He hadn’t curbed his jealousy, but Jacob felt better as he settled into the Tzar’s automobile.
The Robbers in the Trees
Should he have been more careful? Yes, Nerron. After every rain, Sixteen could barely move until she’d scraped the bark from her joints, and Seventeen kept growing roots he had to cut off with his own fingers. Each misty morning made it worse, the moonlight, the damp shadows beneath the trees. It was obvious Fairy magic was winning the battle against glass and silver, but—A curse on you, Nerron, and on your speckled bastard skin—he had relied on the vigilance of the Mirrorlings while he’d daydreamed of treasures in the lost cities, of the brand-new world that was going to be his reward. He’d stuffed his good senses into a saddlebag!
When something stirred in the oak tree above, he thought it was just the wind bringing more of the rain that seemed to have been following the Fairy like a damp veil. But then there was the shrill whistle, and bandits started dropping from the trees like wingless birds.
Old stories. This country was infested with them. Solovei the Brigand, who changed into a bird to evade his hunters. Years ago, Nerron had exposed another treasure hunter who bragged he’d found the flute with which that legendary bandit was said to have laid waste to entire regions. But the men surrounding them now were not the kind of bandits who inspired legends. They were so filthy he should’ve smelled them from miles away. One was missing an eye, the other an ear, and the feathers on their clothes had certainly not grown from their own bodies. They weren’t even from the right bird! The legend was of Solovei the Nightingale, but these idiots had adorned themselves with the feathers of crows and finches.
There were twelve of them. The Jade Goyl had dealt with more during the Blood Wedding, but Will was wearing human skin now. The Pup did draw his saber, though. Nerron and Will had killed three before the others brought them to the ground. Nerron screamed for Sixteen and Seventeen as the bandits pulled the noose over his head. They’d knotted it so it wouldn’t immediately break his neck. Nice! They wanted to see them wriggle. Nerron cracked one more nose before they pulled him up. Will smashed another’s hand, but he was soon dangling next to Nerron. The Bastard’s Goyl skin offered more resistance to the rope, but the Pup was writhing like a fish on a hook, and soon enough his body went slack. He was going to be dead in minutes. Beneath them, the robbers made off with their horses. They looked so dumb they probably weren’t going to find the crossbow in the swindlesack. Even before they were out of sight, Nerron’s fingers started feeling for the blade in his sleeve. Hurry, Nerron! Milk-face had softer skin. He already looked quite dead.
Nerron’s hands were soon free, but the rope around his neck was tougher, and when it finally snapped, the fall nearly broke his neck. Will’s face was as blue as lapis lazuli, and he slumped to the ground like shot venison, but he was still breathing. Nerron cut the rope and grabbed the nearest stone as he heard steps behind him. But it was only Seventeen. The Mirrorling wasn’t even trying to look like a human, or maybe it was no longer as easy for him. His face mirrored the forest, and his left arm was as stiff as a branch. Sixteen was in no better shape. She was all shadows and leaves, and it was hard to tell what was mirrored and what was actual growth. She knelt next to Will and reached out to stroke his face, but she stopped herself when she realized she wasn’t wearing her gloves.
“Is he dead?” Seventeen was scraping bark off his stiff arm.
“No, but that’s no thanks to you.” Nerron’s voice was hoarse, like a toad’s. He was surprised his burning throat managed to utter any words at all. “Remember this the next time you wonder whether you need me.”
Will stirred.
“Really? Then why haven’t we caught up with the Fairy yet?” Seventeen’s voice sounded metallic when he got angry. “You’re a lousy guide! Look at my sister.”
Sister? Since when did mirrors have sisters?
Nerron leaned over Will and immediately forgot his own aching neck. Will’s skin was turning pale green where the rope had chafed it.
Jade. More pure than the most precious amulet you could buy in the King’s capital.
Nerron jumped back as Will sat up and coughed. The fingers touching his abraded skin were made of green stone. It was quickly spreading through his forehead and streaking down his neck. Sixteen stared at Nerron, but Seventeen waved her away impatiently.
Nerron hardly noticed them disappearing among the trees.
He believed neither in the lava-spurting god the onyx worshipped in their black grottoes nor in his mother’s malachite goddess. When he entered a church, he felt nothing, no matter which god was worshipped there. Even the sinister places of sacrifice found beneath Silver-Alders or by the ponds of Watermen made no impression on the Bastard. But the sight of jade in Will Reckless’s skin gave him that shudder of reverence he’d only heard others describe. Jade Goyl. A good feeling when fairy tales came true. That was why he hunted treasure—for this very feeling. Wasn’t it?
Will’s eyes sought his. Eyes speckled with gold. The Pup—no longer a Pup—moved differently as he rose to his feet. Smooth, like a Goyl. One of them.
What now, Nerron? But he didn’t want to think. He just wanted to look at him.
“They have the crossbow,” Nerron said, though he no longer knew whether that was important.
“Do you know where they went?”
Nerron nodded.
The jade was still spreading. Will touched the stone glossing his cheek.
“I called it,” he said. “And it came.”
“Good,” Nerron replied hoarsely.
It was all good.
Lost Stories
For someone who didn’t like to travel, Robert Dunbar had packed his suitcase far too many times these past months. Lectures in Bengal, Nihon, and now Tasmania. He doubted it made any sense to be lecturing Albian history in a land where at least half the people were force-shipped convicts. But Dunbar had accepted the invitation in the hope he’d find a place here, at the end of the world, where his father could live out the rest of his days in peace, without being harassed and beaten for his Fir Darrig tail.
But his first days here had already made Dunbar doubtful whether Tasmania was that place. They didn’t even treat their own Aboriginal people with much respect. He liked the weather (the fur he’d inherited from his father’s side bristled most uncomfortably in Albion’s damp climate), and it was good to be away from all the things that were taken so seriously in Londra and Pendragon. But he missed his books, Pendragon’s libraries, the countless sources of knowledge left there over the centuries for thirsty minds like his. Jacob’s telegram had been a most painful reminder of that.
Alderelves. Even in Pendragon, Dunbar wouldn’t have been sure where to start looking for their long-lost trails. Most of his fellow historians would have ridiculed him for even trying. It was like looking in earnest for forgotten gods: Zeus, Apollo, Odin, and Freya... Had they actually existed? Dunbar’s answer was yes, most definitely, but he’d long stopped voicing such opinions. The odds of finding something about the Mirrorlings were certainly better. Jacob’s description sounded as though Isambard Brunel had gotten the idea to create humans, and that he’d joined forces with the Alderelves to achieve that goal. That they called themselves Sixteen and Seventeen was encouraging. After all, that could mean there were at least fifteen more of them who may have left traces somewhere.
Back in Albion, Dunbar would’ve started his search for traces of the vanished Alderelves in Tintagel and Camelot. Those places housed the most comprehensive collection of literature on Arthur of Albion and the legends surrounding his life. Those stories were the only sources Dunbar knew of that mentioned Alderelves. Still, every historian who publicly believed the legendary King of Albion had actually been the son of a Fairy and an Elf made himself impossible among his peers. Most of them didn’t even know Alderelves had been a very special kind of Elf. And as far as the mirror creatures were concerned, the librarian at the history department in Pen
dragon, who looked as though it had been decades since he’d last seen a ray of sunlight, would’ve pointed him toward the travel journal of a writer who had, almost a century ago, seen a silver woman in a field in Austry. And Dunbar could’ve recruited one of his botanical colleagues to examine the Alder that grew not far from the city wall and that was hung with centuries’ worth of jewelry and trinkets. But…he was not in Albion. He was in Tasmania, and the library of the very new university of Parramatta was a thin and feeble offshoot of the repositories of printed treasures in Pendragon.
If only Jacob’s latest telegram hadn’t sounded so worried. Not like Jacob at all. Some of that worry must’ve shown on Dunbar’s face as he stood among the sparsely stocked shelves of the university library.
“May I ask what you’re looking for? You seem not to have found it.” The librarian in front of him was holding an enormous pile of books between her arms and her chin. Her hair was gray (and looked as though she’d pinned it up rather hastily), but the smile she managed despite her heavy load would’ve been perfectly at home on the face of a twelve-year-old.
“No, but I admit the information I’m looking for would be hard to find even in the libraries back home. From your accent, I’m guessing you’re also from Albion? Robert Dunbar.”
She unloaded the books on a table to shake his hand, even though it was covered in gray fur.
“Jocelyn Bagenal. And, yes, I was born in Albion. I was brought here years ago by a ship. May I ask what you’re looking for?”
“Reports of creatures made of mirrored glass, silver animals and people... Alderelves?” Dunbar added the last word very hesitantly. Most humans thought of Elves only as the finger-sized Grass Elves and Sand Elves, and his list already sounded silly enough.
“Ah-ha. Lost stories.” Jocelyn Bagenal began sorting the pile of books onto nearby shelves: Albian colonial policy, the history of the Koori and Anangy, the mines of New-Cymru. A librarian. Or, as Dunbar liked to call members of her profession, a book priestess. Miss Bagenal—Dunbar saw no wedding band on her finger—pushed the last book onto a shelf. “Fir Darrig?”
She’d even pronounced it right.
“Indeed.”
“A distant relative of mine has some drops of Fir Darrig blood, but only enough to make his beard more pronounced.” She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. The pearl on her earring was, if Dunbar wasn’t mistaken, a Caledonian naiad tear. “Maybe I can help. I collect lost stories. Lost, forgotten, misplaced…whichever. Whether from Albion or Immrama, from Nam Viet, Aotearoa, or Alberica. Everyone in Parramatta knows about Jocelyn Bagenal’s strange books. And people keep bringing me more. Soon I’ll have to limit myself to Dwarf editions. I have barely enough space left for my bed.”
She scribbled an address on a piece of paper and offered it to Dunbar.
“After five and before ten.”
Then she disappeared between the shelves, as though she’d only emerged from one of the books to offer him help.
She even moved like a twelve-year-old girl. Maybe even younger than that.
Dunbar looked at the paper.
Jocelyn Topanga Bagenal.
Maybe Parramatta was the right place after all.
A New Hand
Chanute was in heaven. Age, death, all forgotten. He sat on Aleksei Baryatinsky’s leather sofa practicing loading a pistol. With an arm and hand moved by sinews and joints of steel.
When Fox asked Sylvain how Chanute had paid for the new arm, he grinned like a child who’d executed a well-planned prank. “Sold my wristwatch. You should have seen the watchmaker’s face. Tabarnak, I thought he was going to drop dead! And it was nothing but a cheap Rolex rip-off, but over here nobody would know that.”
Jacob was going to kill him. No, he was going to quarter him first. Fox asked whether all his senses had gone the way of Baryatinsky’s liquor. Sylvain replied with an injured frown and whispered that Albert Chanute needed a new hand, and to him, Sylvain Caleb Fowler, friendship was more important than any talk of two worlds that were best kept apart.
Maybe he was right.
Chanute laughed like a child when his new fingers managed to put the pistol back in its holster. It had been eight years since the Ogre had taken his arm.
“Look, ma puce.” Sylvain pulled a gilded medallion from his pocket. “The shop owner swore I just had to put a lock of my ex-wife’s hair in it.”
And then what? Fox took the medallion from Sylvain and held it to her nose. Always the vixen. And the vixen couldn’t smell the faintest trace of magic. Sylvain watched her like a worried dog who’d just dropped his quarry at his master’s feet. Then he took the medallion back, opened the window, and threw it into Baryatinsky’s vegetable beds. The curses following it were elaborate enough to fill the entire palace to the rafters with Canadian obscenities. That done, Sylvain filled a water glass with the cinnamon-infused gorzalka that seemed to be everywhere in their host’s palace and proceeded to immerse himself in the three-day-old copy of the Londra Illustrated News Chanute had found somewhere. The curlicued type gave him some trouble, but Sylvain read through every small item as though all the treasures of this world were to be found in that newspaper. Fox didn’t have the heart to rob him of that illusion as well.
Outside, the lights of Moskva gave the night sky a grubby glow, and even the moons wore veils of human haze. But Fox didn’t long to be elsewhere. The feelings flooding her heart had pushed aside the forests and the stars. She didn’t want to know how long that would last. She didn’t even want to give a name to the feelings.
“‘The opening of the Londra Tunnel was marked without its builder, ’” Sylvain read aloud. “‘Isambard Brunel’s illness seems to be worse than the court will have us know.’ Londra? Sounds like London. Is that what’s it’s called here?”
Fox shot him a warning glance.
She filled a glass with Baryatinsky’s sweet port wine, though she’d already drunk too much of it, and reached for the book she’d been reading for a couple of hours without remembering a single word. It felt as if Orlando’s touch had left a mark on her skin as clear as pollen dust on the vixen’s fur. She was so happy. And so unhappy. It didn’t help to remind herself of all the times she’d dusted some woman’s talcum powder off Jacob’s clothes or the times her nose had picked up strange perfumes on him.
Where was he?
When Chanute asked her for the third time to admire his new arm, Fox snapped at him so sharply that Sylvain shot her a nasty look over the top of his paper. Oh, to the Stilt with the both of them. To the Stilt with her. She wished she were back in Orlando’s bed. She wished she’d never gone with him.
Sylvain was asking Chanute what a Man-Goyl was. Outside, a carriage was approaching. Fox heard the guards open the gate. How her heart pounded as she approached the window. Yet it wasn’t Jacob climbing out of the carriage but Baryatinsky. Fox had given the perfume their host left in her room to her maid.
Sylvain got up for a refill, but Chanute’s new hand was quicker on the bottle’s neck. He gave Sylvain a triumphant smile, only to mutter a disappointed curse when the glass crushed between his steel fingers. Two servants immediately appeared to pick up the pieces, Sylvain blurted out an “Oupelay!” that made them flinch almost as much as Chanute’s laughter, and the younger of the servants cut himself on the shards.
“Ayoye tabarnak!” Sylvain grunted as he dropped onto the sofa next to Fox, sighing as though he’d just saved the world. “Nothing better could’ve ever happened to me than to end up in a cell with Jacob Reckless. To imagine I could’ve spent my entire life living in only one world.”
Fox shot him another warning glance, and Sylvain pressed his hand over his mouth like a schoolboy caught in a lie, but that didn’t dent his mood. Nothing in this or the other world could ever dent Sylvain’s mood. Or at least he was good at giving that impression.
“Shall I tell you a secret?” he whispered to Fox.
She wasn’t sure, but Sylvain didn’t wait for her a
nswer.
“Chanute and I will go to l’Arcadie! He’s already bought maps and explained the route to me. It’s a long journey, first on one of the river barges that take the pelt-hunters to Kamchatka, and then by ship to Alaska. Here they call it Alyeska. We’re still arguing over how to continue from there. Chanute says we have to cross native territory and that they’ll turn us both into marmots.”
Fox looked across at Chanute. As far as she knew, he hadn’t told Jacob about this plan.
“And when is this going to happen?”
Sylvain gave her a conspiratorial smile. “As soon as Jacob leaves Moskva. Chanute says you don’t need him and he’d only be a third wheel. Well, he probably means fifth. He’s not too good with numbers. If you ask me, I think he wishes you’d cancel the whole thing. He says that the Mirrorlings have only left you in peace because you’ve lost Jacob’s brother and that Jacob won’t admit even to himself how dangerous the whole thing is. And that everyone has to find their own path, even brothers. Well, you know Chanute better than I do—he doesn’t really hold back his opinions.”
And maybe he’s even hoping his expedition might get Jacob to turn back. No, he knew his apprentice better than that. But Fox could already see Jacob’s face when Chanute told him about his plans.
“When will he tell Jacob?”
Sylvain shrugged. “When the opportunity arises.”
Chanute had the servant bring a new bottle of gorzalka. His eyes gleamed at Sylvain as his new fingers closed around its neck and lifted it without breaking it.
From Her
The moth settled on Kami’en’s chest as he was reviewing a military parade with the Tzar—surrounded by Varangian generals and a bear wearing the same uniform as the soldiers marching below. Of course, he immediately recognized who’d sent the moth, but the images it brought only really registered when he heard the child’s cry. Why had Niomee sent the moth? To take revenge on Amalie? To prove he’d suspected and betrayed her unjustly? All he could think was that maybe he hadn’t lost her completely. And that his infant son was still alive.