1
Together
Fox felt Jacob’s breath on her neck, warm and familiar. He
was sleeping so soundly that he didn’t wake up when she
gently eased out of his embrace. Whatever he was encountering
in his dreams made him smile, and Fox ran her fingers
over his lips as if she could read what he was dreaming. The
two moons that shone on her world dappled his forehead
with rusty red and pale silver, and birds whose names she
didn’t know cried outside the inn.
Doryeong… Her tongue could barely pronounce the
name of the port city where they had arrived the day before.
They had given up. Maybe that was why Jacob was sleeping
so deeply. After all the months in which they had lost
his brother’s trail and picked it up again countless times. A
time or two, they had almost caught up with Will. But by
now they had been searching in vain for weeks for any sign
of him, and yesterday, as the sun had set over a strange sea,
they had finally decided to call it off. Even Jacob believed
that his brother did not want to be found after all that had
happened, and that it was time to go their separate ways.
So why could she still not sleep? Was it because she wasn’t
used to being so blissfully happy?
Fox pulled the quilt over Jacob’s shoulder. Their own
path. Finally. A sprig of white blossoms filled the room
they were sleeping in with lush, sweet fragrance. Two more
travelers were sleeping on the mats the landlady had wordlessly
rolled out for them. The ferry to Aotearoa ran out of
Doryeong. An old friend of Jacob’s, Robert Dunbar, kept
sending enthusiastic telegrams from there, which told of
three-eyed lizards, of enchanted whale bones, and of wild
kings who had the fern forests of their homeland tattooed
on their skin.
Their own path. Fox kissed the moonlight off Jacob’s face
and carefully slipped out from under the quilt that warmed
them both. The night lured the vixen outside. Maybe if she
wore the fur, all this human happiness wouldn’t make her
heart overflow so much.
She stole past the two stone dragons that guarded the
entrance to the modest inn, and under trees that swayed their
branches in the breeze from the nearby sea, she changed. The
inn stood on an unpaved road, and the flat wooden houses
that lined it wore their roofs like wooden cowls. Doryeong
was nothing like the seaside village where Fox had grown
up. Even the fishing boats on the dark waves that lined the
harbor just a few houses away seemed to come from a fairy
tale she had never heard of before.
Copyright © 2021 by Cornelia Funke. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
