Reckless (Free Preview) by Cornelia Funke

looks."
    He scrutinized
Jacob as if he were comparing   his brother's face with their father's.
    "Don't
you worry.   I am
fighting it," he said.   "After
all, it's my skin, not yours.   And I'm
still here, right?   Doing what you tell
me to do.   Riding behind
you.   Sucking it
up."
    Valiant's
voice could be heard outside.   He was
trying to convince Fox to free him from his silver shackles.
    Will nodded toward the exit.   "Is that the guide you were talking about?"
    "Yes."   Jacob forced himself to look at this stranger
with his brother's features.
    Will walked toward the opening, shielding his eyes with his hand
as the sunlight found his face.   "I
am sorry for what I said to Clara," he said.   "I'll talk to her."
    Then he
stepped outside.   And Jacob stood in the
darkness, still feeling the splinters — as if Will had smashed the mirror.

     

22
    Dreams

     
    It was night,
but the Dark Fairy did not sleep.   The
night was too beautiful to sleep it away.   But she still saw the Man-Goyl anyway.   By now she dreamed of him whether she was asleep or not.   Her curse had already turned most of his skin
to jade.   Jade.   Green.   Like life itself.   Petrified abundance.   Heart-stone, sown by the heartless.   He would be so much more beautiful once the
jade had replaced all his human skin, and once he fulfilled the promise of his
new flesh.   The future, as decided by the
past, all those things hidden in the folds of time.   They could only be known in dreams, which
revealed so much more to her than to men or Goyl, perhaps because time meant so
little when you were immortal.
    She should
have stayed in the castle with the bricked-up windows and waited there for news
from Hentzau, but Kami’en had wanted to get back to the mountains where he was
born and return to his fortress under the earth.   He longed for the deep as she longed for the
night sky and for white lilies floating on water — although she still tried to
convince herself that love alone could feed her soul.
    All she saw in
the train window was her own reflection, a pale phantom on a pane of glass,
behind which the world slipped past far too quickly.   Kami’en knew that she disliked trains almost
as much as she disliked the depths of the earth, so he'd had the walls of her
carriage decorated with intarsia:   ruby
blossoms and malachite leaves, a sky of lapis lazuli, hills of jade, and,
inlaid with moonstone, the shimmering surface of a lake.   That was love, wasn't it?
    The stone
images were beautiful, very beautiful, and whenever she no longer could bear
seeing the hills and fields rush by as if they were dissolving into the fabric
of time, she would run her fingers over the inlaid blossoms.   And yet the noise of the train still hurt her
ears, and all the metal around her made her Fairy skin crawl.
    Yes.   He loved her.   But he was still going to marry the dollface, the human princess with
the blank eyes and the beauty she owed to the lilies of the Fairies.   Amalie.   Her name sounded as bland as her face
looked.   How she would have loved to kill
her.   A poisoned comb,
a dress that would eat into her flesh while she twirled in it in front of her
golden mirrors.   How she would
scream and tear at her skin, which was so much softer than that of her
bridegroom.
    The Fairy
pressed her forehead against the cool glass.   She couldn’t understand where all that jealousy was coming from.   After all, it wasn't the first time Kami’en
had taken himself another woman.   No Goyl
loved only once.   Nobody loved only
once... Fairies least of all.
    The Dark Fairy
knew all the stories about her kind:   that those who loved one of them invariably fell into madness; that they
had no hearts, just as they had neither fathers nor mothers.   At least that part was true.   She pressed her hand against her chest.   No heart.   So where did the love she felt come from?
    Outside, the
stars were floating like blossoms on the inky