Reckless (Mirrorworld 1)

Clara was standing behind him. She had wrapped a horse blanket around her shoulders, and he noticed that her hair had grown longer.

"How are you feeling?" In her voice Jacob still heard the disbelief that he was actually alive.

"Fine," he answered. "Would you like to check my pulse? Just to make sure?"

She had to smile, but the concern in her eyes remained.

An owl was screaming above them. In this world, owls were regarded as the souls of dead Witches. Clara knelt next to him on the cold earth and held her hands above the warming flames.

"Do you still think we can help Will?"

She looked terribly tired.

"Yes," he said. "And trust me, you don't want to know more than that. It would just scare you."

When she looked at him, her eyes were as blue as Will's. Before they had been drowned in gold.

"Is that the reason you didn't tell Will why he had to pick that rose?" The wind blew sparks into her hair. "I think your brother knows more about fear than you do."

Words. Nothing more. But they turned the night into dark glass in which Jacob saw himself.

"I know why you're here." Clara's voice sounded distant, as though she were speaking not about him but about herself. "This world doesn't frighten you half as much as the other one. You have nothing and nobody to lose here. Except Fox, and she clearly worries more about you than you do about her. You've left all that could frighten you in the other world. But then Will came here and brought it all with him."

She got up again and wiped the earth off her knees.

"Whatever you're planning, please be careful. Getting yourself killed for Will won't make up for anything. But if there is a way, any way, to turn him back into who he was, then let me help! Even if you think it'll frighten me. You're not the only one who doesn't want to lose him. Why else would I still be here?"

Clara walked off before Jacob could answer. He wished her far away. And he was glad she wasn't. And he saw his face in the dark glass of the night. Undistorted. Just as she had drawn it.

32

The River

It took them another four days to reach the mountains the Goyl called home.

Frosty days, cold nights. Rain and damp clothes. One of the horses lost a shoe, and the blacksmith they took it to told Clara about a Bluebeard who had brought three girls, barely older than her, from their fathers in a nearby village and had taken them to his castle and murdered them. Clara listened impassively, but Jacob could tell from her expression that by now she considered her own story to be almost as horrific.

"What's she still doing here?" Valiant asked in a whisper one morning while the bone-weary Clara struggled to mount her horse. "The things you humans do to your females. She belongs in a house. Nice dresses, servants, cakes, a soft bed — that's what she needs."

"And a Dwarf for a husband, and a golden lock on her door to which only you have the key," Jacob retorted.

"And why not?" Valiant replied, giving Clara his most ravishing smile.

The nights were so cold that they stayed in inns. Clara shared her bed with Fox, and Jacob slept next to the snoring Dwarf. But that was not the only reason he slept badly. In his dreams he was smothered by red moths, and he would wake up drenched in sweat, tasting his own blood in his mouth.

* * * * *

On the evening of the fourth day, they saw the first of the towers the Goyl had built along their borders. Slender stalagmites with fibrous walls and windows of onyx, but Valiant knew a path through the mountains to avoid them.

For centuries the Goyl had been just one of the terrors of these lands, mentioned in the same breath as Ogres and Brown Wolves. All along, their worst crime had been to look too human. They were the despised twins, stone cousins who dwelled in the dark. Nowhere had they been hunted as mercilessly as in the mountains they came from, and now the Goyl were paying back in kind; it was in their old homeland that their rule was most merciless.

Valiant avoided the highways used by their troops, but they still kept meeting Goyl patrols. The Dwarf introduced Jacob and Clara as rich clients who were planning to build a glass factory near the royal fortress. Jacob had bought Clara one of the gold-embroidered skirts worn by the rich women of the area, and he had swapped his own clothes for those of a wealthy merchant. He barely recognized himself in the fur-collared coat and the soft gray trousers. Riding had become even more cumbersome for Clara in the wide skirt, but at least the Goyl always waved them past after Valiant had told them his story.

On an evening that already carried the scent of snow, they finally reached the river beyond which the royal fortress lay. The ferry crossing was in Blenheim, an town the Goyl had taken many years before. Nearly half the houses had bricked-up windows. The conquerors had even canopied many of the roads to protect themselves from the sun. And behind the harbor wall there was a heavily guarded manhole, indicating that this town now also had an underground district.

Fox disappeared between the houses to catch herself one of the scrawny chickens that were pecking at the cobblestones. Jacob walked with Valiant and Clara across the square toward the ferry landing. The evening sky was glistening on the murky waters, and on the opposite shore he could see a rectangular gate gaping in the mountainside.

"Is that the entrance to the fortress?" Jacob asked the Dwarf.