Read Online Reckless (Free Preview) by Cornelia Funke - Free Book Online

had lost a war.   For the first time.   And every night she dreamed she was drowning in bloody water, which
invariably turned into pale red stoneskin of her foe.
    For the past
half hour, her ministers and generals had been explaining to her why she had
lost.   They were all in her audience
chamber, decorated with the medals she'd given them, and they tried to put the
blame on her.   "The Goyl rifles are
better."   "They have faster
trains."   But she knew this war was
being won by the King with the carnelian skin because he had a better grasp of
strategy than all of them together.   And because he had a mistress who, for the first time in more than
three hundred years, had but the magic of the Fairies in the service of a King.
    A carriage
drew up to the gate, and three Goyl climbed out.   They acted so civilized.   They weren't even in uniform.   How she would have loved to order her guards
to drag them through the courtyard and club them to death, as her grandfather
would have done.   But these were
different times.   Now it was the Goyl who
did the clubbing.   They would sit down
with her counselors, sip tea from silver cups, and negotiate terms of
surrender.   The guards opened the gate,
and the Empress turned her back to the window as the Goyl crossed the
courtyard.
    They were
still talking, all her useless, medaled generals, while her ancestors stared
down at her from the golden, silk-draped walls.   Right next to the door was a portrait of her father, gaunt and upright,
like a stork, continuously at war with his royal brother from Lotharaine, just
as she had been fighting his son, Crookback, for years.   Next to him was her grandfather, who like the
Goyl King, had once had an affair with a Fairy.   His yearning for her had finally driven him to drown himself in the
royal lily pond.   He'd had himself
portrayed on a Unicorn, for which his favorite horse was the model, with a
narwhal horn attached to its head.   It
looked ludicrous, and the Empress had always preferred the painting next to
his.   That one showed
her great-grandfather with his elder brother, who had been disinherited because
he had taken his alchemical experiments too seriously.   Her father had always been outraged by that
painting because the painter had caught his great-uncle's blind eyes so
realistically.   As a child, she would
push a chair under the picture, climbing up to get a closer look at the scars
around those empty eyes.   He'd supposedly
been blinded by an experiment in which he had tried to turn his own heart into
gold, and yet of all her ancestors, he was the only one who was smiling — which
had always made her think that his experiment must have been successful and
that he indeed had a golden heart beating in his chest.
    Men.   All of them.   Crazy or
sane, but always   men .   For centuries only men had ascended to the
throne of Austry — and that had changed only because her father had sired four
daughters but not a single son.
    She, too, had
no son, just a daughter.   But she had
never intended to turn her into a bargaining chip, as her father had done with
her younger sisters.   One for King
Crookback, in his gloomy castle in Lotharaine; one for her cousin
Albion
, the obsessive huntsman; and the youngest bartered
away to some eastern potentate who had already buried two wives.
    No.   She had wanted to put her daughter on the
throne, to see her portrait on that wall, framed in gold, between all those
men.   Amalie of Austry, daughter of
Therese, who had once dreamed of being called The Great.   But there was no other way, or they would
both drown in that bloody water — she, her daughter, her people, her throne,
this city, and the whole country, together with those idiots who were still
holding forth about why they hadn't been able to win the war for her.   Therese's father would have had them all
executed.   But then what?   The next lot wouldn't be any better, and
their blood would not bring back