Maybe they wouldn’t have noticed the Alder, if not for the silver leaves. Fox approached the tree slowly. The face she spotted in the bark seemed familiar.
Jacob looked around.
They both knew who he was looking for.
“I think she’s riding with your brother,” said Fox. “She and the Bastard.”
Jacob stared at the frozen tree-face as though it could tell him whether his brother had ridden with them willingly, and if so, why he’d chosen such dark companions.
Fox wrapped her arms around him and kissed him so she wouldn’t have to feel the fear she felt stirring inside her, but the joy. Still so much joy.
You have everything you dreamed of, Fox. Everything.
Despite the Fairy.
Despite Will.
Despite the Alderelf, who was still waiting for his payment.
Despite. What a wonderful word, so full of defiance, freedom, courage, hope.
“The Elf got what he wanted,” Jacob whispered. “Maybe he’ll leave us in peace for now. But I’m not counting on it. I promise I’ll find something. Some magic to protect you from him.”
“No,” Fox whispered back. “We. We will find something.”
Jacob buried his face in her hair. He kissed her as though that could make him forget the dead Fairy and Will and his father, and the Elf who’d gotten what he wanted.
“Let’s surprise Chanute and Sylvain,” he said. “We can make it to Kamchatka before they get on the boat.”
That sounded wonderful.
As wonderful as the stolen time in the child-eater’s barn, and in the shepherd’s hut. Or the precious moments on the beach, after they’d survived the sinking of the Albian fleet. They were good at stealing time. Together. But she couldn’t let Jacob run away.
“When, do you think, will you turn around again?” she asked. “Tomorrow? The day after? Who knows, you might even make it for three days. But then you’ll ask me whether I can still find Will’s trail despite his head start.”
Jacob said nothing. His way of admitting she was right. To never let the other forget who they are—love is also about that.
One of the Fairy’s moths was fluttering a little away from the others, hovering over a trickle left from the last rains. Something glistened on the water. Fox bent down and picked it off the damp grass.
A golden thread.
Maybe the Fairy had found the Weaver.
The moth settled on Fox’s shoulder. The dark wings shimmered as if dusted with gold.
Jacob stood by the Fairy’s body. He’d known her name and she’d tried to kill him for it. But she’d also given him his brother back and had saved them all at the Blood Wedding.
The moth fluttered after them as they picked up Will’s trail. Fox didn’t have the heart to chase it away.
No
Was there even one word from the others? Did anyone say, Spieler, you were right? Of course not. Krieger, Letterman, Apaullo—the whole helpers-on-the-other-side faction were too busy stage-managing their return. Who had found Will Reckless? Who had mingled the magic of this world with their own so they could at least send something of themselves through the mirror? Had Guismond been his idea? No! Krieger had wanted a knight. A knight! Who said immortality precluded stupidity? Apaullo had recruited conquistadores, Letterman a papal spy, not to mention all the Stilts, Thumblings, and child-eaters the helpers-on-the-other-side faction had bribed over the centuries. Backward. They were all so hopelessly backward in their thinking, in their dreams. But he wouldn’t let them forget who finally ended their exile. Oh no.
It was simply ridiculous how excited he felt. Were the others nervous? He didn’t even know whether any of them had gone back yet. They each kept the locations of their mirrors as secret as their true form. They’d all tried to find each other’s mirrors, but usually without much success. Letterman’s was most definitely in Fon, and Krieger’s was probably in Nihon.
Spieler had chosen the oldest of his mirrors for his return, made from the first water they’d stolen from the Fairies. A theft they hadn’t even noticed for the longest time...
Spieler ran his fingers over the artfully shaped frame. The lilies were so lifelike that insects often came to settle on their petals. They’d never found a silversmith quite as talented. Volund. He’d met with a very sad end. This world had not at all agreed with him.
The glass between these perfect silver flowers showed Spieler’s true guise. The mirrors only allowed you to pass in that form. A huge disadvantage, and they’d tried in vain to change that. The others had also insisted that he give his face to Seventeen. A childish attempt to punish him for having pushed through with his idea. At least Sixteen had gotten Krieger’s face. A shame that they’d lost both of them, but Spieler had always thought the probability of the Mirrorlings surviving the mission was vanishingly small.
Eight centuries. Eight centuries in the wrong world.
He lifted his hand.
This world had been good to him.
More than you could say about the other one. In this moment, which he’d yearned for so painfully long, everything seemed to wash up behind the mirror’s glass: defeats, old foes, the backwardness, the terror of those last days...
No, Spieler.
He pressed his hand on the glass.
Home...
He kept his eyes closed for a moment, listened to his own breathing, sensed the changed room surrounding him, its width and depth. He didn’t like the smell. The air smelled of lost time, of defeat, and of a past so long forgotten it had lost all its flavor. And it smelled of the Fairies’ elements, of water and earth.
Spieler opened his eyes, and what he saw was familiar, made strange by too many years of absence. The most painful aspect of exile was how home became a dream, cleansed of all that was bad. One never returned to the dream one had nurtured over centuries, but to a reality that would always look shabby compared to the romanticized memories. The silver pillars, the balconies, the chandeliers, the glass floor—how dusty, how old-fashioned. Yesterday. Was there a more merciless word?
His steps echoed through the empty hall.
He’d once been so proud of this palace. Touching. Now it struggled to compare with the glass towers that could touch the sky.
Spieler stopped. He touched his forehead.
What was that?
The skin above his left eyebrow was rough. His fingers felt a bark-like scab. No, this wasn’t a scab.
He pulled his mirror eye from his pocket. But there she was. Her beautiful body was already crumbling into petals. Come on, show me her sisters. There. The lake. Wilting trees, the water clouded by dying lilies. No sign of life. Was their curse dying more slowly than their bodies? Yes. That had to be it.
Spieler put the medallion back in his waistcoat pocket—the clothes of the other world were another thing he’d gotten too used to—and stared at his right hand. Small spots of bark were forming on it.
“No!”
Spieler said it aloud, in his empty palace that smelled of their elements, of water, of the earth, so stuffy, so heavy, so alone with his rage and all the immortal disappointment.
Some remnant... Was it possible? That something remained?
He touched his face, his neck... Nothing. Not yet. Stay calm. The curse is broken, Spieler, or you’d already be a tree.
But something must have survived. What if that final spark had found a keeper? One of their dead lovers, those human weaklings who’d found them so irresistible.
He again reached for the medallion, but it just kept showing him the decaying body and the images he’d seen before.
No.
No!
He would not go back.
He would find it. Whatever it was, whatever remained.
He would make new creatures, better ones. Immortal, untiring, more terrible than anything that had hunted in this world before.
Oh, he didn’t like himself when he lost his patience.
Cornelia Funke, The Golden Yarn
(Series: Mirrorworld # 3)
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