Reckless (Mirrorworld #1)

Reckless (Mirrorworld #1) Page 12

Jacob grabbed Fox and lifted her into the saddle. Will had also swung himself back onto his horse, though he was still staring at the Goyl.

"Will!" Jacob yelled again. "Ride, dammit!"

His brother didn't even look at him.

"Will!" Clara screamed, glancing desperately at the fighting men.

But Will only came when Jacob snatched his reins.

"Ride!" he barked at Will once more. "Ride, and don't look back."

And at last his brother turned his horse.

13

Of The Use of Daughters

Defeated. Therese of Austry was standing by the window, staring down at the palace guards. They were patrolling in front of the gate as if nothing had happened. The whole city lay below her as if nothing had happened. But she had lost a war. For the first time. And every night she dreamed she was drowning in bloody water, which invariably turned into pale red stoneskin of her foe.

For the past half hour, her ministers and generals had been explaining to her why she had lost. They were all in her audience chamber, decorated with the medals she'd given them, and they tried to put the blame on her. "The Goyl rifles are better." "They have faster trains." But she knew this war was being won by the King with the carnelian skin because he had a better grasp of strategy than all of them together. And because he had a mistress who, for the first time in more than three hundred years, had but the magic of the Fairies in the service of a King.

A carriage drew up to the gate, and three Goyl climbed out. They acted so civilized. They weren't even in uniform. How she would have loved to order her guards to drag them through the courtyard and club them to death, as her grandfather would have done. But these were different times. Now it was the Goyl who did the clubbing. They would sit down with her counselors, sip tea from silver cups, and negotiate terms of surrender. The guards opened the gate, and the Empress turned her back to the window as the Goyl crossed the courtyard.

They were still talking, all her useless, medaled generals, while her ancestors stared down at her from the golden, silk-draped walls. Right next to the door was a portrait of her father, gaunt and upright, like a stork, continuously at war with his royal brother from Lotharaine, just as she had been fighting his son, Crookback, for years. Next to him was her grandfather, who like the Goyl King, had once had an affair with a Fairy. His yearning for her had finally driven him to drown himself in the royal lily pond. He'd had himself portrayed on a Unicorn, for which his favorite horse was the model, with a narwhal horn attached to its head. It looked ludicrous, and the Empress had always preferred the painting next to his. That one showed her great-grandfather with his elder brother, who had been disinherited because he had taken his alchemical experiments too seriously. Her father had always been outraged by that painting because the painter had caught his great-uncle's blind eyes so realistically. As a child, she would push a chair under the picture, climbing up to get a closer look at the scars around those empty eyes. He'd supposedly been blinded by an experiment in which he had tried to turn his own heart into gold, and yet of all her ancestors, he was the only one who was smiling — which had always made her think that his experiment must have been successful and that he indeed had a golden heart beating in his chest.

Men. All of them. Crazy or sane, but always men. For centuries only men had ascended to the throne of Austry — and that had changed only because her father had sired four daughters but not a single son.

She, too, had no son, just a daughter. But she had never intended to turn her into a bargaining chip, as her father had done with her younger sisters. One for King Crookback, in his gloomy castle in Lotharaine; one for her cousin Albion, the obsessive huntsman; and the youngest bartered away to some eastern potentate who had already buried two wives.

No. She had wanted to put her daughter on the throne, to see her portrait on that wall, framed in gold, between all those men. Amalie of Austry, daughter of Therese, who had once dreamed of being called The Great. But there was no other way, or they would both drown in that bloody water — she, her daughter, her people, her throne, this city, and the whole country, together with those idiots who were still holding forth about why they hadn't been able to win the war for her. Therese's father would have had them all executed. But then what? The next lot wouldn't be any better, and their blood would not bring back all the soldiers she had lost, the provinces that now belonged to the Goyl, nor her dignity, which in the past six months had been choked in the mud of four battlefields.

"Enough!"

One word, and the room where her great-grandfather used to sign death warrants fell silent. Power. Intoxicating. Like a fine wine.

How they bowed their vain heads. Look at them, Therese. Wouldn't it be nice to have them all chopped off after all?

The Empress adjusted the tiara of elven glass that her great-grandmother had worn before her, and waved one of the Dwarfs to her desk. Hers were the only Dwarfs in this land who still wore beards. Servants, bodyguards, confidants. Generations of service to her family, and still in the same livery they had worn for over two hundred years. Lace collars over black velvet, and then those ridiculously wide breeches. Tasteless and completely unfashionable, but you couldn't argue with Dwarfs about tradition any more than you could argue with priests about religion.

"Write," she ordered.

The Dwarf climbed onto her chair. He had to kneel on the pale golden cushion. Auberon. Her favorite and the smartest of them all. The hand that now reached for the quill was as small as a child's, but these hands would break iron chains as easily as her cook's hands cracked an egg.

"We, Therese of Austry—" Her ancestors stared down at her disapprovingly. What did they know of Kings brought forth from the bowels of the earth, and a Fairy who turned human skin to stone to make it like the skin of her lover? "—herewith offer to Kami’en, King of the Goyl, our daughter Amalie's hand in marriage, to bring an end to the war and to bring peace to our two great nations."

How the silence erupted. As if her words had shattered the glass house in which they had all been sitting. But it wasn't she, it was the Goyl, who had struck the blow, and now she had to give him her daughter.

The Empress turned her back on them, silencing their angered voices. Only the rustle of her dress followed her as she stepped toward the high doors, which seemed to have been built not for humans but for the Giants, who, thanks to her great-grandfather's efforts, had been driven to extinction sixty years ago. Power. Like wine when you have it. Like poison when you lose it. Therese already felt it eating away at her.

Defeated.

14

Thorn Castle

"But he just won't wake up!" The voice sounded worried. And familiar. Fox.

"Don't worry. He's just sleeping." That voice he recognized well. Clara.

Wake up, Jacob. Fingers stroked his searing shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw the silver moon drifting into a cloud, as if trying to hide from its red twin. It shone down into a dark castle courtyard. High windows reflected the stars, though there was no light behind any of them. No lanterns shone above the doors or under the overgrown archways. No servant scuttled across the yard, which was thickly covered with wet leaves, as if it hadn't been raked in years.

"Finally! I thought you'd never wake up."