The Toymaker's Apprentice (24 page)

Princess Pirlipat sat up in her bed and snatched it from his fingers. She fell upon it ravenously, devouring every last piece. Each time her jaws snapped shut and open again, they lost a little more of their mechanized look.

Stefan removed the squirrel
dentata
and massaged his aching face.

The princess was doing much the same, slapping her cheeks and pinching her legs with dexterous little hands. But while blood flowed back into Stefan's cheeks,
life
flowed into hers.

He had succeeded where so many had failed—he'd finished his master's quest. It had cost him his father and his cousin, but Princess Pirlipat of Boldavia was flesh and bone once more. With each passing moment, her skin grew smoother, softer, until it was dimpled and pink and very much alive. The terrible rigor mortis melted from her body, revealing a beautiful young woman of fourteen years, with deep blue eyes, perfect ringlet curls, red cheeks, and a mouth perhaps still a bit too wide.

Pirlipat didn't bother to thank him. She reached for a mirror beneath her pillow and began to primp.

The room was dead silent. As if, after seven years, the kingdom was afraid to believe that its trial had come to an end. Then the princess stretched from her years-long confinement, and rose from her bed.

Everyone in the crowded audience chamber gasped. Their princess had been restored
!
There was a collective sigh of relief and admiration.

But not from Stefan, who couldn't have cared less about the beautiful girl with the sharp tongue.

For over her shoulder, propped up in a doorway, stood his father and
Christian
.

Alive.

Both of them. Crumpled, haggard, filthy, but alive.

Stefan's heart threatened to break his ribs, his smile to crack his cheeks.

“Finish the ceremony
!
” the page hissed.

Stefan bowed quickly and stepped away from the bed. He bowed, stepped down, bowed again, and reached back his boot to take the final step.

“Interloper
!
” a voice squealed.

Stefan's hands flew to his ears. The voice was like a knife of ice.

The pages froze at their stations, their brooms silenced. And the shadows that had kept to the corners of the room flooded forward—just as they had in Stefan's nightmares. Mice spilled into the crowd.

Behind him stood a bloated parody of a Queen. A mouse dressed in royal purple wearing a tiny golden crown.

She pointed a sharp claw at Stefan. “With all my might, and
that of my sons, I curse thee
!
” she shrieked. Throwing herself forward, she sank her long, wicked teeth into his leg.

“Mother
!
” someone cried. It might have been Christian, or Samir, or even his own voice. Stefan couldn't tell. Everyone was screaming, the princess begging to be saved, her parents trying to calm her, servants rushing around, stamping at the mice.

The world blurred. In slow motion, Stefan fell to the ground as the Queen's venom took effect.

His joints stiffened and he hit the floor with a sickening crunch.
I've broken something,
he thought.

But he was wood, solid and unbreakably hard. His limbs were too heavy to move, and his jaw had clamped shut in a terrible rictus. It was as though he had retreated from his body to some small room at the back of his mind. Terror beat at the door, and hysteria begged to come in, but he did not heed them any more than the great oak heeds the summer wind.

The last few weeks of grief, yearning, and urgency disappeared with that one bite, locked out of the little room in his mind, as surely as he was locked in.

He had been cursed. And, with a distant understanding, he realized he had crushed the rodent Queen.

She lay beneath him, her tiny form half-crumpled underneath his wooden leg. Her wicked eyes gleamed. “My sons shall avenge me
!
” she hissed in her strangely accented German.

And then she died.

Stefan was not so lucky.

“MOTHER!” ARTHUR AND
his brothers roared.

The human throne room sprawled out before them, walls towering like trees, greater than the subterranean caverns beneath the city.

“To the Queen
!
” Hannibal bellowed. But the battle cry was diminished, dwarfed by the scale of the room. A room full of
men
.

They were so
huge
!
And so many. The flaw in his mother's secretive designs became clear. She had hidden her sons from the world of Men. All of their studies had little prepared them for the hulking reality.

“Majesty
!
” Several mouse soldiers had reached the edge of the throne room and blocked the prince from rushing across the floor after the Queen. Here was the danger, as if it was always meant to be, the nightmare from Arthur's dreams.

But they surged forward. Roland and Hannibal and Charlemagne gnashed their teeth. Genghis, Alexander, and Julius—even Julius
!
—rolled their eyes and screamed, twinning their voices to the echo of their mother's death curse.

“Sire, it is too late
!
” the mouse soldiers cried.

The Drosselmeyer boy had turned to wood and fallen. So very hard.

Hands held the princes back. Arthur looked away. He and his brothers fell to their knees.

In the giant throne room, the humans were moving. Scooping
up the boy, grabbing the princess and her ridiculous bassinet, until all that was left was the small, broken figure in a tattered purple dress.

“The clockmaker
!
” someone hissed beside Arthur. It was Tailitch, the spy lieutenant, pointing across the room.

“Drosselmeyer.” All seven brothers said the word with venom, curiosity, hatred, and fear.

He was tall, lanky of limb, with milky white hair tousled above a long face. Drosselmeyer strode swiftly toward the door. A black patch covered one eye.
Like a piebald,
Arthur thought. In his arms was the boy who had murdered their mother.

Arthur knew he should do something. But he no longer had the will to move. He knelt with his brothers on the cold flagstones, unable to act. He had lost her.

A hand pressed into his shoulder.

“Come, sires. You must stand up.” It was the rat, Ernst Listz.

The tutor's words rang hollow. After a moment, Arthur pulled himself to one knee, and stood.

“The Queen is dead,” Tailitch announced. “Long live the King
!
”

Arthur had known this day was coming, hadn't he? All along, the dreams had been preparing him for this moment, just as all of his studies were meant to prepare him for what came next.

Arthur searched the tutor's face, his heart breaking. “I can't,” he said.

Seven heads shook in disbelief. “We can't.”

“I'm sorry, son, but you must.” Ernst turned to the retinue of mice. “Give them a moment,” he said, and the mice turned their backs so no one would see the King's pain.

“We should be hunting him; kill him before he leaves the castle
!
” Hannibal said.

“We should ask for guidance,” Charlemagne fretted. “Snitter or Tailitch will know what to do.”

“We need to prepare our mother's burial,” Alexander said reasonably.

“Our mother,” Roland echoed. As if a plug had been pulled from a drain, their grief swirled and threatened to pull them under.

Hannibal fought it. “Vengeance, brothers
!
We must have revenge
!
” His spittle flew as he called them to battle.

Revenge.
Arthur closed his eyes against the bloodlust raging through his brother, the fear and confusion in each of them. Seven heads, and one shattered little heart. But this was not the time for self-pity.

“Mother meant for us to continue,” Arthur said. “With clear heads.” His brothers might succumb to baser instincts, but he would be the son she had asked for. He would make her proud.

“Together, now,” he said. “Together.” It was not encouragement. It was an imperial command.

His brothers reacted, holding their heads a little straighter. Not by choice, but by Arthur's will.

Arthur turned to Tailitch. “Fetch the Queen's body. And bring me the crown.”

Tailitch bowed deeply, nose to the floor, and swept the soldiers around him into service. The Queen was gathered on the shoulders of her soldiers and carried through the tunnels to her chambers down below. The mice followed her final descent into the castle.

Except for Arthur. He stood in the shadows of the throne room, taking in the breadth and width of the space before him.

“You said the world was big, Ernst. This is but an inch on the map, is it not?”

A respectful two steps behind him, the tutor replied, “Less than that, I'm afraid.”

Arthur exhaled slowly and nodded.

“She had large ambitions, your mother,” the rat noted. He looked older than Arthur remembered. Then again, Arthur had aged a lifetime in the last few minutes.

“Tailitch,” Arthur said. The piebald emerged from the shadows with a deferential nod and held out his mother's golden crown. It had been smashed by the falling boy, several tines now dented and the rim crushed flat. Arthur pulled it into shape, recalling the many days and nights when it had been their plaything. The one gift their mother had given them. It was more than a crown; it was her soul.

Once he'd repaired it as best he could, Arthur bowed, pausing to screw his courage to the sticking place. They would need more of these, he thought, and he placed the crown on his head. He looked down his nose at the piebald, the rat, and the few soldiers that had remained to guard him where they had failed to guard the Queen. They all fell to their knees, bowing to their new monarch.

“Our mother is dead,” Arthur proclaimed. “Now, we are
King.”

“WAKE UP, STEFAN.
Wake up, my beautiful boy. It's Christmastime. Don't you want to go to the Kindlesmarkt?”

A cool hand patted his cheek. Warm fingers touched his brow. Stefan opened his eyes. He was in his own warm bed in the loft above the workshop at home. The room smelled of baking bread and his mother smelled of flowers.

“No,” he moaned into the sheets. “I want to stay here. I want to stay with you.”

He'd been so cold and afraid just a little while ago. But he couldn't remember why. This was better. Much better than before.

Stefan's mother smiled, her gray eyes crinkling in amusement. “Then you may stay, just for a little while. And then you must get up
!
”

Stefan tried to nod, but he could not will himself to move.

• • •

“SOMETHING IS WRONG.
It wasn't like this with Pirlipat,” Christian said. “There was the same stiffness of limb, but within a day or two, she was awake and moving. I don't understand.”

The three men sat watch over the boy who lay, stiff as a Nativity baby, in the bow of the fishing boat they had hastily commandeered. Zacharias sat beside Stefan, holding his son's hand. The toymaker's face was gray as ash. Stefan's own skin was pale and hard, the softness turned angular as if chiseled rather than alive. The venomous bite had robbed him of his
newfound height, as well. Stefan was now less than five feet tall. The captain, a stout Boldavian man, kept his own counsel, his hand on the tiller. They were a long way from Boldavia, as the mouse ran—a full day's sail up the coast—but still not far enough to be safe.

Christian sighed. He'd seen the streets of the city emptied of mice, as they fled with Stefan, a block of ice, in his arms. They'd all disappeared suddenly, called away by the death of their Queen. If they were to rally, the wave of destruction would be formidable. Certainly more than a catatonic boy and three men could face alone.

It was remarkable how small Stefan had become—he'd been condensed by the Mouse Queen's venom into a solid, hardened doll, so different from the rangy young man Christian last saw on the deck of the
Gray Goose
. Stefan's spirit, if not his actual life, seemed to have been taken from him, along with the softness of his skin. And it was all Christian's fault.

“The boy has lost his will to live,” Samir said. “He has suffered more these past weeks than that spoiled princess has in her entire life. Yet, his heart still beats, there is breath in his chest. He will wake when he is ready.”

“You don't know that
!
” Christian said with anger born of frustration.

Samir merely shrugged. “We've all had our share of suffering. I am familiar with its effects.”

“I'm sorry for the charade, Samir. I had to play dead to reach Zacharias. The mice were watching us too closely. Pirliwig would have left him to his fate.”

“No doubt,” Samir agreed. “I see your logic. But it was difficult. Especially for the boy.”

Christian gripped the side of the boat. “At least it worked. I had the solution, a trick up my sleeve. But now?” He waved his hand in the air. “I'm not accustomed to being so helpless.”

“I should think seven years was plenty of practice,” Samir said under his breath, almost—but not quite—extracting a smile.

“Do you know what time of year it is?” Zacharias asked suddenly. A strange smile played across his lips. “It's Christmastime. Nuremberg will be alight with the season. The Kindlesmarkt . . . I haven't missed one in thirty years. We should be there, Stefan. Even without toys to sell.”

He had told Christian of the task the mice had set him to. It made little sense to either of them. A single toy soldier, whatever its size, was of no use that they could see.

“A Trojan horse?” Zacharias had suggested. But the soldier he'd made could not hold enough mice to cause any real damage.

In the end, Christian feared that all the mice had managed to do was sully his cousin's love for making toys. It might be gone for good. Like Elise, and now perhaps Stefan, too.

“Take us home, Christian,” Zacharias pleaded.

“I will,” Christian promised. “And I'll find a way to save your son.”