Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (23 page)

The royal couple ascended to the altar, the queen taking her child from Father Brassbound’s hands. He glanced up at the open sky, wondering for a moment whether God might reach down with lightning or some other sign of divine disfavor at the deception he had assisted the queen in maintaining regarding the gestation and birth of the princess.

The heavens remained stubbornly placid, while the assembled multitudes in the Great Hall began to cheer.

Then came the presentation of the gifts.

I
t was a ceremony of some hours, even though only those of the highest station were permitted to bring forth their gifts personally. Many more people had been asked to leave their offerings on tables in the courtyard, where the Mistress of Protocol and her aides had bustled about making notes of who, what, and when for the inevitable flood of royal thank-you missives that would follow in response over the weeks to come. Still, members of the court, heads of the guilds, senior leaders of Talos City, foreign dignitaries—there were dozens upon dozens of persons whose rank required they make their presentations in the hall.

And the gifts were wondrous. Cunning little clockwork toys from the workshops of Venice and Trondheim and even distant Kwangchow. An entire steam railroad, with little cars the princess could ride in, or, when a bit older, upon, large enough to fill one of the palace’s courtyards. Bolt upon bolt of the finest Eastern silks. A trunk filled with ornate silver canisters holding spices from all the warm islands of the southern sun. An ocelot with a jeweled harness that had been trained to fetch and carry. Vases and statues and paintings enough to fill a summer house.

The stream of presents was a panoply of wealth and beauty and exotic curiosities that would amuse and delight Zellandyne
through much of her childhood. Father Brassbound wondered how much of the glittering pile a child would trade for a stick horse or a sweet little poppet, but he supposed the king and queen were well positioned to provide a stable full of stick horses and a houseful of poppets should the little princess so desire. These gifts, he knew, were more about the giver. Many contained messages to the royal court in that strange sort of encoding that the wealthy and the powerful used between and among themselves.

The long line of gift bearers eventually shrank to a little cluster of well-dressed children of various ages. Father Brassbound realized these must be the coven from the Court of Seasons.

“I am Tertia,” announced one of the oldest girls in the group. She was almost plump, with long chestnut hair and piercing gray eyes. Not beautiful, perhaps, but comely and with a certain sly charm about her. “We come to offer our kindest regards and blessings to the princess Zellandyne, as well as the goodwill of our parents, the King of Winter and the Queen of Summer.”

“Our most humble thanks, Cousin,” said Queen Perrault in a loud, clear voice. The priest could hear her anxiety to have done with this. These children made even her nervous. He couldn’t see King Grimm’s face from where he was standing, but he figured on the king smiling in that fixed fashion he assumed whenever matters at court diverged from the agenda in some unaccountable fashion.

“To display our regards and blessings,” Tertia continued, “we offer the young princess three gifts.”

One of her siblings, an older boy, spoke up. “She will always have friends.”

The youngest girl added, in a slight lisp, “Music will follow her wherever she goes.”

A middle girl offered the last gift. “Her heart’s choices will not trouble her unduly.”

“I thank you,” the queen began, but she was interrupted by a shattering of one of the large stained-glass windows lining the Great Hall. Color sprayed everywhere in deadly splinters, as if a rainbow had been murdered. A girl rode in on an iron-winged
bird that spewed steam like a laundry tub. She was smaller than any of the coven before the altar.

People screamed, stumbling away from the broken window and the hovering witch—for surely that’s what she was.

“I am Triskaidecalia,” the girl announced in a firm, piercing voice as her bird alit atop a statue of King Ferd the Munificent. “You did not invite me with my siblings. Why didn’t I get an invitation?”

Queen Perrault tried to answer. “We did not know….”

Triskaidecalia glared at her. “Just because I’m young doesn’t mean I don’t count.”

“Be welcome here now,” the queen said in a conciliatory tone, opening one hand wide even as the other cradled little Zellandyne.

The fae girl’s face clouded. “It’s too late,” she called. “You can’t welcome me now. And my siblings gave their gifts, didn’t they?”

“Sister,” another of the fae began, but Triskaidecalia was working herself up to a full tantrum and ignored the entreaty. “I will be
remembered
.” She waved her hands in a tight circle, the air growing hot and close as she did so. “Your Princess Zellandyne will never know love. Her first love’s kiss will be her last breath!”

The crowd of well-wishers moaned, the wounded and the hale alike, at such a curse.

One of the fae siblings stepped forward. “Begone, Trisk,” she shouted, “or you will be whipped round the court when we are returned!”

“Never,” shouted the child, before she flew out the shattered window.

The girl who’d stepped forward turned to the king and queen. “I am Octavia, and Triskaidecalia has long been my charge. She is our thirteenth, and in truth you did not name her on your invitation. I cannot undo her curse, for her power is her own, but I can change it thusly—when Zellandyne knows love’s first kiss, she will only sleep until that first lover has passed himself into oblivion. She will be denied only love, not life.”

“You call this a blessing?” roared King Grimm, who seemed to almost have kept up with events.

“It is what I can do for her,” Octavia said sadly.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE III

Otho, Lord Chamberlain of Talos

Oh, the childhood of this princess. Such a mess we had, after the christening. The court in a panic over that awful girl’s curse, then King Grimm summoning mages and artificers and soothsayers from every corner of the civilized world to try to lift the spell.

The queen tried to calm him, to stop him from his rising panic, but the king wanted, if not a son, a son-in-law. He saw the girl Trisk’s curse as meaning he could never have even that small consolation.

The story went round the world, of course. Too many had been present at the event to keep the curse a secret. Telegraph wires carried it, and family gossip, and the intelligences of foreign powers. People can’t get enough of love and death. A doomed romance is just the topic over mulled wine and roast capon.

Queen Perrault was more practical. She had all books about romance removed from the palace libraries, from the simplest happily-ever-after fairy tales to all those awful true-love books the maids so love to giggle over on their evenings off. This child was going to be raised only on notions of chivalry and service, of quest and sacrifice.

I and many others despaired that they would make of Zellandyne a warrior-princess or some such thing, a modern-day Maid of Orleans.

More practically, King Grimm caused that all boys between the ages of six and thirty be banned from the palace, with an exception only for the Royal Guard, who were under military discipline anyway. Even they were eventually replaced by automata.
This certainly inflected the makeup of the court, and considerably advanced the cause of women’s rights in the Kingdom of Talos, as of necessity many jobs formerly held by young men were now occupied by young women of ambition and perspicacity.

So Princess Zellandyne grew, while those of us close to the king and queen watched their years-long, hopeless quest to find a way out of the curse of the thirteenth witch.

Father Brassbound prayed so much we feared for a time he would retreat to some anchorite’s pole in the wilderness. Eventually he buffed his face and polished his eyes and rejoined us, but he always seemed haunted by guilt at his inability to successfully petition God to lift the curse.

Dr. Scholes consulted ancient manuscripts and corresponded with learned experts from Cambridge to Peiping, but his studies availed little. He, too, seemed ever dogged by guilt at his failure to resolve the problem through the sciences. Both of them, in fact, had the airs of one being punished for some transgression.

Sometimes, I swear, the queen appeared guiltiest of all, and retreated to her laboratories in the castle basements as if in search of a solution amid the alembics and lightnings of that place.

For my own part, it fell to me to deal with the endless stream of cranks and dreamers and confidence tricksters who came to the palace with ever-more elaborate plans for lifting or evading the curse. Many of them were genuine but misguided, too foolish or caught up in their own fancies to perceive that they had failed before they had begun. By way of solutions, various theories contemplated the love of old men; sheer, simple murder; even the forbidden love of women for one another. In this, perhaps the priest and the doctor were wiser than most. And, of course, some of the visitors were just here to wheedle funds or patronage for their pet projects, devices, even sometimes great juggernauts of machines as if Princess Zellandyne were lumber to be milled within gaping metallic guts, amid chains and belts and shrieking steam valves.

If one or another of these managed to get past me and find their way before King Grimm, well, he would try anything in his
royal and fatherly desperation. Not even the queen could talk her husband out of his reed-thin hopes, perhaps because her own eyes always seemed haunted and thus she lacked conviction. Better all around that I stop the parade of foolishness before it marched past the throne.

Still, a few slipped through. We all spent an entire season eating lavender honey and dancing bee dances before that one fellow was run off. Likewise the year that colored smokes were to be deployed to draw out demons and deflect the curse. Mostly we stained miles of curtains and carpets and put the palace laundry to its worst test in many a season.

The child Zellandyne, growing up amidst all this suppressed panic and premature mourning, still somehow managed to be a bright, high-spirited little thing who loved nothing more than morning rides through the misty grounds of the royal estate at her father’s side, or playing games with the maids in the courtyard, or reading about castles and quests and knights of old. She showed the most aptitude at mechanics and artifice, though, and was soon laboring at apprenticeships in the workshops and foundries attached to the Royal Palace.

“Let her sweat over a fire,” I counseled the king and queen more than once. “Whosoever her heart catches on will be the end of her for the reign of years. Perhaps she will fall in love with the flow of molten brass and spend her time wreaking steam instead of chasing hearts.”

“She is a girl,” Queen Perrault had said sadly at one of these closeted conferences. “It is her fate to find a love, and be betrayed by it.”

“At least it is not death that awaits her,” I offered cautiously.

“Just the sleep of years.” King Grimm was morose, growing into his name as the ever-changing days of Zellandyne’s childhood unfolded. “Is that better?”

“There will still be a future, in time.” It was small wisdom, of little worth, but all I had to offer. After all, how do you stop a girl from falling in love?

Prince Puissant of Bourgoigne

When I was small, I had but to pick up a stick and I was feted as the greatest swordsman since Roland. Every scrawl and scribble of mine foretold a new Leonardo. Such words ring hollow after a while, when you come to recognize the fundamental untruths wrapped within their pretty shells.

Mother, of course, stood at the heart of it, as she stands at the heart of everything.

My own words, the ones I will never say, are that Mother terrifies me. She certainly terrifies everyone else in the court, in the palace, in Nouveau Kronstadt, in the kingdom. That her affections seem reserved for me is only natural, and it only adds to my terror.

Since I was small they have trained me to fight like a nobleman. Ahorse with lance, afoot with sword, learning to lead formations of pikemen and archers and hard-bitten old legionaries who march in the style of Rome. Likewise to command cannon, steam leviathans, even the new rockets that have come only recently out of the devil’s workshops of the Iron District here in Nouveau Kronstadt.

I will be a man, and I will stand before the world, I am told. Father informs me of this, in his kingly style. I hear it from my tutors, from my arms masters, even at times from the stable boys and serving wenches.

How can I be the greatest warrior in the modern world by the mere virtue and flattery of my birth, and at the same time stand at the front of the armies of Bourgoigne to do my father’s will?

It will happen because Mother says it will happen. Her word is the law of the land, whatever our traditions might say. Father married power, after all.

Mother, so the whispered tales go, is an ogress, or least has the blood of fae running in her veins. Whisper those tales too widely and you’ll find yourself eating your own tongue sautéed with butter and rue. I watched Mother force my old tutor,
Magister Biyal, to that bitter fate, before turning him out with a traitor’s brand on his forehead to beg mute in the streets of our city.