Orlando lifted his finger. The spider dangled off it by her thread.
Fox plucked the thread and spider from Orlando’s hand. “A shaman who speaks to spiders. Of course. He and the Weaver are more or less in the same line of work.”
“Smart vixen.”
“And do you know where to find such a shaman?”
Orlando had tied the two remaining horses to one of the Dragon’s vertebrae. One was already saddled. He went to it and tightened the surcingle. “I’m sorry. Shamans don’t believe in a god who needs to be worshipped in golden churches. They worship the mountains and rivers,” he said. “I’ve only ever met one, and he only talked to trees. But I’m sure the two of you can find one who speaks to spiders. You just have to promise me one thing: should you find the Weaver, I’d be most curious to know what the Dark Fairy wanted from her.” He untied the reins from the brittle bone and threw them over the horse’s head. “I’ll take the better horse. Only fair, don’t you think?”
Fox didn’t know what to say. I will miss you? It would have been the truth.
Orlando swung himself into the saddle.
“You still have the feather? Just stroke it along the quill should he ever treat you badly. I will sense it and I will come. You can also call me if you’re simply bored with him.”
“What if I treat him badly?”
“I very much hope you will.”
He leaned down and kissed her cheek. “We live dangerous lives. That’s our choice, even though we may wish a different life for those we love. Use the feather! Whenever you need help.”
He steered his horse toward the south. Pashtun, Bengal, the Suleiman Empire... Spies were always in demand. Fox stared after him for a long time. There went another piece of her—but she knew the Windhound would take good care of it.
Jacob was kneeling by the Dragon’s petrified tail. The skeleton had been plundered thoroughly, but Alma had taught Jacob a few things not many treasure hunters knew. He’d scraped the moss off the bones and had broken some of the thorns off them. They were no bigger than rose thorns, but very effective on broken bones and torn tendons.
“We won’t be very fast on one horse,” Fox said, “but I could shift.” The vixen could keep up with a horse, at least for a while.
Jacob put the thorns into his pouch in which he kept his medicines from two worlds.
“No.”
“No what?”
“We’re turning around.” He got up. “We tried. Chanute is right. Will’s not a child anymore. He decided to come here. Maybe he wants the jade back. Maybe he wants to take revenge on the Fairy. What do I know?”
He avoided looking her in the eyes; he always did when he was trying to fool her.
She took his face in both her hands, forcing him to look at her. “We don’t run from anyone or anything. That’s still true, isn’t it?”
Jacob held her hand against his cheek. She loved him so much. Maybe even more now that she didn’t have to hide it any longer. But what if they ended up betraying each other, just as Kami’en and the Dark One had?
Her heart pounded as he kissed her. Or was it his heart? She hadn’t been able to tell the difference ever since he’d freed her from that trap.
Exposed
The spider was tugging on the web through which the Fairy had disappeared. The longer Donnersmarck watched it, the more he felt he was caught in its web himself. The stag now came almost every day. Leo Donnersmarck was keeping a journal of all the lost hours in an attempt to make them his again. The stag didn’t count them. Donnersmarck tried to remember, but all he got were smells, images, the taste of grass, his quickened heartbeat as he scented a wolf, the memory of wind and rain. And her. But now she was gone.
A beetle had gotten caught in the spider’s web. Was he dreaming or was it really a stag beetle? Its helpless buzzing grated at Donnersmarck’s soul, but when he reached out to free the beetle, Chithira held him back.
“You still want to live, don’t you? That door is not for mortals.”
Chithira’s voice always sounded like it was coming from far away. Hardly surprising, since he barely belonged to this life anymore. How could one choose to become a fluttering insect, a bodiless shadow of one’s former self—for love? Donnersmarck had never loved like that.
One got used to talking to a dead man, and it had been a long journey. Donnersmarck had learned Chithira had been married at the age of eight and his bride had died young. He’d told Donnersmarck how he met the Fairy. He’d described his birthplace and his place of death. But every time Donnersmarck had asked him about the other side, the land of the dead, Chithira had only smiled and talked instead of the green parrots in the temples and of his tame elephants that could wash pain and guilt off any human heart.
The beetle stopped humming. The spider was wrapping it in her silk threads until it looked like a cocoon. Life and death were so eerily similar. Donnersmarck had never noticed that before. Had the stag taught him that? He hated how the two overlapped, man and beast. She would’ve laughed at him for his useless resistance. Would she ever come back? What if not?
Would her dead coachman remind him of his name?
The Weaver
The Weaver’s lake was much bigger than the lake from which the Dark One had been born. No trees lined its shores, just reed-like grasses and countless ponds reflecting the night sky. There were so many they reminded the Fairy of the eyes of the spider whose web she’d passed through to come here.
The webs of that spider’s mistress were woven between the reeds and across the water. The silk threads caught all the colors of life, hope, fear, joy, despair… love and hate. Only the Weaver knew the patterns. She knew them all. Takushy was what they called her in this land, but she had as many names as she had woven webs.
The Weaver wove herself from the thread of night, hair of moonlight, skin of stars. So old. Without beginning or end.
“What are you doing here, sister who knows nothing of death?” The Weaver’s voice sounded like a thousand fingers plucking the strings of life.
“I need your help,” the Dark Fairy replied.
The Weaver turned into a bevy of black swans. They settled on the lake, flapping their wings, and the largest one took the shape of a woman. Her body was made of threads as black as the night, as white as death, as translucent as spiders’ silk. She walked easily through the water, and when she reached the shore, the Fairy had to crane her neck to look at her.
“You’ve come here in vain.”
The Weaver’s eyes were round and black, like those of her eight-legged guard. “You seek to sever what no one shall sever.”
“I know,” the Dark One replied. “But if you do it anyway, then I shall give you the only thread you can’t spin. Free me from the Golden Yarn and I shall give you one of my three Yarns of Immortality.”
The Weaver plucked something from the night. She had many fingers. “Your web weakens when you remove a thread,” she said. “And you want to remove two?”
“Then give me others. Red, blue, green, even white, but not the gold.”
The Weaver looked at the two threads she’d plucked from the night. One was silver, the other one glass. “Someone is spinning threads that don’t belong here.” She closed her fingers around the threads until they turned black as the night. “I don’t make the patterns,” she said to the Dark One. “I just weave them from the threads I find in the night. You don’t want the golden one? Then you will have to spin your own threads.”
With that she took one of the pairs of scissors she carried around her neck like jewelry, dozens of scissors, gold, silver, wood, and ivory. The pair she picked was made of gold.
The Weaver let the scissors snap open like a beak.
“It will weaken you more than you expect.”
“I know,” said the Dark One. “Cut it.”
So Much to Lose
A shaman who speaks with spiders. A hunter they met knew of a man who spoke with lizards. A priest (looking around anxio
usly, worried about angering his god with such talk) whispered he’d heard of a boy who could speak to fire. And the days went by in this land where the past seemed more alive than the future. Jacob caught himself wishing they’d never find the spider shaman so he and Fox could just ride on and on to where nobody knew of Fairies or Alderelves.
He’d never been so happy.
Not even the thought of abandoning Will changed that. It felt so easy to finally indulge this love. Fox was the only one able to dampen the rage his father had stoked once more. If only it didn’t scare him how much he suddenly had to lose.
They slept with each other for the first time while waiting out a storm in an abandoned shepherd hut. The hours the storm granted them, surrounded by raw wool and rusty shears, felt like a month, a year, all the years they’d been waiting for this, full of fear of their kisses, of their too-familiar skins. So far from all their memories, it felt as if they were meeting each other for the first time all over again. The horse scraping around in the discarded fleece, the storm, the sound of rain, Jacob gathered it all, like jewelry he would put around Fox’s neck whenever they would remember this first time.
The next day they met a boy with an eagle that was almost as big as the shaggy horse he was riding. The boy told them about a holy man who lived in a tree and let spiders nest in his clothes.
No.
They still had only one horse, and Jacob could feel Fox’s arms tighten around him. They probably both felt the same: They should have stayed a little longer in that hut, so they wouldn’t have ever met that boy.
The boy described a remote valley and a forest of wild apple trees. They found the valley and the forest, but there was no sign of the shaman. Only when a murder of crows fluttered out of one of the trees did they spot the face among the branches, a face so weathered it barely stood out from the bark and leaves. The shaman ignored Jacob’s calls, but when he saw Fox, he climbed down from his tree. His coat was crawling with spiders, so many it looked as though a Baba Yaga had put living embroidery on it. He picked a spider off his collar, one with pale green legs. Without a word, he placed it in Fox’s hand, smiled at her, and climbed back up into his tree. The spider descended on her thread and began to weave a web into the grass.
It took a while until they realized she was weaving a map.
The white gossamer formed a mountain range, a river, the shores of a lake. But then the web began to tremble. The fine threads tore, and Jacob felt a warm breeze on his skin. So warm it felt like rage. And pain.
He should have turned back. He shouldn’t have listened to her.
Sixteen wasn’t wearing Clara’s face this time. She didn’t even try to look like a human. Her body mirrored Fox, the torn web, the grass, the wild apple trees, but her glass skin was so jagged in places that the images were broken into a thousand facets, and the bark striped her like a tiger’s fur.
The spider tried to flee, but Sixteen caught it and froze it into silver, throwing its body into the torn web. Jacob thought he heard a cry from the branches, but the shaman stayed out of sight. Smart.
“What are you doing here? My brother’s warning wasn’t enough?”
Jacob saw his fear reflected in Sixteen’s eyes. She pointed at Fox with the silver blades of her fingers.
“Seventeen says silver suits her. And that you drove it out with Witch magic.” She looked around. “But there are no Witches here.”
She smiled.
Jacob tried to stand in front of Fox, but she wouldn’t have it. She’d drawn her knife. It wouldn’t help. Nothing would help.
Sixteen eyed Jacob as though comparing his face to another’s.
“You really look nothing like him.”
Of course. His brother.
“He’s so beautiful,” Sixteen continued. “Even silver couldn’t make him any more beautiful.”
Jacob didn’t ask her whether she’d already stolen Will’s beautiful face. But maybe Sixteen could answer another question.
“Does he have human skin?”
The question didn’t seem to surprise her.
“Yes. It only turns to stone when he gets angry.”
Jacob tried to comprehend what that meant. Let it go, Jacob. What was it Dunbar’s telegram said? Damp earth. Water. He looked around. Trees. Nothing but trees.
Sixteen leaned down and picked up the silver spider. “My brother has started collecting them. Insects, plants, a mouse, a snake. I wish this whole filthy world could be turned to silver.”
She threw the spider away again.
“Let her go,” said Jacob. “Please. Spieler is angry with me, not her.”
Fox clawed her fingers into his arm so hard it hurt.
“He’s lying,” she said to Sixteen. “Before you can even touch him, I will shift and tear out your throat.”
Sixteen flexed her fingers like a cat looking forward to the hunt.
“You won’t be fast enough, fox-sister,” she said.
Sixteen’s features became human. And again Jacob recognized the face. It was his mother’s, young, the one he knew only from photographs. The sight paralyzed him.
Fox yanked him away.
She screamed at him, pulled him along. They stumbled over roots and dead trees, ran side by side through the high grass that smelled of apples, their eyes desperately looking for the one thing that could protect them.
Damp earth. Water.
Sixteen was in no rush. She was obviously enjoying her quarry’s fear.
Damp earth. Water. But all Jacob saw was rotting leaves. He wanted to stop, kiss Fox one last time.
Sixteen walked faster.
Jacob stumbled over a branch. Fox dragged him back to his feet. Shift! he wanted to shout. The vixen can escape. But what for? She would never flee without him. Together. Even in death. His fingers tightened their grip around her hand. A double statue of silver. Romantic. What would their faces show? Fear? Or love?
Jacob took a swarm of mosquitoes to be a figment of his desperate mind, but Fox pulled him toward them. A pond! Barely visible under the rotting leaves floating on its brackish surface. Jacob covered Fox as she slipped on the muddy bank. She waded into the water, and he dug his fingers into the damp earth, threw a handful into Sixteen’s face, which was still that of his mother. The glass fingers quickly wiped the mud off, but the skin beneath had already turned to bark.
The pond wasn’t very deep, the water barely reaching to their chests. But Sixteen stopped one step away from the bank, her eyes a kaleidoscope of a hundred stolen lives. Jacob wrapped his arms around Fox. The water was warm, and the rotting foliage surrounded them like a blanket. Would this be their end? In a muddy pond?
Sixteen’s feet were growing roots. She stared at them. But then her head turned.
The muddy water rippled.
The wind, the wind, the heaven-born wind...
Sixteen smiled.
Maybe it was whispering to her.
“It’s over,” she said. “Your brother has found her!”
She briefly seemed torn whether or not to finish the hunt.
But then she turned to glass and was gone.
So Weak
The stag’s head rose above the grass. He had no memory of ever not having carried the proud antlers. It was back, the melody that had been missing from the music of the world. But its song was weaker than usual.
The stag followed it, the one sound that contained everything he’d once been. And there she was, her dress covered in cobwebs. Only the thread in her hand was golden.
The stag went to her side, and the Fairy buried her face in his neck.
And Everything Will Be Just as It was Meant to Be
The leaves and blossoms growing on the carriage would have made good camouflage in any forest, but here, among the blue mountains and the yellow grass, they just announced from how far they’d come.
Will climbed off his horse and hid behind a dead tree.
He’d found her.
A stag stood next to the carria
ge. His antlers were wider than Will could stretch his arms. Two horses were searching the yellow grass for shoots as green as their coats. The man fitting the harness over their necks wore clothes that reminded Will of Scheherazade and the tales of a thousand and one nights. Those had been their mother’s favorite stories. Will could no longer tell whether the memory of her was more of a fairy tale than what he was seeing now.
The Dark Fairy was kneeling in the grass a few feet from the carriage. The gathering dusk made her green dress as black as the approaching night. Will lost himself in the images brought back by being so close to her. Forgotten images: The day the Goyl had brought him to her. The time spent by her side. And the night she’d let him go. They’d all been so exhausted. Exhausted, betrayed, half of them dead. Who did he mean by “them”? Him and the surviving Goyl. Jacob had been there, and Fox, among the human prisoners. They’d come for him, but he’d had no memory of having a brother.
Maybe he didn’t want to remember.
Enchanted.
The stag looked at him. What did he see? Even Will could barely make out Seventeen in the fading light of the dying day. And he hadn’t seen Sixteen in hours.
He pulled the swindlesack from under his shirt.
The Fairy rose.
“Do not look at her, fool! Never.” The Goyl who’d trained him had warned him over and over. Hentzau, yes, that had been his name.
Will tried to pull the swindlesack off the crossbow, but his hands seemed to resist. It’s her magic, the silver under his fingers seemed to whisper. Fight back! But what if the Goyl was right? What if she took the jade with her? He so longed for the stone.
The Fairy looked toward him. She was as pale as the stars gathering in the strange skies above. So beautiful. The stag wanted to shield her, but with one swipe of her hand, his legs were caught in vines that wouldn’t budge, no matter how he kicked and thrashed his antlers at them.