Reckless (Free Preview) by Cornelia Funke Read Free Book Online Page A

pensively.
    "Thank
you," she said.   "For whatever
you did out there.   I'm so glad you came
back."

     

10
    Fur And Skin

     
    Jacob knew too
much about gingerbread houses to be able to find any 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 the Empress, but at least the plate could fit into a
saddlebag.
    The red moon
splashed rust into the night, and dawn was still hours away, but Jacob didn't
dare go see whether the stone in Will's skin had vanished.   Fox sat down next to him and licked her
fur.   The Tailor had kicked her, and she
had several cuts on her body, but she was all right.   Human skin was so much more fragile than fur —
or Goyl skin.
    "You
should try to sleep," she said.
    "I can't
sleep."
    Jacob's shoulder
ached, and he imagined he could feel 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.   No matter how often he told Fox
how much he liked her world, she never lost the fear that one day he would
climb up the tower and never return.
    "Of
course," he said.   "And they'll
live happily ever after."
    "What
about us?"   Fox snuggled against him
as he shuddered in the cold night air.   "Winter's coming.   We could
go south, to Granady or Lombardia, and look for the hourglass."
    The hourglass that stopped 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 he could hunt for
in this world.   And most of the time it
helped him forget that he had never been able to find the one thing he really
wanted.
    Jacob took a
piece of bread from the plate and offered it to Fox.   "When did you last shift?" he asked
as she greedily snapped at it.
    She tried to
scamper away, but he grabbed her fur.   "Fox!"
    She tried to
bite his hand, but then the fox-shaped shadow, cast by the moonlight of the
wall of the well, began to stretch, and Jacob felt himself being pushed away by
the strong hands of a girl kneeling next to him.
    Her hair was
as red as the pelt she so much preferred to her human skin.   It fell down her back so long and thick that
it looked almost as though she were still wearing her fur.   Even the russet dress that covered her
freckled skin glistened in the moonlight like the coat of a fox.   Its fabric seemed to have been woven from the
same silky hair.
    She had grown
up 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 the world he had come from than he had promised.   She had been following Jacob for nearly a
year by then, without ever showing him her human form.   He kept reminding her that she would one day
lose her human form if she kept wearing her fur too long, even though he knew
that, should Fox ever be forced to decide, she would always choose the
fur.   At the age of seven she had saved a
wounded vixen from her two elder brothers and their sticks, and the next day
she had found the furry dress on her bed   It had given her the body she had come
to regard as her true self, and Fox's greatest fear was that someday someone
might steal the dress and take the fur away from her.
    Jacob leaned
back against the well.   It will be all right, Jacob .   But the night seemed endless.   He felt Fox lean her head against his
shoulder, and finally he fell asleep, next to the girl who did not want the
skin that his brother had to fight for.   He slept fitfully and even his dreams turned into stone.   Chanute, the paperboy