Reckless (Mirrorworld 1)

One mistake.

Jacob stepped through the arched doorway in which the scorched remnants of the castle’s main door were still hanging on the warped hinges. On the steps in front, a Heinzel was collecting acorns from the cracked stones. He quickly scampered off as Jacob’s shadow fell on him. Red eyes above a pointy nose, pants and shirt sewn from stolen human clothes. The ruin was swarming with them.

“Send him back! That’s what we came here for, isn’t it?” The impatience in Fox’s voice was hard to miss.

But Jacob shook his head. “Bringing him here was a mistake. There’s nothing on the other side that can help him.”

Jacob had told Fox about the world he came from, but she never really wanted to hear about it. What she knew was enough: that it was the place to which he disappeared far too often, only to bring back memories that followed him like shadows.

“And? What do you think will happen to him here?”

Fox did not say it, but Jacob knew what she was thinking. In her world, fathers killed their own sons as soon as they discovered the stone in their skin.

He looked down toward the foot of the castle hill, where the red roofs were fading into the twilight. The first lights were coming on in Schwanstein. From a distance, the town looked like one of the pictures printed on gingerbread tins, but over the past years, railway tracks had begun to cut through the hills beyond, and gray smoke rose from the smokestacks of factories into the evening sky. The world behind the mirror wanted to grow up. However, the petrified flesh growing in his brother had not been sown by mechanical looms or any of the other modern achievements but by the old magic that still dwelled in its hills and forests.

A Gold-Raven landed next to Will on the cracked tiles. Jacob shooed it away before it could croak one of its sinister spells into his brother’s ear.

Will groaned in his sleep. The human skin did not yield to the stone without a fight. Jacob felt the pain as his own. Only his love for his brother had made him return to the other world, even though he’d done so less and less frequently over the years. His mother had threatened him with social services, she had cried, but she had never suspected where he vanished to. Will, however, had always wrapped his arms around Jacob, eagerly asking what he had brought for him. The shoes of a Heinzel, the cap of a Thumbling, a button made of elven glass, a piece of scaly Waterman skin — Will had hoarded Jacob’s gifts under his mattress, and soon he began to regard the stories Jacob told him as fairy tales his brother invented only for him.

Now he knew how true they had all been.

Jacob pulled the coat over his brother’s disfigured arm. The two moons were already in the sky.

“Keep an eye on him, Fox.” He rose to his feet. “I’ll be back soon.”

“And where are you going? Jacob!” The vixen jumped into his path. “Nobody can help him.”

“We’ll see.” He pushed her aside. “Don’t let Will climb into the tower.”

She looked after him as he walked down the steps. The only footprints on the mossy steps were his own. No human ventured up here. The ruin was thought to be cursed, and Jacob had heard dozens of stories about its demise, but after all these years he still didn’t know who had left the mirror in its tower, just as he had never found out where his father had vanished to.

A Thumbling jumped at his collar. Jacob managed to grab him before he could steal the medallion he was wearing around his neck. On any other day, Jacob would have followed the little thief at once. Thumblings could hoard considerable treasures in the hollow trees where they built their nests. But he had already lost too much time.

One mistake, Jacob.

He would make it right again. But Fox’s words followed him as he climbed down the steep hill.

Nobody can help him.

If she was right, soon he would no longer have a brother. Neither in this world nor in the other.

One mistake.

3

Goyl

The field over which Hentzau and his soldiers were riding still reeked of blood. The rain had filled the trenches with a muddy sludge. Behind the walls both sides had built for their protection lay abandoned rifles and bullet-riddled helmets. Kami’en had the horse cadavers and the human corpses burnt before they began to rot, but the dead Goyl still lay where they had fallen. In just a few days, they would be all but indistinguishable from the rocks that protruded from the trampled earth, and the heads of those who had fought valiantly had already been sent to the main fortress, as was Goyl custom.

Another battle. Hentzau was tired of them, but he hoped that this would be the last one for a while. The Empress was finally ready to negotiate, and even Kami’en wanted peace. Hentzau covered his mouth as the wind blew the ash down from the hill where they had burnt the corpses. Six years aboveground, six years without the shelter of the rock between him and the sun. His eyes ached from all the light, and the air was again growing colder with every day, making his skin as brittle as chalk. Hentzau’s skin resembled brown jasper — not the finest color for a Goyl. Hentzau was the first jasper Goyl to have risen to the highest military ranks. But then again, before Kami’en the Goyl had never had a King, and Hentzau liked his skin. Jasper provided much better camouflage than onyx or moonstone.

Kami’en had set up camp not far from the battlefield, in the hunting lodge of an imperial general who, together with most of his officers, had died in the battle.

The sentries guarding the destroyed gate saluted as Hentzau rode past them. The King’s bloodhound. That’s what they called him. His jasper shadow. Hentzau had served under Kami’en since they had first challenged the other chiefs. It had taken two years for them to kill them all, and for the Goyl to get their first King.

The drive leading up to the lodge was lined with statues, and not for the first time did Hentzau note with amusement how humans immortalized their gods and heroes with stone effigies while loathing his kind for their skin. Even the Doughskins had to admit it: Stone was the only thing that lasted.

The windows of the lodge had been bricked up, just as in all the buildings the Goyl had occupied, but only when he descended the steps to the cellars did Hentzau finally feel the soothing darkness that could be found belowground. Just a few gas lamps lit the vaults that now housed, instead of supplies and dusty trophies, the general staff of the King of the Goyl.