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Authors: Cornelia Funke

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Espionage, #Suspense, #Thrillers

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Fox ducked
under the front seat, shivering behind Jacob's legs.

Machines.
 
The sound of metal.
 
Engineered motion.
 
Mechanical magic for those who had neither fur nor wings.

Jacob steered
the plane toward the large tunnel.
 
Yes,
it certainly was unwieldy on the ground.
 
He could only hope flying it would be easier.

Shots rang out
behind them as the plane rolled into the tunnel.
 
The roar of the engine reverberated between
the walls.
 
Oil splattered into Jacob's
face, and one of the wings nearly grazed the side of the tunnel.
 
More
speed, Jacob
.
 
He accelerated, which
made it only harder to keep the wings clear of the tunnel walls, and he took a
deep breath as the clumsy plane shot out of the tunnel and onto a gravel
runway.
 
Above them, a pale sun was
drifting among white clouds.
 
The noise
of the engine tore through the silence, and a few crows rose from the nearby
trees but, luckily, stayed clear of the propeller.

Pull her up, Jacob!
 
Fox has her fur, your brother has a skin of
stone, and now you have a pair of wings.

Engineered magic.

John Reckless
had brought metal Dragons through the mirror, and, just like the sheet of paper
Jacob had found in one of his father's books, the planes seemed like something
else John Reckless had left behind for his elder son.

The plane took
off and rose, higher and higher.
 
Below,
Jacob saw roads and railways disappear through massive arches into the
mountain.
 
A few years ago, the entrance
to the Goyl fortress had been just a natural fissure at the bottom of the mountain.
 
Now jade lizards adorned the arched gates,
and the mountainside above them was emblazoned with the coat of arms Kami’en had
chosen for himself:
 
a black moth on a
shield of carnelian.

The sun drew
the plane's silhouette under the moth's wings as Jacob flew past the coat of
arms.

He was
stealing the King's Dragon, but not even that could give him back his brother.

 

42

Two Paths

 

Back.
 
Over the river where the Lorelei lurked, the
mountains where Jacob had died, and the plundered land where the beauty was
still sleeping in her overgrown castle and where Will had first seen his new
kin by the abandoned farm...
 
Within
hours, the Junkers covered all the miles that it had taken them more than a
week to travel.
 
To Jacob the journey
seemed just as long, for every mile made it more irrevocable that he no longer
had a brother.

"Jacob, where's Will?"
 
He'd lost Will so many times when they were
children, while shopping our out in the park, where he'd felt embarrassed to be
seen holding his stubby fingers, Will would be off stalking a squirrel, a stray
dog, or a crow...
 
One time Jacob had
searched for hours before he found Will in
a
 
shop
entrance, his face swollen with
tears.
 
But this time there were no more
places to look for him, no path he could retrace, no way to undo his mistake,
his one moment of carelessness.

Jacob flew
south along the railway tracks, hoping they would lead him to Schwanstein.
 
It was bitterly cold in the open cockpit,
though he was quite sure flying quite close to the ground, and the wind kept
grabbing the aluminum-clad wings, forcing him to forget his self-reproach as he
fought to keep the wobbling contraption under control.
 
The Dwarf had started to curse behind him
every time the plane lurched, even though he probably enjoyed sharing the
narrow rear seat with Clara, and Fox uttered an occasional yelp.
 
Only Clara was silent, letting the wind blow
away everything that had happened in the past days.

Flying.

It was as
though the two worlds had merged, as if there were no longer a mirror.
 
When Dragons turned into machines, what came
next?

Such thoughts
were not conducive to controlling a biplane, especially not for someone doing
it for the first time.
 
The rising steam
of a locomotive suddenly robbed his vision, and Jacob pulled up too abruptly.
 
The Junkers tumbled toward the earth as if it
had remembered that it wasn't supposed to be in this world.
 
Fox cowered with a whimper, and the Dwarf's
curses became louder than the sputtering motor.

Of course, Jacob.
 
How
could you have trusted anything your father built?

He felt Clara
clawing her hands into his shoulders.
 
What will be his last thought?
 
Will's jaded face, or the dead larks?

He didn’t get
to find out.

A lucky gust
of wind cushioned the fall of the groaning plane, and he regained control in
time to avoid crashing into the trees.
 
The Junkers pitched like a wounded bird, but Jacob managed to put the
wheels onto a muddy ridge.
 
The rudder
broke on impact, one of the wings shattered against a tree, and the fuselage
was ripped open by the rocky terrain, but finally they came to a halt.
 
The engine died with one last stutter — but
they were alive.

Valiant
scampered down the remaining wing and immediately vomited beneath a tree.
 
The Dwarf's nose was bleeding, and a branch
had grazed Clara's hand, but apart from that everybody was unharmed.
 
Fox was so happy to feel solid ground beneath
her paws that she jumped after the first rabbit that stuck its head out of the
grass.

Fox cast a
relieved glance at Jacob as she noticed the hill with the ruin to their
left.
 
They were, in fact, not far from
Schwanstein.
 
But Jacob was eyeing the
railway tracks running southward to Schwanstein and farther beyond... much
farther... all the way to Vena, the Empress's capital city.
 
In his mind's eye, Jacob saw the five
bridges, the imperial palace,
the
towers of the
cathedral...

"Reckless,
are you listening?"
 
Valiant was
wiping the blood from his nose.
 
"How much farther?"

"What?"
 
Jacob was still looking at the rails.

"To your house?
 
My gold tree?"

Jacob didn't
answer.
 
He turned eastward to where the
train that had caused their crash was now coming over the hills.
 
White smoke.
 
Black iron.

"Fox."
 
He
knelt next to her.
 
Her fur was still
disheveled from the wind.
 
"I want
you to take Clara back to the ruin.
 
I'll
be there in a few days."

She didn't ask
him where he was going.
 
Fox looked at
him as if she had known this would happen all along.
 
This was how it had always been.
 
Fox knew him better than he knew
himself.
 
But Jacob could see that she
was tired of worrying about him.
 
And the
anger was back.
 
She had not forgiven him
for the Larks' Water,
nor
for not taking her along to
the fortress.
 
And now he was leaving her
behind again.
 
Give up
!
her
eyes said.

You know I can't, Fox
.

He stood.

The train grew
toward them, devouring the fields and meadows in its path.
 
Fox looked at the locomotive as if its cargo
were death itself.

Ten hours to
Vena.
 
And then what, Jacob?
 
He didn't even know when the wedding was
supposed to take place, but he didn’t want to think anymore.
 
All his thoughts had turned to jade.

He stumbled
down the slope.
 
Valiant shouted
something after him, but Jacob didn't look back.
 
The air filled with the smoke and the noise
of the train.
 
He broke into a run, his
hands gripped metal,
his
feet found a footboard.

Ten
hours.
 
Time to sleep
and to forget everything, except for what the Red Fairy had revealed to him
about her dark sister.

 

43

Dog
And
Wolf

 

Trams, carriages, carts, and riders on horseback.
 
Soldiers, workers, beggars,
and bourgeois.
 
Maid
in starched aprons and Dwarfs being carried through the crowds by their human
servants.
 
Jacob had never seen
the streets of Vena so crowded.
 
It took
him nearly an hour to get from the station to his usual hotel.
 
The rooms had more in common with a
Bluebeard's treasure chamber than with his modest lodgings at Chanute's tavern,
but every now and then Jacob liked to indulge himself with the comfort of a
four-poster bed.
 
He paid one of the
chambermaids to always have a few clothes pressed and ready, which were good
enough even for an audience in the palace.
 
The girl didn't miss a beat when he gave her his bloody garments for
cleaning.
 
She was used to finding such
stains on his clothes.

The bells
of
 
the
city were
chiming midday as Jacob made his way to the palace.
 
On many of the walls he passed, he saw
hastily smeared anti-Goyl graffiti competing with the official photographs of
the wedding couple captioned with pompous descriptions of the upcoming event.
 
ETERNAL PEACE
...
HISTORIC EVENT
...
TWO POWERFUL
EMPIRES
...
OUR PEOPLES
...
 
The same obsession with big
words on both sides of the mirror.

Jacob himself
had once posed for the court photographer.
 
The man was a master of his trade, but the princess could not have been
an easy subject.
 
The beauty that Amalie
of Austry had gained form the Fairy lily was as cold as porcelain, and her face
was as blank in real life as it was on the posters.
 
Her groom, however, photographed like fire
turned to stone.

The crowd in
front of the palace was so dense that Jacob had to struggle to get through to
the wrought iron gates.
 
The imperial
guards pointed their bayonets at him as he approached.
 
Fortunately, Jacob recognized a familiar face
under one of the feathered helmets.
 
Justus Kronsberg, scion of an old family of landed gentry.
 
They owed their wealth to the fact that his
father's meadows were popular with the Elves whose threads and glass adorned so
many dresses at the court.

The Empress
required all her guardsmen to be at least six and a half feet tall, and the
youngest Kronsberg was no exception.
 
Justus was half a head taller than Jacob, not counting his helmet, but
his scraggly mustache couldn't hide the fact that he still had the face of a
boy.

Years ago,
Jacob had saved one of Justus's brothers from the wrath of a Witch whose
daughter he'd rejected, and every year since then their father had sent Jacob
enough elven glass to make new buttons for all his clothes, though the rumor
that the beautiful glass protected against Stilts and Thumblings had sadly not
proved to be true.

"Jacob Reckless!"
 
The youngest Kronsberg spoke with the soft dialect of the countryside
around the capital.
 
"Just yesterday
someone told me you were killed by the Goyl."

"Really?"

Jacob
automatically touched his chest.
 
The
imprint of the moth was still on his skin.

"Where
did they put the groom?" he asked while Kronsberg opened the gate.
 
"In the north
wing?"

The other
guards eyed him warily.

"Where else?"
 
Kronsberg lowered his voice.
 
"Are you
back
from an assignment?
 
I hear the Empress has been offering thirty
gold sovereigns for a wishing sack since King Crookback started bragging about
owning one."

A wishing sack.
 
Chanute had one.
 
Jacob had helped
him steal it from a Stilt.
 
But not even
Chanute was ruthless enough to put such an item into the Empress's hands.
 
You just had to name an enemy, and the sack
made your foe disappear without a trace.
 
Crookback was rumored to have already dealt with hundreds of men this
way.

Jacob looked
up at the balcony from which the Empress would present the bride and groom to
her subjects the next day.

"No, I'm
not here about a wishing sack," he said.
 
"I am delivering a present for the bride.
 
My best to your father and
your brother."

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