After Ursula left, Jutta carried Albrecht to her worktable. She swept everything off it: tools, bits of metal, weapons half-made. The smithy had no door and was open to the elements. Stinging air blew in, and Albrecht’s face throbbed.

“Am I going to die?” he asked. The words came out garbled, wet.

“Not if I can help it,” Jutta said. “But it’s no small amount of blood.”

He knew this. The shirt he wore stuck to his shoulders and chest.

There, in the smithy, standing in a puddle of Albrecht’s blood, Jutta repaired his ribboned face. She’d always tended his wounds, but his boyhood injuries had been nothing like these. By the time she’d stitched his flesh, he had little left in the way of a nose and lips.

He wanted to ask how he looked, but he couldn’t. It would take a while before he could speak again. And he was glad, at first, not to have his mirror anymore. He was glad he didn’t have to see what his sister had done to him.

In the weeks that followed, his skin itched and burned as it rewove itself. In his pain, he sketched himself a new face and he planned his revenge. He knew how he looked well enough to re-create his nose. His lips. From his experience building articulated masks, he designed a lightweight one that would move with his jaw as he spoke. He instructed Jutta to make it with the last of his mother’s gold, mixed with steel so that it would be strong and immune to the effects of blood. There would be more of that for sure.

After he finished designing his mask, he sketched more plans. He closed his mind to everything but his metal men. The pair he’d put at the entrance to the castle certainly hadn’t kept his sister away. He needed a were. He needed to cut one open. To see if they contained the key. He considered dissecting Jutta, but she was more useful to him alive than dead.

If he could master these metal men, if he could create life that would not die, then he would be the most powerful king who’d ever lived. He would dispense with the need for women to give birth to subjects and soldiers. He could make his own. Use them to expand his kingdom. Metal men who would never be hungry. Never question him. Never turn against him. Never die. They would be unstoppable.

His fevered thoughts kept him from sleeping. They replaced his appetite. They warmed him, drove him, consumed him. They were not thoughts he wished to share, even with Jutta. But he knew they were right. Revolutionary, even. The future of man was metal. And he would be the one to bring it about. It would not be easy. But nothing worth doing was.

The more he worked on his metal men, the more he understood the nature of the challenge before him. He would not only have to get their limbs moving, he’d have to keep them moving. And he’d have to design ways for them to move in the formations that soldiering required. It was overwhelming. He wanted to quit, but that would mean that Ursula had won. That his father, who’d always doubted him, had won.

Hans’s idea about the wings kept returning to Albrecht. Wings could keep the soldiers wound. But perhaps Albrecht’s approach had been wrong. Perhaps he’d been so accustomed to trying to make metal come alive that he’d overlooked a crucial first step. One that in retrospect seemed obvious.

Albrecht had already given himself a metal face. He’d given himself a metal finger. What was stopping him from giving himself metal skin everywhere? What was stopping him from giving himself wings?

He could turn himself into a flying soldier, the first flying soldier. He could do the same for other men in his kingdom. No man could shoot one down with an arrow. Not even a bear could pluck one from the sky. Albrecht would have what he’d always wanted. He would be a man. But he would have a second aspect. He would be everything the frissers were but better, because he could not be killed and because he’d made it himself, with the force of his hands and his mind. He’d be the golden gryphon.

Albrecht had made wings before, but never with this ferocity. As his face slowly healed, he built, he thought, he studied, shooting bird after bird with his smallest arrows so he could understand how their wings worked. How they were attached. Unfolded. Moved. Glided on updrafts.

He worked wrist deep in blood, his remaining fingers tracing every muscle and tendon. He split their tiny bones to understand how they could be so light. Days darkened into nights and Albrecht did nothing but the work, dreaming of the mysteries of the inner workings of birds, his fevered sleep gauzed in shades of red and white and pink.

He sketched plans for Jutta, who pounded out samples that he hung from wood beams spanning the room. Before long, his workshop was full of well-oiled wings, beating the air with a steady tick-tick-tick.

“My king,” Jutta said one day. “Albrecht. Your people are hungry. The harvest was poor.”

“Of course it was,” he snapped. “The crops were burned.”

Her voice was low. “They need to be fed. You need to be fed.”

“There are things more important than food.”

And then he dismissed her. He couldn’t do everything for his subjects, so he was focusing on the most important thing. He heard whispers that he’d gone mad, but they didn’t understand. It was not madness. It was the work of becoming a god.

Weeks passed and he did not succeed. He’d tried again and again with the rats. He’d failed. The wings always ripped off. Again, he thought of using frissers for his experiments. The rats were so small and the frissers so much bigger. But it wasn’t just that. The rats had also been full grown. Perhaps a mature body was less adaptable by its very nature. It could not accept wings. A frisser child could.

Eventually his face healed enough to wear his golden mask. From that moment, he never took it off in the company of others excepting Jutta. He couldn’t stand the staring of his servants, the maids especially. They’d once looked on him with hunger. Now he saw pity, disgust.

He realized that life was better with the mask on. It wasn’t just that the mask hid his ruined face. When he wore it, people could not read his expressions. If he’d known how powerful that would make him feel … how invincible … he would have worn one all the time. He regretted learning this so late.

His face was a humiliation. He constructed a story about it, trusting Jutta to spread it by whispers: that Greta had cursed him, had given him a golden touch as a wedding gift, that he touched his face inadvertently and turned it to gold as well, and that the only way he’d managed not to turn everything else on him into gold was by killing her on their wedding night.

It didn’t matter that people had seen him without the golden face after the wedding. By the time the tale had been repeated often enough, it had become true.

And it had always been true at its core. Greta had been a curse, and she was responsible for the fact of his lost face. All in all, he felt lucky. He had his ears and eyes. This meant he could still hunt. He also had his tongue and teeth, which meant he could still rule. Ursula might have had the claws, but it had been Greta who’d taken his beauty; he had taken everything else from her. In the end, he’d won. And that had always been all that ever mattered, all that ever would matter.

And he would win the ultimate battle against his sister once he had the little frissers to experiment on.

But even that was more complicated than he wished. He’d sent a group of soldiers into the woods to search for Greta’s body. He knew that’s where it had been taken; the trail of blood wasn’t exactly subtle. The soldiers hadn’t returned.

He assumed Ursula had killed them, but he could not be certain because their bodies had not been found, only their gear, scattered at the edge of the woods. They hadn’t deserted. Deserters would never leave behind their weapons, boots, and armor. But why wouldn’t Ursula have taken it? She must not have known it was there.

This meant someone else—something else—might have killed his men.

Since he was a boy with a broken leg, he’d told tales about a beast in the woods. He’d told them so often he believed them. Had his story become truth after all? Had he manifested a beast? The trees had changed since his wedding night. They were red now, a sickening color. And their music had changed too. It was louder. Angrier.

The beast had so far spared Ursula and her people. He’d seen the smoke rising from their camp. Perhaps it had a soft spot for animals. A bond from beast to beast.

“Jutta!” he said. “I need you!”

She came.

He explained his plans with respect to the werechildren. He disclosed what had happened to the group of soldiers, along with his theory.

“The woods have different rules for weres. You can go in safely, where real human beings can’t. You are the only one who can bring me those children.”

Something flickered across her face. “But … children?”

He waved away her concern. “Children who will turn into adults, who are and always will be the enemy of the kingdom,” he said. “It’s best to deal with them when they’re small. Think of how much easier it is to uproot a sapling than a mature tree.”

She looked out the window.

“Don’t tell me you’ve lost your nerve,” he said. “That you think children will get the best of you.”

“It’s not that at all.”

He didn’t like the edge to her voice. He removed his mask. “I’ve lost my face. I’ve lost my glory. I’ve lost my future. I want theirs in return.”

Jutta looked away from his face and into the ravenous forge, and from her expression, he could tell that she’d do as he commanded. “Do not engage with my sister or any of the other grown frissers. Just the children. Put a cage in a wagon and leave it at the edge of the woods. Capture them. Bring them to me.”

“It will be done,” she said.

It will be done. There was no enthusiasm in her tone. He wanted her to feel what he felt.

“Imagine the soldiers we could build, Jutta. With the weres’ capacity for transformation, enhanced by weaponry of my design and your manufacture. There is nothing we could not defend ourselves against. No force in the world could defeat us.”

“How many children do you need?” Jutta asked.

“As many as you can catch.”

She left, and Albrecht turned to a task he’d been putting off: the repair of his mirror. The frame would no longer serve. This was a pity given that Jutta had crafted it for him with his mother’s gold. But he’d kept the shattered bits. Using a pot of glue he’d made from the boiled hides and bones of dead animals, he attached the pieces one by one to the wall. The smell was foul, but the substance was exactly right. Something rendered from a broken body in order to render something that had been broken whole once more.

It was a fine way to pass the time.

Just as he’d found a rhythm to hunting—inhale, point, shoot, drop—he slipped into a rhythm with each shard glued to the wall. Sort. Find. Place. Attach.

He could have put the pieces on the wall any which way. What did it matter if the edges matched? But he liked to be precise. He liked it when all the pieces came together. He’d done this with the kingdom. Put it back together. Restored its greatness. And now he would do it for his mirror, which had always been a faithful companion, reminding him that he was beautiful to look at. Strong. Worthy of his power and privilege. The mirror would not show him the face he’d grown up seeing, it was true. But perhaps what he saw in it would not displease him so very much.

Slowly the glass returned to its original shape. It was arduous, and his face grew warm behind his mask. But at last Albrecht stood before it. This was the moment he’d been waiting for, and he could feel his body recognize it. His blood felt thin and swift, and his skin prickled with anticipation. He removed his mask, feeling relief at the cool air on his skin.

He stepped closer. The wall behind the mirror hadn’t been perfectly smooth, and as a result, the pieces of glass looked mottled, like the skin of a snake, with some bits catching more light than others.

He looked grotesque.

As broken as the mirror on the wall. He traced his scars with his golden finger. He looked at himself until his scars were no longer surprising to him, no longer alarming. They were simply the new landscape of his face. It might not yet be familiar territory, but neither did it seem strange anymore. This was the cost of power, a price he was willing to pay for his people. He did not hate his face.

He felt a strange fondness for his mirror, telling him the truth like this. They were even more like brothers now than they’d ever been. Both shattered. Both put back together. If they’d been distorted by circumstance, well, it only made them more fearsome to those who did not understand.

After he’d had his fill of his reflection, he put the mask back on and pulled the tapestry in front of the glass. He would look at himself again, but he did not wish to be caught by surprise.