Reckless (Mirrorworld 1)

"Don't you worry. I am fighting it," he said. "After all, it's my skin, not yours. And I'm still here, right? Doing what you tell me to do. Riding behind you. Sucking it up."

Valiant's voice could be heard outside. He was trying to convince Fox to free him from his silver shackles.

Will nodded toward the exit. "Is that the guide you were talking about?"

"Yes." Jacob forced himself to look at this stranger with his brother's features.

Will walked toward the opening, shielding his eyes with his hand as the sunlight found his face. "I am sorry for what I said to Clara," he said. "I'll talk to her."

Then he stepped outside. And Jacob stood in the darkness, still feeling the splinters — as if Will had smashed the mirror.

22

Dreams

It was night, but the Dark Fairy did not sleep. The night was too beautiful to sleep it away. But she still saw the Man-Goyl anyway. By now she dreamed of him whether she was asleep or not. Her curse had already turned most of his skin to jade. Jade. Green. Like life itself. Petrified abundance. Heart-stone, sown by the heartless. He would be so much more beautiful once the jade had replaced all his human skin, and once he fulfilled the promise of his new flesh. The future, as decided by the past, all those things hidden in the folds of time. They could only be known in dreams, which revealed so much more to her than to men or Goyl, perhaps because time meant so little when you were immortal.

She should have stayed in the castle with the bricked-up windows and waited there for news from Hentzau, but Kami’en had wanted to get back to the mountains where he was born and return to his fortress under the earth. He longed for the deep as she longed for the night sky and for white lilies floating on water — although she still tried to convince herself that love alone could feed her soul.

All she saw in the train window was her own reflection, a pale phantom on a pane of glass, behind which the world slipped past far too quickly. Kami’en knew that she disliked trains almost as much as she disliked the depths of the earth, so he'd had the walls of her carriage decorated with intarsia: ruby blossoms and malachite leaves, a sky of lapis lazuli, hills of jade, and, inlaid with moonstone, the shimmering surface of a lake. That was love, wasn't it?

The stone images were beautiful, very beautiful, and whenever she no longer could bear seeing the hills and fields rush by as if they were dissolving into the fabric of time, she would run her fingers over the inlaid blossoms. And yet the noise of the train still hurt her ears, and all the metal around her made her Fairy skin crawl.

Yes. He loved her. But he was still going to marry the dollface, the human princess with the blank eyes and the beauty she owed to the lilies of the Fairies. Amalie. Her name sounded as bland as her face looked. How she would have loved to kill her. A poisoned comb, a dress that would eat into her flesh while she twirled in it in front of her golden mirrors. How she would scream and tear at her skin, which was so much softer than that of her bridegroom.

The Fairy pressed her forehead against the cool glass. She couldn’t understand where all that jealousy was coming from. After all, it wasn't the first time Kami’en had taken himself another woman. No Goyl loved only once. Nobody loved only once... Fairies least of all.

The Dark Fairy knew all the stories about her kind: that those who loved one of them invariably fell into madness; that they had no hearts, just as they had neither fathers nor mothers. At least that part was true. She pressed her hand against her chest. No heart. So where did the love she felt come from?

Outside, the stars were floating like blossoms on the inky waters of a river. The Goyl feared water, even though it had created their caves, and the sound of its dripping was as natural a part of their cities as the sound of the wind above the ground. They feared water so much that the sea had restricted Kami’en's conquests, making him dream of the power of flight. But she couldn't give him wings, any more than she could give him children. She was born of the water he feared so much, and all the words that so much to them — sister, brother, daughter, son — meant nothing to her.

The dollface couldn't give him children, either, unless he wanted to sire one of those crippled monsters some human women had borne his soldiers. "How often do I have to tell you? I couldn’t care less about her, but I need this peace." He actually believed every one of his words, but she knew him better than that. He did want peace, but even more than that he yearned to caress human skin and to make one of them his wife. His fascination with all things human had begun to concern her as much as it did his people.

Where did the love come from? What was it made of? Stone, like him? Water, like her?

When she had first set out to find him, it had just been a game. A game with the toy her dreams had shown her. The Goyl who was smashing the world to pieces, who disregarded its rules, just as she did. The Fairies played with this world; the last one to have done so now wore a skin of bark. And yet she had still dispatched her moths to find Kami’en. The tent in which she first met him had smelled of blood, of the death she did not understand, and still she had thought of it all as a game. She had promised him the world. His flesh in the flesh of his enemies. And much too late had she realized what he had sown in her. Love. Worst of all poisons.

"You should wear human dresses more often,"

Eyes of gold. Lips of fire. He didn't look tired, even though he had barely slept in days.

The Fairy's dress rustled as she turned. Human women dressed like flowers, layers of petals around a mortal, rotting core. She had had the dress made in the likeness of one of the paintings that hung in the dead general's castle. Kami’en had gazed at it often, as if it showed a world he longed for. The fabric would have made ten dresses, but she loved the rustling of the silk and its cool smoothness on her skin.

"No news from Hentzau?"

As if she didn't know the answer. Why had her moths still not found the one she was looking for? She could see him so clearly — as if she only had to reach out to fell his jade skin at her fingertips.

"Hentzau will find him, if he exists." Kami’en stood behind her. He doubted her dreams but never his jasper shadow.

Hentzau. Someone else she would have loved to kill. But Kami’en would forgive his death even less than that of his future bride. He had killed his own brothers, as the Goyl often did, but Hentzau was closer to him than a brother. Maybe even closer than she was.

Their reflections in the train window melted into one. Her breath still quickened whenever he stood near her. Where does love come from?

"Forget the Jade Goyl. Forget your dreams," he whispered, undoing her hair. "I will give you new dreams. Just tell me what you want."

She'd never told Kami’en that she had also found him first in her dreams. He wouldn't have liked it. Neither Goyl nor men lived long enough to understand that yesterday was born of tomorrow, just as tomorrow was born of yesterday.

23