of that spider’s mistress were woven between the reeds and across the water. The silk threads caught all the colors of life, hope, fear, joy, despair… love and hate. Only the Weaver knew the patterns. She knew them all. Takushy was what they called her in this land, but she had as many names as she had woven webs.
The Weaver wove herself from the thread of night, hair of moonlight, skin of stars. So old. Without beginning or end.
“What are you doing here, sister who knows nothing of death?” The Weaver’s voice sounded like a thousand fingers plucking the strings of life.
“I need your help,” the Dark Fairy replied.
The Weaver turned into a bevy of black swans. They settled on the lake, flapping their wings, and the largest one took the shape of a woman. Her body was made of threads as black as the night, as white as death, as translucent as spiders’ silk. She walked easily through the water, and when she reached the shore, the Fairy had to crane her neck to look at her.
“You’ve come here in vain.”
The Weaver’s eyes were round and black, like those of her eight-legged guard. “You seek to sever what no one shall sever.”
“I know,” the Dark One replied. “But if you do it anyway, then I shall give you the only thread you can’t spin. Free me from the Golden Yarn and I shall give you one of my three Yarns of Immortality.”
The Weaver plucked something from the night. She had many fingers. “Your web weakens when you remove a thread,” she said. “And you want to remove two?”
“Then give me others. Red, blue, green, even white, but not the gold.”
The Weaver looked at the two threads she’d plucked from the night. One was silver, the other one glass. “Someone is spinning threads that don’t belong here.” She closed her fingers around the threads until they turned black as the night. “I don’t make the patterns,” she said to the Dark One. “I just weave them from the threads I find in the night. You don’t want the golden one? Then you will have to spin your own threads.”
With that she took one of the pairs of scissors she carried around her neck like jewelry, dozens of scissors, gold, silver, wood, and ivory. The pair she picked was made of gold.
The Weaver let the scissors snap open like a beak.
“It will weaken you more than you expect.”
“I know,” said the Dark One. “Cut it.”