The Golden Yarn (Mirrorworld 3)

The Dark Fairy stepped under the trees she’d planted. These trees only grew at the shores of the lake that had borne her and her sisters. She picked two of the seedpods from the dense foliage. She broke the first one, and two tiny horses, both green like the pod itself, sprang into her hand. She set them on the tiles, and they began to grow. A carriage rolled from the second pod. It sprouted leaves and pale green blossoms as it grew. The wheels and axles were black, the coach box, the leather benches, all as black as her pain, as black as her rage.

Donnersmarck’s glance betrayed what all mortals felt when they witnessed magic: disbelief, yearning, jealousy... How they all wished for such powers.

Carriage. Horses. Now all she needed was a coachman. The Dark Fairy raised her hand. A moth settled on her fingers, its spread wings looking as though their black velvet had been sprinkled with gold dust. Head and body gleamed emerald green.

“Chithira, Chithira,” the Dark One whispered to the moth. “You helped me find him. Now you have to take me away from him.”

The moth lowered its wings until they brushed her hand, lightly, like a kiss. Then it fluttered down to her feet and changed into a young man. Like the moth’s wings, his black clothes seemed to have been dusted with gold. His turban and his vest were of gleaming emerald green, and his pale face showed how long he hadn’t been at home in this world. Chithira... His name was one of the few the Fairy remembered. A

prince who’d fallen in love with her more than a century ago, and who’d stayed faithful even after death, like so many others who’d fallen for her or her sisters. They were accustomed to the everlasting love of mortals. How could she have known that Kami’en’s affections would be so short-lived?

Chithira silently climbed up onto the coach box. Donnersmarck still stared at the horses and carriage like someone lost in a dream. But this dream was Kami’en’s love. Time to wake up.

The Fairy gathered up her dress and looked around one last time. Splinters. They were all that was left. Dead, like solid water. What else but death could you hope to reap when you gave your heart to a mortal?

Donnersmarck opened the carriage door for her. The Dark One had known for a while—longer than he’d known himself—that Donnersmarck would come with her. He came to protect her, but also for her to protect him—from what was stirring in his chest.

Kami’en’s guards moved to block the path of her green horses, but they were no match for Chithira, who’d already steered them past her sisters’ unicorns. The guards in the courtyard scattered as soon as they saw his deathly-pale face. Donnersmarck opened the gate while the Fairy looked up at the balcony from which Therese of Austry had announced her daughter’s engagement. Amalie didn’t show. The Dark One probably would have let her live. Probably.

Too Many Dogs

Three attacks in as many days. Two on border posts and the third one a direct attempt on Kami’en’s life. His bodyguards had acted so clumsily that Hentzau had to kill the assassin himself. Then he had the bodyguards executed, with a public threat to cut out the tongue of anyone who used this incident to lament the disappearance of the Jade Goyl. There would be whispers, of course. “First the Jade Goyl leaves him, then the Fairy. The King of the Goyl is as doomed as his moonstone son.”

The assassin who’d managed to get into Kami’en’s tent was not one of the human rebels who’d risen against the occupation. No. It was an onyx Goyl. Just weeks before, they’d crowned one of their own as rightful King of the Goyl. A shadow king, allied to Lotharaine and Albion. Traitors to their own people. Not surprising. The onyx had always been parasites, living off the blood and sweat of their subjects. Under their rule, only those born onyx could thrive. Hentzau had stuffed the assassin’s head with stone maggots and had sent it to Nia’sny, the most powerful onyx lord, who now resided in Lotharaine, but his spies were everywhere.

Too many days... Hentzau put one of the pills, which Kami’en’s personal physician had prescribed for his chest pains, under his tongue. They were as useless as the ones Amalie’s human doctor had given him in Vena. So he’d sent one of his soldiers to the underground forest north of the royal palace, to where the Clay-Matrons lived. The potions they brewed could burn even Goyl tongues, but they had also helped Hentzau survive his wounds from the Blood Wedding.

Hentzau had to get back under the earth. Down there he needed neither pills nor the potions of the Clay-Matrons. And now that idiot of a quartermaster had assigned Hentzau a tower room as his office, with a window and so much light that he’d soon be blind in both eyes. Hentzau had asked for the window to be bricked up, but apparently the only soldiers with any bricklaying experience had died in the last skirmish with the rebels.

Kami’en loved taking up residence in human palaces, despite all the windows and towers. The one they were in now they’d taken from a Holstein cavalier who’d tried to avenge the theft of his property by releasing poisoned rats into the cellars. Thirty of Hentzau’s men were in the sick ward after they’d slept down there to get away from the daylight. The longer they lived above ground, the more susceptible they became to human diseases. It was one of the facts the onyx Goyl used to support their argument that Goyl had no business being above ground. But like Kami’en, Hentzau hadn’t forgotten what happened when the Goyl tried to stick to life under the earth. There was too much down there the humans wanted—not only silver, gold, and precious stones but ore, coal, gas, oil... All of which had grown more precious to them than what grew in their fields.

“Lieutenant Hentzau?” Nesser poked her head through the door.

“What?” He quickly dropped the pill bottle into his desk drawer. Nesser didn’t deserve the harshness of his voice, but there were already too many whispers that the King’s Bloodhound was old and sick—though only the Fairy had ever dared say it in front of Kami’en. By all the gods of the heart of the earth, Hentzau was so glad she was gone.

“New dispatches.” Nesser positioned herself behind him before ushering in the courier. After an attack had left Hentzau lightly wounded, Kami’en had made Nesser Hentzau’s personal bodyguard. Against his will, of course. The King’s Bloodhound guarded by a soldier who could’ve been his daughter? It could hardly get any worse... Though, admittedly, Nesser was much smarter than the imbeciles who guarded the King.

The courier was one of the Man-Goyl who’d remained in the Goyl King’s service, though his skin had in places already turned back to the snail-like softness of his birth. Hentzau would’ve had all Man-Goyl shot, but they’d proven to be very useful as scouts and spies. They hardly remembered their human lives. This one had been a ruby Goyl. The red stone was still on his brow and cheek, and there was a shimmer of gold in his brown eyes. Entire armies of them were now roaming as mercenaries, plundering above- and below ground.

The Dark Fairy’s legacy. Yes, Hentzau was indeed glad she was gone, though he didn’t dare contemplate how much damage she might do as their enemy. His spies reported she was traveling east. The Suleiman Empire? Unlikely. Its sultan believed magic should be the domain of men alone. But there were other rulers she could peddle her magic to: the Cossacks in Ukraina, the Tzars of Varangia, the Wolf-Lords in Kamchatka and Yukaghiria. For centuries, the Goyl had maintained lively trade relations with most of the rulers of the East, and some of their oldest underground cities lay in the East, but Hentzau had little doubt that most of their old allies would turn against them if the Fairy promised them her magic. His greatest concern used to be the Wolf-Lord who was married to Isolde of Austry. But the youngest sister of the deposed Empress had died a few weeks earlier. Poisoned by her husband, according to the whispers in Vena.

The dispatches the Man-Goyl delivered did little to improve Hentzau’s mood: a fire in one of their airplane factories, a murdered Goyl ambassador in Bavaria, a suicide attack on one of their cave cities on the surface. Four hundred dead. The last dispatch was from Thierry Auger, one of their human spies in Lotharaine. He reported that Crookback had received an interesting visitor: Isambard Brunel—the human who built planes and ships but hated to travel. It was the first time Brunel had left Albion, and that he’d done so to pay his respects to the King of Lotharaine was the most alarming message of them all.

Nesser waved the Man-Goyl out of the room. As he left, he pressed his fist to his chest, saluting like a Goyl. Hentzau still couldn’t get used to them. Nesser waited in the doorway. Hentzau had no children, but the feelings he had for Nesser probably came as close to being fatherly as he would ever experience. He even valued her weaknesses, the impetuousness, the youthful impatience, the need to see the world in black and white, all good on her side, all bad on the other. Enviable. Life is so simple when you’re young, though of course that’s not what it feels like to the young.

Brunel and Crookback. Maybe the bad news could be turned into good news. No, better, a present.

“Tell Kami’en’s attaché I need to speak to the King. Right away.”

As soon as Nesser had pulled the door shut behind her, Hentzau clutched his chest. The pain was brutal, but a soldier was used to living with pain.

***

Kami’en no longer had the windows of his rooms bricked up. He’d had his eyes hexed by a Witch, and he made fun of Hentzau for fearing that magic more than the milky white film that dulled his vision. When Hentzau entered his chamber, the King of the Goyl was standing by the window, and, yes, he was probably thinking of the Fairy.

Hen

tzau was sure Kami’en still loved her. But whether Kami’en believed she’d killed his son—there were things not even Hentzau knew about him. He turned around, and his face betrayed nothing. Carnelian. The Goyl called it fire-skin.