Fearless by Cornelia Funke Read Free Book Online Page B

paradise.
    ‘What is in that tomb?’ Fox looked at Jacob.
    Valiant rubbed his napkin over his wine-soaked moustache. ‘The deadliest crossbow ever built.’ His tongue was getting heavier by the minute. Fox was having trouble understanding his slurred words. ‘One bolt into the chest of a general reduces his entire army to a pile of corpses. Not bad . . . not even the Goyl have anything like it.’
    Fox gave Jacob a puzzled look. What was this about? Was he going to squander what time he had left hunting for treasure?
    ‘My share’s Fifty per cent,’ said Valiant. ‘No – Sixty. Or you can forget about it.’
    ‘I’ll give you Sixty-five,’ Jacob replied. ‘If we leave tomorrow morning.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    TOGETHER
    E lven dust and red wine. When Jacob took Fox to her room, Valiant was sitting in his oversize chair, his feet on his oversize table in his ridiculously oversize and crumbling castle, and he was talking to the paintings on the walls. They were all chasing their childhood dreams.
    Fox’s shoulder was aching, though she tried to hide it. Jacob found a sleepy servant down in the kitchen who heated a bowl of water for him. A Man-Swan’s beak was not the cleanest of weapons, and so he also dressed the wound with some of the salve Alma had mixed for him.
    Bites, knife wounds, burnt fingers . . . like him, Fox had probably lost count of how often they’d patched each other up over the years. To Jacob, her body was as familiar as his own, but as he touched her now he caught himself feeling self-conscious. She belonged to him like his own shadow. Younger sister, best friend. Jacob loved her so much that the other kind of love seemed like something he had to protect her from: the hungry game that was best ended before it got too serious. He wished he’d observed that rule himself with the Fairy.
    Fox didn’t say a word while he put a fresh bandage on her shoulder. Her silence used to be an expression of the wordless familiarity that connected them. But not this time. Jacob opened the window and poured the bloody water into the night. A few snowflakes drifted in.
    Fox stepped to his side and caught them with her hand.
    ‘What’s your plan? Are you going to trade the Dark Fairy the crossbow for your life?’ She leant out the window and inhaled the cold air as though it might drive away her fear.
    ‘A few hundred thousand dead, for my own skin? Since when do you think so little of me?’
    She looked at him. ‘You would have done it for your brother. For him you would have done anything. Why not for yourself?’
    Yes, why not, Jacob? Because he’d grown up with the certainty that Will’s life was more precious than his own? Did it matter?
    ‘I’m not planning to trade or sell the crossbow,’ he said. ‘The Witch Slayer used it three times. The first bolt killed an Albian general who took Fifty thousand men with him to his death. The second killed the commanding general of Lotharaine and Seventy thousand soldiers. A few weeks later, Guismond had himself crowned King of both kingdoms.’
    Fox held out her hand into the falling snow.
    ‘I think I know the rest. I’d forgotten that story. It always frightened me.’ The flakes planted crystal flowers on her skin. ‘One day’ – she spoke the words into the night as though snatching them from the darkness – ‘Guismond’s younger son was dying. Gahrumet. I think that was his name. A Witch had poisoned him to take revenge on his father for killing hundreds of her sisters. His son was in such terrible pain that Guismond couldn’t bear it any more. He shot a bolt from the crossbow into his son’s heart, but Gahrumet didn’t die; he was healed. They say he hated his father later on, but he lived for many years.’ She closed the window and turned around. ‘It’s nothing but a fairy tale, Jacob.’
    ‘And? Everything in this world sounds like a fairy tale. I’m dying for having uttered the name of a Fairy!’ He stepped towards her and brushed