Reckless (Free Preview) Read Online Free

mirror, and the monument on the square
showed a King on horseback who had hunted Giants in the surrounding hills.   He was an ancestor of the reigning Empress,
Therese of Austry, whose family had hunted not only Giants but also Dragons so
successfully that they were considered extinct within her realm.   The paperboy who was
standing next to the statue, shouting the news into the gathering dusk, had
definitely never seen more than the footprint of a Giant or the scorch marks of
Dragon fire on the town walls.
    DECISIVE
BATTLE
. TERRIBLE LOSSES . GENERAL AMONG
THE FALLEN . SECRET NEGOTIATIONS.
    This world was at war, and it was not being won by humans.   Four days had passed since he and Will had run
into one of their patrols, but Jacob could still see them come out of the
forest:   three soldiers and an officer,
their stone faces wet from the rain.   Golden eyes.   Black
claws that tore into his brother’s throat — Goyl.
    “Look after your brother, Jacob.”
    He put three copper coins into the boy’s grubby hand.   The Heinzel sitting on the boy’s shoulder eyed
them suspiciously.   Many Heinzel chose
human companions who fed and clothed them — though that did
little to improve their crabby dispositions.
    “How far are the Goyl?”   Jacob took a newspaper.
    “Less than five miles from here.”   The boy pointed southeast.   “With the wind right, we could hear their
cannons.   But it’s been quiet since
yesterday.”   He sounded almost
disappointed.   At his age, even war
sounded like an adventure.
    The imperial soldiers filing out of the tavern next to the
church probably knew better.   THE OGRE.   Jacob had
been witness to the events that had given the tavern its name and had cost its
owner his right arm.   Albert Chanute was
standing behind the counter, wearing a grim expression, as Jacob entered the
dingy taproom.   Chanute was such a gross
hulk of a man that people said he had Troll blood running through his veins,
not a compliment in the Mirrorworld.   But
until the Ogre had chopped off his arm, Albert Chanute had been the best
treasure hunter in all of Austry, and for many years Jacob had been his
apprentice.   Chanute had shown him
everything he had needed to gather fame and fortune behind the mirror, and it
had been Jacob who had prevented the Ogre from also hacking off Chanute’s head.
    Mementos of his glory days covered the walls of Chanute’s
taproom:   the head of a Brown Wolf, the
oven door from a gingerbread house, a cudgel-in-the-sack that jumped off the
wall whenever a guest misbehaved, and, right above the bar and hanging from the
chains with which he used to bind his victims, an arm of the Ogre who had ended
Chanute’s treasure-hunting days.   The
bluish skin still shimmered like a lizard’s hide.
    “Look who’s here! ” Chanute said, his
grouchy mouth actually stretching into a smile.   “I thought you were in Lotharaine, looking for
an hourglass.”
    Chanute had been a legendary treasure hunter, but Jacob had
meanwhile gained an equally famous reputation in that line of work, and the
three men sitting at one of the stained tables curiously lifted their heads.
    “Get rid of them! ” Jacob whispered
across the counter.   “I have to talk to
you.”
    Then he went up to the room that had for years now been the
only place in either this world or the other that he could call home.
    A wishing table, a glass slipper, the golden ball of a
princess — Jacob had found many things in this world, and he had sold
them for a lot of money to noblemen and rich merchants.   But it was the chest behind the door of his
simple room that held the treasures Jacob had kept for himself.   These were the tools of his trade, though he
had never thought they’d one day have to help him save his own brother.
    The first item he took out of the chest was a handkerchief
made of simple linen, but when it was rubbed between two fingers, it reliably
produced one or two gold sovereigns.