Jacob knew too much about gingerbread houses to sleep under the sugar-icing roof. He took the tin plate from his saddlebag and sat down with it in front of the well, polishing it until it filled with bread and cheese. It wasn’t a five-course dinner, like the one provided by the Wishing Table he had found for Therese of Austry, but at least the plate fit into a saddlebag.
The red moon splashed rust into the night, and dawn was still hours away, but Jacob didn’t dare to go and find out whether the jade in Will’s skin had vanished. The vixen was licking her fur. The Tailor had kicked her, and she had several cuts on her body, but she would be fine. Human skin was so much more fragile than fur—or Goyl skin.
“You should try to sleep,” she said.
“I can’t sleep.”
His shoulder ached, and he imagined the Witch’s black magic battling the Dark Fairy’s spell.
“What are you going to do if the berries do work? Take them back?”
Fox tried hard to sound unconcerned, but Jacob heard the unspoken question behind her words. Will you go with them? No matter how often he told her that he considered this world his true home, she still feared that one day he would climb up the tower to never return.
“First of all: no, I won’t go with them,” he said. “But yes: I’ll bring them back to the ruin. And then, hopefully… happily ever after.”
It is not easy to read a vixen’s face, but Jacob knew her well enough to feel her relief.
“So once they’re gone…” She nestled close to his side when he shuddered in the cold night air, “what about us? Winter’s coming. We could head south, to Granady or Lombardia, and look for the Hourglass.”
The Hourglass that stops time. Just a few weeks back, it had been all Jacob could think about. The Talking Mirror. The Glass Slipper. The Spinning Wheel that spun gold. There was always something to hunt for in this world. The fact that he did it so successfully made him forget most of the time that he still hadn’t found any trace of his father.
He took a piece of bread from the plate and offered it to the vixen. “When did you last shift?”
She backed away.
“Fox!”
She gave a sharp bark of disapproval, but then her shadow, cast by the moonlight, began to change its shape.
Fox. The girl rising to her feet just a few steps away from him had hair as red as the pelt she so much preferred to her human skin. It fell down her back as though she was still wearing her fur. Even the russet dress she wore over her freckled skin shimmered in the moonlight as if it had been woven from the silky hair of the vixen.
She had changed in these past months, nearly as suddenly as a fox cub becomes a vixen. But Jacob still saw the ten-year-old girl he had found one night crying at the bottom of the tower because he had stayed much longer in that other world than he had promised. The vixen had been following him for nearly a year by then without ever showing Jacob her human form, which he often reminded her she would one day lose if she kept wearing her fur too long. Although he knew she would always choose the fur should anything force her to decide. She had been seven years old when she had saved a vixen’s cubs from the sticks of her elder brothers. The next day she had found the furry dress on her bed. It had given Fox the body she had come to regard as her true self, and her greatest fear was that some day someone might steal the dress and take the fur away from her.
Jacob leaned back against the well. The berries will work, Jacob. But the night seemed endless and finally he fell asleep, next to the girl who did not want the skin that his brother had to fight for. His sleep was troubled. Even his dreams were made from stone. Chanute, the paperboy on the square in Schwanstein, his mother, his father… they all froze into statues standing among the trees next to the dead Tailor.
“Jacob! Wake up!”
The vixen was standing beside him as if he had dreamed her human form as well. The first light of dawn was seeping through the pine trees and his shoulder ached so much that he barely managed to get to his feet. Everything will be fine, Jacob. Chanute knows this world like no one else. Remember how he exorcised the Gold-Raven’s spell from you? You were already half-dead.
His heart beat faster nevertheless with every step he took toward the gingerbread house.
The sweet smell inside nearly choked him. It was probably the reason that Will and Clara were still fast asleep. She had her arms wrapped around Will, whose face was so peaceful that it was as if he were sleeping in the bed of a prince, not a child-eater. But his left cheek was speckled with jade as if it had spilled onto his skin, and the nails on his left hand were nearly as black as the claws that had sown the Petrified Flesh into his neck.
How loud a heart can beat.
The berries will work.
Jacob was still staring at the jade, when Will finally stirred. Jacob’s eyes told him everything. Will put his hand to his neck and traced the stone up to his cheek.
Think, Jacob. But his mind drowned in the fear that was flooding his brother’s face.
They let Clara sleep. Will followed Jacob outside like a sleepwalker caught in a nightmare.
Fox backed away from him. The look she gave Jacob said only one thing.
Lost.
And that was how Will stood there. Lost. He touched his face, and for the first time Jacob could not find the trust his brother had always granted him so freely. Instead, he believed he saw all the blame he put on himself. All the If only you’d been more careful, Jacob… If you only hadn’t taken him so far east… If only…
Will walked to the window behind the oven, and stared at the image the dark panes threw back at him. Above him the sugared roof was lined with soot-blackened cobwebs. Jacob couldn’t take his eyes off them. They reminded him of other webs, just as dark, spun to catch the night.
What an idiot he was. What was he doing at a Witch’s house? This was the curse of a Fairy. A Fairy!
Fox was watching him.
“No!” she barked. “Forget it!”
Sometimes she knew what he was thinking even before he himself could give voice to his thoughts.
“She will definitely be able to help him. After all, she is her sister.”
“You can’t go back to her! Ever.”
Will turned around. “Go back to whom?”
Jacob didn’t answer. He reached for the medallion beneath his shirt. His fingers still remembered picking the petal that he kept inside it. Just as his heart remembered the one from whom the leaf protected him.
“Go and wake Clara,” he said to Will. “We’re leaving.”
It was a long way—four days, maybe more—and they had to be faster than the jade.
Fox was still looking at him.
No, Jacob! No! Her eyes pleaded with him.
Of course she remembered it all as well as he did, if not better.
Must have been terrible injuries. Oh, yes. He had almost died.
But this was the only way, if he wanted to save his brother.