Reckless (Free Preview) by Cornelia Funke

‘Dwarf City’).   In a little wood, Fox found a cave that the
local shepherds used as a shelter.   Will
followed his brother into its shade as if he couldn't wait to get out of the
daylight.   There was only a small patch
of human skin left on his right cheek, and with every passing day Jacob found
it harder to look at him.   The eyes were
the worst.   Both were drowning in gold,
and Jacob had to struggle ever harder against the fear that he might have
already lost his race against time.   Sometimes Will would return his glance as if he had already forgotten
who he was, and Jacob thought he could see their shared past fading from his
brother's eyes.
    Clara had not
followed them into the cave.   When Jacob
walked with Fox back to the horses, he saw her standing among the trees, still
wearing men's clothes and looking so lost that for a moment Jacob mistook her
for one of the orphan boys found everywhere in this world, waiting by the
roadside, ready to do any kind of work.   The autumn grass growing between the trees was the same color as her hair,
and he could barely see the other world in her anymore.   The memories of the streets and houses where
they all had grown up, of the lights and the noise, and of the girl she had
been there — all but faded, far away.   The present swiftly became the past, and the future suddenly wore
strange clothes.
    "Will
doesn't have much time left."
    She didn't
phrase it as a question.   She faced
things, even if they scared her.   Jacob
liked that about her.
    "And you
need a doctor," she said, seeing him flinch with pain as he swung himself
onto the mare.   All the flowers, leaves
and roots Fox had shown her had done nothing to check the infection in his
shoulder.   It was already making him
feverish.
    "She's
right," said Fox.   "Go to one
of the Dwarf doctors.   They're supposed
to be even better than the Empress's personal physicians."
    "Yes, if
you're a Dwarf.   Their only ambition with
human patients is to make them pay and then send them to an early grave.   Dwarfs don't think very highly of us,"
he added in response to Clara's puzzled look, "even those who serve the
Empress.   Nothing earns a Dwarf more
prestige than having successfully fleeced a human."
    "But you
still know one you can trust?"
    Fox uttered a
scornful growl.   She brushed around
Clara's legs.   Forging
an alliance.   "Trust?   The Dwarf he's going to see is even less
trustworthy than the others!   Ask him
where he got the scars on his back."
    "That was
a long time ago."
    "And?   Why should
he have changed?"   Anger had
replaced the fear in Fox's voice.
    Clara looked
at Jacob with even more concern.
    "Why
don't you at least take Fox with you?"
    For that, the
vixen brushed around Clara's legs even more affectionately.   She now always sought Clara's company, and
for Clara she had even begun to shift into her human form more often.
    Jacob turned
the horse about.
    "No.   Fox stays here," he said.
    Fox lowered
her head and did not protest.   She knew
just as well as he did that neither Will nor Clara understood this world well
enough to be left alone in it.
    As Jacob
reached the first bend in the road, he looked back and saw her, still sitting
beside Clara, watching him ride away.   His brother hadn't even asked him where he was going.   Will was hiding from the sun.

     

18
    Whispering Stone

     
    Will heard the stone.   He
heard it as clearly as his own breathing.   The sounds came from the cave walls, from the jagged ground beneath his
feet, from the rocky ceiling above... vibrations to which his body responded as
if it were made of them.   He no longer
had a name, only the new skin that cocooned him, cool and protective, and the
new strength in his muscles, and the pain in his eyes when he looked at the
sunlight.
    He ran his
hands over the rock, reading its age from its stony folds.   They whispered to him about what was hidden
beneath the innocuous gray surface:   striped agate,