The Golden Yarn

  Why did she tell him all this? After nightfall...

  “You’re trying tonight?”

  “When else? Orlando will be dead tomorrow morning. And Brunel probably, too.”

  “How many helpers do you have?”

  “Two.”

  Two? To break into the secret wing of the Magic Collection? Impossible!

  “I assume at least one of them knows how to handle protective spells?”

  Ludmilla Akhmatova looked up and smiled. Ah, yes. A message for Celeste Auger. Maybe Orlando really had sent the Dwarf, but that wasn’t the only reason she’d come.

  “No.” Jacob raised his hands. “Orlando and I are just acquaintances.” And these past few days he’d wished him worse than a cell, but that was none of her business.

  “Then help us for Albion. It is your home, isn’t it?”

  “Even so. Do I look like someone who’d happily die for King and country?”

  Yet if he helped Ludmilla, it would prove to Fox he didn’t wish Orlando dead. You do wish him dead, Jacob.

  The Dwarf smiled again.

  “Thank you,” she said, pulling the gloves over her tiny fingers. “I was certain you’d help us. And that you wouldn’t do it for King and country. One o’clock, in front of the Academy. It’s right behind the Magic Collection.”

  Jacob opened the door.

  And looked at Sylvain.

  “It was Chanute’s idea!” Sylvain defended himself. “He knew the two of you were having an interesting conversation. Et voilà! You will need a diversion.”

  The Dress of War

  The rhythm of his heartbeat had changed. Will felt it as clearly as the pain on his neck. The daylight stung his eyes. Just like it used to. Why was he less afraid now? Because he’d been through it before? No. This was different. He was different. He didn’t fight it. He let it happen.

  He had called the stone. Out of fear or rage, it didn’t matter.

  He.

  The robbers hadn’t even tried to cover their tracks. Why should they? They thought he and the Bastard were dead. They followed the bandits’ trail deeper into the forest, until they came upon a house. Its pale blue paint was weathered; moss and rot had settled into the wood carvings around the roof and windows. A wooden pavilion stood among overgrown flower beds like a skeleton of pleasures long past. The empty bottles and gnawed bones were probably from the new owners, just like the bear’s head with bared fangs that hung above the door. The paws were nailed to the doorposts.

  “Oh my, ghost guardians, how touching!” Nerron whispered to Will. “They probably buried the heart under the threshold. If the bear appears, don’t worry—he can’t do anything. In Lotharaine, they do the same with cats and dogs. I’ve never understood it. If I were a ghost, why would I guard the ones who’d killed me?”

  Something moved behind one of the windows. They heard screams. One of the grimy windowpanes exploded, and a bullet struck the fence post next to them. The robbers had taken their guns, but Nerron still had his knife, and Will discovered a rusty hatchet in the grass.

  They entered through a back door into a filthy kitchen. The robbers never got to the weapons on the table. Will and Nerron found them in the next room, six silver corpses on a moth-eaten rug. Will stared at them in disbelief. The same ragged men who’d tied the ropes around their necks were now shimmering sculptures, every hair frozen in precious metal. He looked at Nerron, who didn’t seem very surprised.

  Outside, a horse whinnied. It sounded shrill, frightened. Will went to one of the grimy windows. Next to the five frantic horses were three more corpses. There were two shapes leaning over them that mirrored the overgrown garden and the weathered house. Will flinched when one of them looked over at the window. It was a girl with eyes of glass; her face was a reflection of the sky above her, but as she approached the house, the gray clouds turned to skin.

  “Ah, so now you’ve finally seen them.” Nerron cut some silver hair off one of the dead bodies and tucked it in his pocket. “In case they fail to introduce themselves properly—the boy calls himself Seventeen, but Sixteen may look a little more familiar.”

  Yes, she did. The girl who appeared in the smashed-down doorway looked so human she could’ve been the one living in this house. And Will knew her face from his dreams. Except for the rash on her left cheek. Sixteen hid it with her hand when she noticed him looking at it.

  “What are you doing?” The boy who appeared next to her in the doorway was still a moving mirror. He pulled Sixteen aside and whispered something to her, but she didn’t take her eyes off Will. Her glass eyes.

  The boy was carrying the crossbow. He approached Will and placed it in front of his feet. Seventeen. His arms were sprouting leaves. He plucked them off with his fingers.

  “You have to forget you ever saw us,” he said to Will. “Sixteen isn’t supposed to show herself to you. We are here for your protection, nothing else. We make sure you can do what you came here to do.”

  “Really? Well, I have to say, you’re not doing it very well.” Nerron picked up the crossbow and handed it to Will. “Who cut him off that rope? You?”

  Seventeen’s face turned silver. Nerron groaned with pain as the blades on the Mirrorling’s fingers poked into his chest. “You promised to find the Fairy. What about that? You’d better find her soon, Stone-skin, you hear? Very soon.”

  Silver turned to glass again. “He can make himself completely invisible. Am I right, Seventeen?” Nerron reached out and waved through the air. “You can’t even feel them. They’re an idea, nothing else. A dark thought.”

  Sixteen was still standing in the doorway, her hand on her cheek. “He’s gone, Stoneface,” she said.

  Then she turned into glass, like her brother. If that’s what he was.

  Nerron took a silver piece of bread off one of the dead and threw it through the window, cursing. He seemed only a little reassured that there was no reaction.

  Will climbed over the solidified corpses and went to stand where Sixteen had just been. Why had she been in his dreams? He forced himself to think of another face. Clara. But he could only picture her in the hospital bed, so alien and still. He pulled the swindlesack from under one of the bodies—and stared at his own hand. Skin. He touched his bruised neck. The stone was gone. The disappointment was so strong that the Goyl could read it on his face.

  “‘And he wore the jade only as his war dress.’ That’s how my mother always ended her stories of the Jade Goyl,” Nerron said. “I always wondered what that meant. I’m sure the skin will return when you need it.”

  Will stroked his soft hand. He wanted the stone back, but he hated himself for wanting it. Was he betraying her again? Clara. Think her name, Will. Clara. When had he last thought of her? He no longer even dreamed of her. He was forgetting her, like he had before.

  “Everything will be just as it was meant to be.”

  “Let’s turn around,” the Goyl said behind him. “Who cares about the Fairy? The Jade Goyl is back! We’ll wait for the next rain, lose your guards, and disappear. A few more wet days and you won’t be able to pick those two from a row of trees. No loss, if you ask me.”

  Turn around? No.

  Will shook his head. “I have to find the Fairy. I promised.”

  “Promised? Shall I remind you of another promise? You swore an oath to Kami’en, and Kami’en is in Moskva, barely three days’ ride from here.”

  “The crossbow doesn’t belong to Kami’en.”

  “Really. And to whom does it belong?”

  “The one who made it.”

  “Is that so? You seem to know him quite well. What do they look like, the lost Elves?”

  Elves? Was that what he was, the stranger from the hospital? Will pulled the swindlesack over the crossbow.

  “I don’t know him. I’ve only seen him once. You think he sent those two?”

  “Who? Our silver friends?” The Goyl rubbed his chest. “I don’t want to talk about them. You never know where they are. And
they’re quite spiteful.” Nerron’s lizard jacket had turned silver where Seventeen had poked his chest. There was also a damp spot. Will remembered Goyl blood had no color.

  “Hey, you filthy, glassy brood!” Nerron shouted. “Soulless Mirrorlings!” He looked around and spat. “Looks like they’re really not here. Probably scraping some bark off their limbs.”

  Silver. Silver and glass. What does that remind you of, Will?

  Nerron planted himself in front of Will. He grabbed the boy’s chin to keep him from averting his face. “Stop that. I want to see your eyes. What did they promise you? Why are you playing errand boy for them?”

  Will shoved him away and reached for—what? He could almost feel the hilt of the saber between his fingers. His shoulder remembered the thrust.

  The Bastard flinched.

  His eyes told Will the jade was back even before he could see it on his own hands. The Goyl smiled.

  “What about the girl?” Will tucked the swindlesack under his shirt. “Sixteen... She looks sick.”

  “Her?” Nerron laughed. “Sounds like she showed you the right face. The Fairy curse? The Silver-Alders? You’ve got no idea what I’m talking about, do you? Just forget about it. I’ll let them explain, or else they’ll turn me into one of these.” He nudged one of the dead robbers with his boot. Then he turned his back on Will and carried on plundering the corpses.

  “I’ll let them explain.”

  Will stepped outside.

  The overgrown garden was filled with the stillness of death. He touched his face and found stone and skin. The jade was fading again. It was coming and going like a fever. His war dress. The daylight still hurt his eyes, and he could sense the depths beneath the damp grass. The womb of the earth. He’d missed that knowledge.

  No.

  He must forget again. Just like he’d forgotten before. For Clara, for himself. The jade wasn’t a part of him, no matter how much it felt like it was, even more so than before. It was a curse. A curse. A curse. You’ve been hexed, Will. That word had scared him so much as a child. Hexed.

  He felt a warm breeze even though the sun was little more than a pale coin behind gray clouds.

  Sixteen was standing at the bottom of the brittle steps, barely visible, just the outline of a body.

  “You’ll never find the Fairy, will you?”

  The bark was already growing on her arm. Will remembered the day he’d found the first traces of stone on his skin, the horror, the disgust. It had passed. Maybe that was the worst thing about it.

  “Look how ugly she’s making me.” Sixteen peeled the park from her arm. Blood, like liquid glass, ran down her hand. “But her magic makes you just more beautiful. Why?”

  “Sixteen.”

  She turned around.

  For a brief moment, Will thought he saw Jacob’s face on Seventeen.

  “Leave him be.” The bird in Seventeen’s hand was as silver as the corpses. “We have to move. You’re just holding him back.”

  Sixteen hesitated. Will felt she wanted to protest. Her face flushed with silver as if in anger. But then she stepped back and became the grass and the sky, the weathered pavilion, the overgrown garden.

  Will saw her again in his dreams the next night. And the night after that. But now she also showed herself to him during the day. Whenever he turned, she was there, like a flower of glass and silver. But there was more bark, and more colorless blood on her skin.

  And Will rode faster.

  “You’ll never find the Fairy, will you?”

  He had to find her.

  As though only now did he really know why.

  No, Will.

  For Clara. He still did it only for Clara. He repeated it to himself, over and over, but Clara’s face had turned into silver and glass.

  Home

  Caution! Dogs!

  When he saw the sign on the fence on the northern edge of Parramatta, Robert Dunbar was tempted to order the taxi driver to turn around. Beyond the fence, he could see the kind of house found all over Tasmania, an adventurous mix of wood, stone, and wrought iron. The white struts of the terrace and the iron borders under the roof reminded Dunbar of the sugar icing on the houses of Witches. The houses were shipped as kits from Albion, halfway around the world, to make a strange land feel like home. Under the wide blue sky and surrounded by eucalyptus trees, they’d quickly become part of that strange land.

  Dunbar cursed his myopic eyes as he tried to see whether there were indeed dogs lurking under the flowering bushes in front of the house. Too many evenings spent reading in dim light... Soon enough he’d be as blind as a bat (of which there were irritatingly many in Tasmania). Fir Darrig didn’t get along too well with dogs, but Dunbar reminded himself of how much Jacob had risked when he’d rescued him from the drunken sailors. He opened the gate. The barks and yelps that greeted him as he climbed the steps to the front door almost made him turn around after all, but then he lifted his hand and knocked. There were four dogs, ranging in size from sand-mouse to brown wolf, and they painted their excitement in streaks of drool on his clothes. Their mistress called them off. Dunbar had to admit that none of them seemed particularly frightening.

  Jocelyn Bagenal seemed not to be as tidy as librarians usually were, at least in Dunbar’s experience. The room he entered resembled the lab of the archaeological institute in Pendragon, where the staff kept all the pieces of pottery, crafted objects, and strange weapons they’d stolen from all over the world. (Dunbar didn’t have a high opinion of archaeologists.) Jocelyn Bagenal’s collection was at least as diverse. Dunbar spotted a bran-kettel from Eire (which Miss Bagenal had clearly used for cooking—the archaeologists would have crucified her for that), Stilt-spindles from Bavaria, bufana-pots from Lombardia (here used as flowerpots), a Varangian Dragon-samovar, and a spear from Tilafegia.

  “I know,” Jocelyn Bagenal said, frowning at her treasures. “Travel mementos, terrible dust traps, but I simply can’t get myself to lock them behind glass. I don’t want to just look at them. How can you understand something without touching it every now and then?”

  An interesting theory. Dunbar wasn’t sure he agreed. He remembered a snapping box from Caledonia that had nearly taken off one of his hands when he’d given in to the temptation to touch it. Dunbar was curious to see how Jocelyn Bagenal kept her books. The long corridor down which she now led him was filled with hot and stuffy Tasmanian air, and the door at the end was decorated with a thief-deterring mask from Nihon.

  Home... There was no place in the world Dunbar really considered home, but whenever he stepped into a room full of books, that word did come to mind. Jocelyn Bagenal’s collection of lost stories was one of the most wondrous book places Robert Dunbar had ever entered. In the center of the room stood a weathered wooden signpost with countless arms. It looked as though she’d stolen it from a highway crossing, but the inscriptions seemed to be hers. Dunbar saw the names of existing lands and places, but also those of mythical cities, sunken islands, forgotten oceans. Many of the names were also written on the shelves, so that the reading traveler wouldn’t get lost, because Jocelyn Bagenal’s collection was sorted by country.

  Oh, the temptation to spend a few days in this treasure chamber! Dunbar found it hard to remember he’d come here with a mission. With a heavy heart, he ignored the yellow shelf for Tasmania and the blue-green planks from which Aotearoa whispered its stories. The information he was after was probably hidden in the stories of the Old World. Albion was fittingly stored on a bright green shelf. The green for Caledonia was a little darker. Helvetia was on pale gray, Bolanda on blue. Dunbar found fairy tales from Leon, legends from Sveriga and Norga, folk tales from Hellas, but there were also travel journals, newspapers, biographies of explorers and adventurers, diaries, illuminated atlases, and nature guides. Many of the books looked well read, some little more than a collection of loose pages, but the breadth of the collection was as impressive as its order. Dunbar found the system much more stimulating than that of the
historic library of Pendragon.

  “I like that expression on your face!” Jocelyn Bagenal straightened a few stray spines. “A little better organized than the rest of the house, isn’t it? Remind me—what are we looking for?”

  One of the dogs snuck through the door, but not even that could dampen Dunbar’s joy.

  “Creatures of mirrored glass who can turn things and beings into silver with their touch. And how to protect yourself from them. A friend of mine had a very unpleasant encounter with such creatures.”

  “Encounter? Intriguing.” Dunbar thought he detected a trace of sadness in Jocelyn Bagenal’s voice, perhaps because she’d never had such an encounter.

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she mumbled. “No, probably not. But I think I know where we should look. Didn’t you mention something else? Alderelves?”

  Dunbar nodded. Librarians. He’d never met one with a bad memory. He had a theory that words stuck to their minds like flies to flypaper.

  “King Arthur’s father… That kind of Elf?”

  “Exactly.”

  Jocelyn Bagenal cast a doubtful glance along her shelves. “That is the most lost of all stories. I fear my books may not be old enough for that. But...let’s try.”

  The Gift of the Goyl

  No lies. Jacob hadn’t forgotten his promise to Fox, nor the night on which he’d made it. But he also remembered the Bluebeard’s blood chamber and her silver face. The Magic Collection was not the hut of a Baba Yaga, but it was still a dangerous place, and he couldn’t bear the thought of having to be afraid for her, even if it was her lover he was risking his own skin for.

  He mixed the sleeping powder into the pea puree Baryatinsky’s cook had prepared to go with the stuffed pheasant. The apothecary had assured him the powder would make a person sleep for at least twenty hours without feeling any after effects. If that was true, then the Windhound would be free by the time Fox woke up—or Jacob would be in prison with him, or dead. To Jacob, the latter seemed the most likely scenario.