Winterspell (15 page)

At first all was awkward silence. Clara still wore her chemise, but it did little to dull the sensation of Nicholas's palms against her back. Dimly she registered her breasts pressing into his chest, his thigh draped over hers. The metal plates along his spine creaked when he shifted his weight.

“Do you know where we are?” she whispered at last, into his neck.

He was quiet for a moment. “I'm not certain,” he said, sounding frustrated. “Perhaps when the storm clears up . . .”

Clara burrowed into him, trying not to think of her father, lost somewhere in the cold with his abductor, nor of Felicity, being tucked back into bed by Dr. Victor at the mansion, or of Godfather, wherever he was. Had he tried to follow them? Was he here, somewhere out in the snow?

Did she care?

She closed her eyes, trying not to think of them, and trying not to think of herself in an embrace with this man, barer than she liked to be even when alone. She reached desperately for the forced calm that had seen her through the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

“We can't sleep for long,” she said. “I don't have much time to get him home.”

Nicholas's lips were cold at her ear. “We'll wait for the storm to pass. No longer.”

Clara would have to be satisfied with that. She listened for his heartbeat—faint but steady against her cheek—and wondered if it had beat these long years, encased in metal in Godfather's shop, or if it had been frozen along with his body. Restless, exhausted, fear hard in her chest, she felt the heavy blackness of sleep approach, and let it take her.

C
lara awoke to the sound of a train.

Her eyes flew open. She waited for the horn to sound again, but perhaps it had been the fragments of a dream, and anyway there was a more pressing matter—the body beside her,
on top
of her.

She tasted metal on her tongue.

Ah, yes. Nicholas—his weight half atop her; his lean arms trapping her; his bare torso, crisscrossed with steel, pressed against hers in a curious mixture of harsh lines and warm flesh. When she shifted her weight, her forehead brushed against the edge of the steel plate that curved beneath his right ear.

“Did you hear it too?” came a soft voice at her cheek.

“Hear what?” She sounded breathless; she
felt
breathless.

“The horn.” Then, with the hint of a tease: “You're blushing.”

Mortification swept through Clara's body in waves. “You're awake.”

“Quite, in fact.”

She scooted away and fumbled for her clothes, her abused body protesting.

Nicholas pulled on Godfather's greatcoat, shaking out flakes of ice. “Clara, I wasn't peeking or anything. Don't you know me at all?”

She glared at him over her shoulder, incredulous. “No, I don't.”

A flicker of hurt, quickly hidden. “I know
you
. More than most, I would think.”

“And I'm supposed to believe that?”

“You've a penchant for coffee,” he said at once, his eyes carefully turned away from her as they dressed. “You twine your hair around your fingers when you're thinking. You once told me you had dreamed of marrying Drosselmeyer, and that the idea was disturbing but also made you feel safe, and you never felt safe when you were awake.” He paused to give her a soft smile. “Except when you were in the shop, with me.”

All those years of whispers in the shadowed corner, of stolen kisses to metal. The disturbing realization that Nicholas knew so much about her, that he had for years been a spy upon her life, left her feeling unnerved, and even outraged. It was one thing to have imagined him alive, and quite another to know he
had
been. Of course, that wasn't entirely fair. As if he could help being stuck there, having no choice but to watch.

Or had he had a choice? What, exactly, had brought him to Godfather's shop? Why had he been trapped there, and how? A startling thought arose: Was he as much to blame for her mother's death as Godfather? Or perhaps it was not about blame. Perhaps it was horrible, unavoidable circumstance and she should forgive them.

She shook off the unanswerable questions; they could wait. “You heard it too?”

“The train horn?” He nodded. “But it couldn't have been.”

“And why not?” Forgetting herself, Clara grabbed his hand. “Do you think my father might be on it?”

Nicholas was distracted, his eyes distant. “There are no trains in Cane. We made an express point of forbidding their construction and routinely destroyed any attempts.”

“Cane? What's that?”

His face was troubled. “Cane is here. I think.”

“Where is
here
?”

“It's a secret.”

“Don't play games with me.”

“I'm telling you the truth. It's one of the secret places left behind when your world was made. That's what our stories say. Not many people know about Cane, and those who do try to keep it that way.” He raised a smug eyebrow; it made him look younger. “You see? The very definition of a secret.”

Clara was unimpressed. “And those lights in the air? That Door?”

“A tricky piece of magic that not many can fashion, and for good reason.”

He said it so matter-of-factly, as if such things were as natural as breathing. Clara inspected his face for evidence of a lie. Bitterly she said, “Godfather spoke of Doors sometimes. In his stories.”

“Yes. I heard him tell you things over the years. True things. Not many of them, mixed up with nonsense, but still—true things.”

“ ‘Trust only those whose pow'r is true,' ” Clara said, remembering a tale of a wandering man with tired feet, delirious from travel. “ ‘Then wait for the lights—' ”

“ ‘And step on through.' A children's rhyme.”

An uncertain thrill swept through her. “He's . . . He is from here, then? Like you?”

“Yes. We fled together but did not make it out before . . .” He gestured at himself. “Before we were hit.”

It should have perhaps seemed stranger to Clara that Godfather was not of her world—but hadn't she entertained such fantasies as a girl, while watching him at work in the candlelight, when the shadows had played across his face?

Had he known, in those years, that her mother would die? And that he would then
lie
to Clara about it? The cowardice of it, the
selfishness
.
Afraid she would no longer love him, indeed. He was right to have feared it.

And utterly wrong. Even now her fury couldn't keep her from wishing he were near.

Her throat was tight. “He called you ‘Your Highness.' ”

“As well he should. I am—” He paused, his mouth twisting. “Or I should say, I
was
a prince, before.”

“Prince.” She could not keep the skepticism from her voice. “The prince of Cane, I assume?”

He crossed his arms, regarding her. “Don't be flippant. It's unbecoming.”

“And what does ‘before' mean?”

“Previously. In the past. Formerly.”

“Don't be flippant. It's unbecoming.”

He nearly smiled. “Do you know, I've always wondered what it would be like to argue with you.”

“I'm serious.”

“ ‘Before' means just that—before I left, before I arrived in your city. Before the coup, before the war. Before.”

Coups.
Wars.
Could Godfather have been involved in such a thing? “I see.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. And do you know what I think?”

“What's that?”

Clara fetched her corset, undoing its laces to save for later. They might come in handy, and she certainly wasn't going to wear the thing. Too restrictive. “I think I
should
think you're mad—you and Godfather—but I don't think that, and even if I did, I can't do anything about it, because I need you to find my father.”

Nicholas seemed pensive. “Need. Yes. It's a curious thing, isn't it?”

A flash of something out in the snow, a whip of noise, caught
their attention. Clara's eyes shot toward the door, and she reached for the dagger hidden in the shaft of her boot.

“What is that? I saw a figure.”

“As did I.” Nicholas's eyes went to her blade. A smile pulled at his mouth. “Ah, your many daggers.”

Clara drew her lips tight and tossed her ravaged corset into the corner.

“Poor forsaken undergarment,” Nicholas said. There was
laughter
in his voice. “Of what crime is it guilty?”

Glaring at the back of his head, Clara tugged on her boots and pressed the mechanisms on her heels. The hilts popped out with their familiar clicks; she shoved them back into place, reassured. Her third dagger she kept out and ready instead of returning it to the strap at her thigh.

“I'm not in the mood for jokes,” she said tightly.

“I hope you're in the mood for breakfast,” Nicholas said, peering out a filthy window Clara had not noticed before. The world beyond was quiet and pale. Morning? “We might have found some.”

* * *

It was not breakfast.

It was, in fact, so utterly the opposite of breakfast that, when they had gotten close enough to see it clearly, Clara yanked a stunned Nicholas behind a tree that had been felled by the storm. There, shielded by branches draped in ice, they watched. Clara held her dagger at the ready, unable to tear her eyes away from the scene before them.

“What is it?” she whispered.

But Nicholas seemed paralyzed with horror. “Sinndrie save us.”

“Creature” was too kind a word for it, this aberration that should have been a deer. But with frayed wires bulging from its haunches and an unblinking, whirring white eye, it could hardly be called that. Matted brown fur gave way to an ever-shifting mass of black tubules and weakly flickering lights, of mechanized claws where hooves should have been. It was half-alive, and half automaton.

It paused, eye spinning, foreleg raised, on a ridge past where Clara and Nicholas hid. Across the way, hidden in a grove of trees, a group of human figures crouched, clothed in snow-dusted hides and furs. One of them shifted; a branch cracked. The deer jerked into motion, a metal fan embedded in its throat humming wetly to life, but before it could escape, an arrow shot out from the trees and struck its chest.

The creature brayed, its call marred by some wavering mechanized note, as though the sound had been
manufactured
. The thing collapsed, its legs buckling under. The hunters sprang out from their hiding places and cleaved it to pieces with crude axes.

Then a part of the creature more laden with metal and cogs than fur and meat separated itself from the corpse and began crawling away, spiderlike. A hulk of living metal come to awful life.

Some of the hunters pounced on it with savage cries, hacking madly. The others remained with the corpse, digging into the animal's innards, scooping steaming raw meat into their mouths.

“Nicholas . . . ,” Clara whispered, desperate to break free of the moment.

But he said nothing, his hand hard on her wrist, and then someone began to scream.

The skittering hunk of metal had dissolved into tiny black shapes, blue light sparking angrily between them, and these shapes had climbed up one hunter's legs, his belly, his arms.

They ate him. There was no better word for it. They swarmed over his body, and the faint buzzing of a thousand tiny mechanical mouths burrowed under Clara's skin. Wherever they moved, hard blackness melted out behind them.

Like Godfather's dragons
, Clara thought, remembering the transformed ballroom—except the dragons had seemed benevolently industrious, and these creations reeked of cruelty.

Silence fell abruptly. Where there had once been a screaming man now stood a misshapen black statue, molten lumps where his eyes had been.
Frozen in a final contortion of agony, he toppled over and hit the snow.

The other hunters watched, emotionless, wolfing down their meal. They had done nothing to help him. The sounds of their slurping echoed inhumanly through the white woods.

“The mechaniks,” Nicholas breathed. “It's
her
.”

Clara ripped her gaze from the hunter-turned-statue; it reminded her, awfully, of what Nicholas had so recently been, and the similarity struck her as a terrible portent. “What did you call them? Mechaniks?”

“We didn't build trains. We didn't build weapons or drawbridges or clocks. We destroyed those that already existed. They would make us too vulnerable. She would find them, sink her magic into them like teeth, bring them to life, and turn them against us. . . .”

Nicholas grew agitated, his eyes bright. Clara tried to quiet him before the hunters heard, but one of them raised his bloodied face, tilted his head, doglike. His skin was haggard and windburned.

“Nicholas,
hush
.”

He gripped the metal plate around his wrist, tried to rip it from his flesh. “Get it off—she'll wake them up!”

Clara clamped a hand over his mouth, tightening her grip on her dagger, but it was unnecessary. The hunter who had raised his head straightened and looked to the horizon. His eyes widened. He whistled to the others and pointed into the whiteness.

Like a flock of birds, the hunters scattered, leaving behind red snow, tufts of fur, and their blackened companion.

Clara heard it before she saw it—a horn, and a distant rhythmic churning. She turned toward where the hunter had pointed.

Now, the storm gone, she could see that beyond their shack—which was some sort of way station?—stretched a long, rocky ridge, and railroad tracks. Beyond even that, at some distance and ghostly in the mist, stood an immense wall of shifting shadows.

And, far to the right, a steady blue light.

The train that had woken Clara approached.