The Golden Yarn (Mirrorworld 3)

“When she wakes up, tell her something,” he said to Chanute. “Tell her I’m following Will’s trail, tell her I’m—tell her anything, but don’t let her follow me.”

Chanute lumbered to his feet. “You can’t get the dress back!” He knew Jacob too well. “It’s suicide. Fox will get over it.”

No, she would not. Ever. He had given away her soul. How could she live without it?

The Forgotten Moth

The river was so wide! Nerron felt like vomiting. The wheels of the carriage had carved deep ruts into the damp earth, and they led straight into the water. Nothing proved Kami’en’s fearlessness like his choice of lover. He’d brought the Goyl’s greatest fear into his bed: a woman born of water.

The Fairy had left more than the tracks and the remnants of her moths’ web in those young willow trees. There were corpses spread along the river for miles. Men with slashed skins and faces, as if a terrible hailstorm had sliced them up. A very precious hailstorm...Nerron leaned over one of the dead bodies and picked a couple of diamonds from his wet hair.

“Are you still sure you want me to find the Fairy for you?”

Will looked at the corpses and nodded. Maybe the sight reminded him of the massacre in the cathedral. He’d heard the Fairy’s moths had killed more than three hundred humans there. Nerron carefully scanned the area, but he couldn’t see their travel companions. Which was not to say they weren’t there. Nerron was certain Will had no idea of their existence. But Nerron had the dubious privilege of Seventeen showing himself to him regularly. Things were going too slowly for the Mirrorling; Will and Nerron kept eating and resting t

oo much, which were clearly needs Seventeen did not have. But the Fairy was traveling fast. They weren’t gaining on her at all, and Nerron didn’t need some mirrored face to tell him how sluggishly this hunt was progressing.

He would have loved to ask the Pup about Seventeen’s maker. Nerron would’ve bet his speckled skin that Will had met him and was here at his behest. But Seventeen wouldn’t like such questions, and Nerron didn’t feel any desire to end like that silvered fly. So he kept on playing the part of the obedient stoneface, following wheel tracks, and daydreaming about melting Sixteen and Seventeen into a set of goblets in which he’d serve Goyl wine. Yesterday the milk-faced Pup had interrupted one of these fantasies by asking Nerron whether he believed in true love. “What’s that glass girl doing to you at night?” Nerron had wanted to reply. “Is she making you dream of a different one each time? She’s got enough faces for it.”

True love. The Pup looked as guilty as if he’d robbed at least three princesses of their virtue. Nerron couldn’t make sense of him.

But each time the temptation to ask Will more about his mission became almost too strong to resist, Nerron would feel the air around him warm and he believed he could feel Seventeen’s silver fingers around his neck.

He was wasting too much thought on Milk-face. He’d get used to him, like he’d gotten used to the tame salamander he’d once owned. Those puppy eyes were not going to make him forget whose brother he was.

Damn.

It didn’t matter what Milk-face was taking to the Fairy. It didn’t matter why the Mirrorlings were watching over him. His brother had stolen from Nerron, and the Bastard wanted his revenge. He played the guide because eventually he’d guide Milk-face to the slaughter, just as he’d done before with magic calves, enchanted doves, and speaking fish. Who cared if his clients had cut their hearts out, or their speaking tongues? Nerron would’ve taken any bet that Sixteen and Seventeen had similarly gruesome plans for the boy. Revenge. Fame. Wealth. That’s what kept the Bastard going. In that order. And to top it all off, a brand-new world.

The only thing Nerron found disquieting was how often he had to repeat that to himself.

Maybe it helped to picture it. Every time the Pup annoyed him with his kindness, Nerron imagined how much he could make off him at one of the illegal Ogre markets, or how he would throw him into one of the lava traps the onyx used to roast their enemies alive.

“How do you think she crossed the river?”

Just as well the little choirboy wasn’t half as good at reading stone faces as Nerron was at reading his.

“She drove over the water, how else? Did she never do that when you were guarding her lover? While you had a decent skin on you?”

How the Pup looked at him every time Nerron stopped coddling him. As though the boy thought he’d turned into an Ogre.

Lava traps, Nerron, meat markets.

“Do you know where the nearest bridge is?”

“Bridge? Goyl don’t need bridges.”

The Pup didn’t seem to remember the Goyl’s fear of water. Nerron sometimes thought he was like a grub who’d forgotten he’d once been a butterfly.

Something glinted in the sunlight by the riverbank. Ah. There they were. Half mud, half river, the sky in their many faces. Nerron was getting better at spotting the Mirrorlings. Sometimes they mirrored what was behind them, sometimes what was in front, and sometimes the images were as haphazard as their faces. They kept away not only from the willows and the remnants of the Fairy’s net but also from the river. Nerron suspected they disliked the water as much as he.

He would show them why they needed a Goyl.

He found the nearest tunnel barely a mile south from where the Fairy had killed the Cossacks. Mosaics by the entrance showed lizards and bats. Their style indicated that the tunnel was close to a thousand years old. The Goyl’s fear of the water was older than most human bridges, and in this area, their tunnel networks were particularly dense because their lost cities lay east of here. The largest one was supposedly built entirely of malachite. Nerron’s mother had told him about it whenever he’d felt ashamed of the speckles in his onyx skin. She’d described it in such detail that he’d begun to believe he’d seen it with his own eyes. One day...

Most humans hesitated before entering a tunnel, especially one as steep as this one. But not Will Reckless. He disappeared into it without even waiting for Nerron. Maybe he hadn’t forgotten everything after all.

The Mirrorlings probably needed neither tunnels nor bridges.