‘I’ll give you Sixty-five,’ Jacob replied. ‘If we leave tomorrow morning.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
TOGETHER
Elven dust and red wine. When Jacob took Fox to her room, Valiant was sitting in his oversize chair, his feet on his oversize table in his ridiculously oversize and crumbling castle, and he was talking to the paintings on the walls. They were all chasing their childhood dreams.
Fox’s shoulder was aching, though she tried to hide it. Jacob found a sleepy servant down in the kitchen who heated a bowl of water for him. A Man-Swan’s beak was not the cleanest of weapons, and so he also dressed the wound with some of the salve Alma had mixed for him.
Bites, knife wounds, burnt fingers . . . like him, Fox had probably lost count of how often they’d patched each other up over the years. To Jacob, her body was as familiar as his own, but as he touched her now he caught himself feeling self-conscious. She belonged to him like his own shadow. Younger sister, best friend. Jacob loved her so much that the other kind of love seemed like something he had to protect her from: the hungry game that was best ended before it got too serious. He wished he’d observed that rule himself with the Fairy.
Fox didn’t say a word while he put a fresh bandage on her shoulder. Her silence used to be an expression of the wordless familiarity that connected them. But not this time. Jacob opened the window and poured the bloody water into the night. A few snowflakes drifted in.
Fox stepped to his side and caught them with her hand.
‘What’s your plan? Are you going to trade the Dark Fairy the crossbow for your life?’ She leant out the window and inhaled the cold air as though it might drive away her fear.
‘A few hundred thousand dead, for my own skin? Since when do you think so little of me?’
She looked at him. ‘You would have done it for your brother. For him you would have done anything. Why not for yourself?’
Yes, why not, Jacob? Because he’d grown up with the certainty that Will’s life was more precious than his own? Did it matter?
‘I’m not planning to trade or sell the crossbow,’ he said. ‘The Witch Slayer used it three times. The first bolt killed an Albian general who took Fifty thousand men with him to his death. The second killed the commanding general of Lotharaine and Seventy thousand soldiers. A few weeks later, Guismond had himself crowned King of both kingdoms.’
Fox held out her hand into the falling snow.
‘I think I know the rest. I’d forgotten that story. It always frightened me.’ The flakes planted crystal flowers on her skin. ‘One day’ – she spoke the words into the night as though snatching them from the darkness – ‘Guismond’s younger son was dying. Gahrumet. I think that was his name. A Witch had poisoned him to take revenge on his father for killing hundreds of her sisters. His son was in such terrible pain that Guismond couldn’t bear it any more. He shot a bolt from the crossbow into his son’s heart, but Gahrumet didn’t die; he was healed. They say he hated his father later on, but he lived for many years.’ She closed the window and turned around. ‘It’s nothing but a fairy tale, Jacob.’
‘And? Everything in this world sounds like a fairy tale. I’m dying for having uttered the name of a Fairy!’ He stepped towards her and brushed the snowflakes from her hair. ‘Why shouldn’t there be a weapon that brings death when it’s yielded in hatred but gives life when it’s used out of love?’
Fox shook her head. ‘No.’
They both knew who was going to have to shoot the bolt.
Jacob took her hands. ‘You heard Valiant: nobody came out of the tomb alive. You know we can make it. Or shall we just wait together for death to catch up with me?’
What could she say to that?
CHAPTER TWELVE
LIVING SHADOWS
Looking at the valley where the Dwarfs had found the tomb, no one would have guessed that it had once been famous for its flowering slopes. Mirror-blossoms could make even the ugliest face irresistible for a few hours. But the sale of iron ore made riches faster.
The valley lay in the steep mountains of Helvetia, a little under a day’s ride from Valiant’s castle. The country was so small that it spent a lot of effort and gold on appeasing its mighty neighbours. It had once been part of Lotharaine but had won its independence with the help of an army of mercenary Giants. And since a Stilt had stolen the last King’s only heir, a parliament had been ruling the tiny country, keeping peace with the Goyl by allowing them to move troops through its mountains. When Jacob had asked what price the Dwarfs had paid for the permission to scour iron ore from Helvetia’s blooming valleys, Valiant merely replied with an indulgent smile. The country needed tunnels if it wanted to keep up with its neighbours’ railways and fast highways. And nobody could blast holes through mountains the way the Dwarfs could.
Jacob’s boots sank into deep snow as he climbed out of Valiant’s carriage. The cowering huts around the mine’s buildings did not show any of the wealth that was being scraped out of the earth, and the smoke rising from the chimneys scribbled a dirty future into the sky.
A crowd of Dwarf children were waiting by the cages that would take them down into the belly of the earth. They could crawl deeper into the tunnels than any human could, and they weren’t afraid of the mine-gnomes that made mining behind the mirror even more dangerous than in the other world.
‘Is that what you call good business these days?’ Jacob asked the Dwarf as they passed the pale urchins. ‘Children scraping for ore?’
‘And? They’d be doing it without me,’ Valiant retorted blankly. ‘Life’s an ugly affair.’
Fox eyed the women who were unloading the tenders as they came up from the tunnels loaded with ore. She whispered to the Dwarf: ‘Did you hear about the mine owner in Austry whose workers sold him to mine-gnomes?’
Valiant gave Jacob an alarmed look. ‘You should keep a close eye on her,’ he hissed. He disgustedly shoved back one of the children who’d been stretching a little hand towards his wolf-fur coat. ‘She already sounds like one of those anarchists who smear their slogans on every factory wall.’