IN THE END, THE CLOCKSMITH WAS to blame. But Mr. and Mrs. Zelverhaus should not have let him into the house. This is the problem with even lesser demons. They come to your doorstep in velvet coats and polished shoes. They tip their hats and smile and demonstrate good table manners. They never show you their tails.
The clocksmith was called Droessen, though there were rumors he was not Kerch, but Ravkan—an exiled nobleman’s son, or possibly a disgraced Fabrikator, banished from his homeland for reasons unknown. His shop was on Wijnstraat, where the canal crooked like a finger beckoning you closer, and he was known the world over for his fantastical timepieces, for the little bronze birds that sang different songs at every hour, and for the tiny wooden men and women who played out amusing scenes at midnight, then again at noon.
He’d risen to fame when he’d built a clockwork fortuneteller that, when a certain lever was pulled, would move its polished wooden hand over your palm and predict your future. A merchant brought his daughter to the shop before her wedding. The fortune-teller had clicked and clanked, opened its wooden jaws, and said, “You will find great love and more gold than you could wish for.” He bought the clever automaton for his beloved child as a wedding gift, and everyone who attended the celebration agreed they’d never seen a bride and groom more in love. But the ship his daughter boarded to begin her honeymoon was so heavily weighted with goods and coin that it sank at the first breath of a storm and all were lost to the uncaring sea. When the news reached the merchant, he remembered the automaton’s clever words and, drunk on misery and brandy, smashed the thing to bits with his own fists. His servants found him lying amid the wreckage the next day, still weeping, shirt stained, knuckles bloody. But the sad tale drew new customers to the clocksmith’s door in search of the marvelous and uncanny.
In his shop, they found many wonders: tawny golden lions who hunted mechanical gazelles across a velvet veldt; a garden of enamel flowers pollinated by jeweled hummingbirds that whirred and buzzed on wires so thin they truly seemed to be flying; a rotating calendar clock—kept on the highest shelf away from curious young eyes—populated by human automata who committed different ghastly murders every month. On the first of January, a duel was fought on an icy field, puffs of smoke emerging from the combatants’ pistols with tinny pops. In February, a man climbed atop his wife to strangle her as her lover cowered beneath the rumpled bed. And so on.
Despite his accomplishments, Droessen was still a young man, and he became a coveted party guest among the merchant families who served as his customers. He dressed well, conversed pleasantly, and always brought charming gifts to his hosts. It was true that when he entered a room, the people there would find themselves shifting uneasily on their feet, rubbing their arms at the sudden chill, wondering if a door somewhere needed closing. Yet, somehow, it only made him more interesting. Without that sense of the unwholesome, Droessen might have been a pathetic character, a grown man fiddling with what were little more than elaborate toys. Instead, there was much talk of his smart velvet coat and his nimble white fingers. Mamas clutched their handkerchiefs and daughters blushed when he was near.
Every winter, the Zelverhauses, a wealthy family of tea merchants, hosted the clocksmith at their country home for the parties and entertainments given during the week of Nachtspel. The house itself was a model of merchant restraint, all dark wood, stolid brick, and hard lines. But it was perfectly situated by a lake that froze early for skating, and it was effusive in its comforts, with fireplaces alight in each room to keep the house always snug and merry, and every floor polished to the warm syrup shine of a glazed cake.
From the very first year Droessen visited the house by the lake, troubling rumors followed. During his first stay, the Zelverhauses’ neighbors, the De Kloets, wore mourning through Nachtspel and into the new year after Elise De Kloet gave birth to a baby composed entirely of dandelion fluff.
When a careless maid opened a window, it blew away at the first gust. The next year, one of the Zelverhaus cousins had a bloom of little gray mushrooms break out over her forehead, and a boy visiting from Lij claimed he’d woken to find a single wing jutting from between his shoulder blades, but that it had burned to ash when he’d passed through a sunbeam in the hall.
Were these strange occurrences linked to the clocksmith? No one could be certain, but they whispered about it.
“That young man Droessen is a charming fellow, but most unusual, and peculiarities seem to follow him,” a woman once said to Althea Zelverhaus.
“Most unusual,” Althea agreed, but she knew that Droessen accepted few invitations, and that this woman with her fussy lace collar could only hope Droessen might someday make an appearance at one of her salons. So Althea smiled, repeated, “Most unusual indeed,” and left it at that.
It all seemed harmless at the time.
Droessen was not just unusual in his talents or his habits, but also in his greed. He had spent his life tinkering in corners, bowing and scraping to the merchants who graced his door, and he had learned early that talent was not enough. When he realized customers preferred to buy from handsome faces, he had his hair cut into a fashionable style and made himself a set of even white teeth so fine that they sometimes fooled even him. When he saw the respect his patrons gave military men, he’d worn a painful brace to correct his stoop and had the shoulders of his jackets padded so that he could affect a soldier’s upright bearing. Because he’d discerned that popularity was dependent upon demand, he made sure to refuse two out of every three invitations.
But he grew tired of eating cold dinners in his darkened shop, the doors locked and lights turned off to create the illusion that he was somewhere having fun. He wanted a grand house instead of a dank rented room. He wanted money for his inventions. He never wanted to have to say yes sir, no sir, right away sir again. So he would have to marry well, but whom could he make his bride? The young women of marriageable age who came to his shop with their fathers and flirted with him at parties saw him as a bit of danger. They would never take a mere tradesman seriously as a prospect. No, he needed a girl, still malleable, one that he could make admire him.
Clara Zelverhaus was not yet twelve then, lovely enough, rich enough, and of just the dreamy disposition he required. He would learn her wants and wishes. He would deliver them to her, and in time, she would come to love him for it. Or so he thought. Droessen knew the properties of every kind of wood and paint and lacquer; he could finesse the gears of a clock until they spun with silent precision. And yet, though he could smile readily, charm easily, and play the part of a gentleman, he had never truly understood people or the workings of their steady-running but inconstant hearts.
The house by the lake bustled with excitement whenever the clocksmith arrived, and the children were always first to greet him when he emerged from his coach. They would trail after the house servants who unloaded his luggage, the trunks and chests invariably filled with splendid objects—dolls in the costumes of the Komedie Brute, music boxes, rows of cannons, even a grand castle to defend.
Though young Frederik liked to stage long battles, he would eventually grow bored—no matter how finely made the tiny armaments and troops—and put on his coat to go find mischief in the snow. Clara was different. To Droessen’s dismay, she ignored the elaborate clockworks and mechanicals he brought her, and spared only a small smile for the exquisite replica of a Ravkan palace with its carved wooden arches and domes plated in real gold. But she could play for hour upon hour with the dolls he made, vanishing into the house and emerging only when the dinner bell had been rung more than once, and her mother had been forced to shout up the stairs and down every corridor for Clara to cease her make-believe and come be fed.
So over many long nights in his workshop, Droessen made for her an elegant, pale-eyed nutcracker with a bright blue coat and shiny black boots, a wicked little bayonet tucked into one blocky fist.
“You must tell him all your secrets,” said Droessen as he placed the doll in Clara’s arms, “and he will keep them safe for you.”
She promised that she would.
Clara’s mother and father assumed that as she grew older, Clara would leave such childish things behind and begin to care more for dresses and the prospect of a husband and a family, as her friends did. But as the years passed, Clara stayed the same strange, dreamy girl who might let a sentence trail off because some secret, unspoken thought had caught her, who would endure language lessons and cotillions with distracted grace, then smile and drift off to some dim corner where whatever invisible world her mind had conjured might unfurl without distraction.
When Clara turned sixteen, her parents threw her a grand party. She ate sweets, teased her brother, and danced beautifully with every eligible merchant’s son in attendance. Althea Zelverhaus heaved a happy sigh of relief and went to bed without a worry for the first time in months. But that night, when she woke from her sleep, she had the sudden need to check on her children. Frederik, seventeen and happy to be home from school, snored loudly in his room. Clara’s bed was empty.
Althea found Clara curled on her side by the hearth in the dining room, one of her favorite dolls in her arms. She saw that her daughter had put on her slippers and coat and that both were wet with snow.
“Clara,” her mother whispered, rocking her shoulder gently to rouse her from sleep. “Why did you go outside?”
Clara blinked drowsily at her mother and smiled a sweet, vague smile. “He loves the snow,” she said, then clutched her doll closer and fell back into slumber.
Althea looked down at her daughter in her nightgown and damp coat, the ugly little face of the wooden doll in her arms. It was Althea’s least favorite of Droessen’s creations, a nutcracker with a grotesque smile and garish blue coat. Standing there, she had the sudden thought that inviting the clocksmith into her home years ago had been a terrible mistake. Her fingers itched to snatch the doll from Clara and toss the wretched thing into the fire.
She reached for the nutcracker, then yanked her hand back. For a moment—it could not be and yet she was sure of it—it seemed the toy soldier had turned his square head to look at her. And there had been sorrow in his eyes. Nonsense, she told herself, cradling her hand to her chest. You are becoming as fanciful as Clara.
Even so, she stepped away, certain that if she dared touch the nutcracker, dared throw it into the flames, the thing would cry out. Or worse, it might not burn at all.
She put a blanket over her daughter and returned to her own bed, and when she woke the next morning, she’d all but forgotten her foolish notions of the night before. Nachtspel was beginning and her guests would soon arrive. She rose and rang for tea, seeking fortification for the arduous day ahead. But when she went downstairs to see to the menus, she checked to make sure that Clara was sorting chestnuts with the cook, and paused once by the cabinet in the dining room where they displayed Droessen’s gifts. Not for any reason really. Certainly not to make sure that the nutcracker was safely locked away behind the glass.
Clara knew her mother worried. She worried too. When she was seated at dinner or at some party with a friend or even occasionally at her lessons, she would think, This is pleasant. This is enough. But then she’d arrive back home and she’d find herself in the dining room in front of the cabinet. She’d reach once more for the nutcracker and take him to her bedroom or up to the attic, where she would lie on her side amid the dust motes and whisper to him until he whispered back.
It always took some time and felt a bit awkward at the start. It had been easier when she was a child, but she was self-conscious now in a way she hadn’t been then. Clara felt foolish moving the nutcracker’s arms, making his jaws open and close to answer her questions. She couldn’t help but see herself as others would: a young woman, nearly grown, lying on a dusty attic floor, talking to a doll. But she persisted, reminding him of the adventures they’d had, though they had changed a bit over the years.
You are a soldier. You fought bravely on the front and returned to me, your darling.
You killed a monster for me once, a rat with seven heads, on the last evening of Nachtspel.
You are a prince I woke from a curse with a kiss. I loved you when no other would, and you chose me for your queen.
She would place a walnut between his hard teeth—then crack, the noise so loud in the still attic.
Are you my soldier? she would ask, again and again. Are you my prince?
Are you my darling?
Are you mine?
And at last, sometimes after mere moments, sometimes after what seemed like forever, his jaws would move and he would speak.
Are you my soldier?
“I am.”
Are you my prince?
“I am.”
As he spoke, his limbs would grow, his chest would broaden, his skin would turn supple.
Are you my darling?
“I am.”
Are you mine?
“Sweet Clara,” the nutcracker would say, tall and handsome and perfect now, the grotesque rictus of his face softened into tender human lines. “Of course I am.”
He would offer her his hand and with a whoosh, they would fly through the attic window, out into the cold. She would find herself atop a great white horse, clutching her beloved’s waist, whooping with joy as they sailed through the night, past the clouds, and into the lands beyond.
She did not know what to call the place he brought her to. Fairyland? The Land of Dreaming? When she was a child, it had looked different. They’d ridden a spun-sugar boat on a sweet water stream. She’d walked on marzipan cobblestones past gingerbread villages and castles made of marmalade. Children had danced for them and greeted the nutcracker as their prince. They’d sat on gumdrop cushions and his mother had called Clara a hero.
Now much of that was gone, replaced by deep green forests and shining rivers. The air was warm and silken like the places she’d read about—summer lands where the sun shone all year and balmy breezes were thick with the scent of orange blossoms. The white horse carried them to new places every time: a valley where wild ponies with manes of mist ranged; a quicksilver lake as big as a sea, where they met with dashing pirates who had gems for teeth; a palace of dogwood walls and larkspur towers that rose from a grove where clouds of butterflies hovered, wings chiming like bells. The queen there had pale green skin perpetually dotted with dew and her crown rose like antlers, directly from her forehead, in twists of bone that gleamed like mother-of-pearl. When she touched her lips to Clara’s mouth, Clara felt two delicate wings sprout from her back. She spent the day flying, swooping and dropping like a hummingbird, pausing only to drink honey wine and let the queen twine hellebore into her hair.
And yet it was not enough. Did her prince love her? Could he? Why did he return her to her home at the end of every magical journey? It wasn’t fair to show her that such a world could exist and then take it from her so cruelly. If he loved her as she loved him, surely she would be allowed to stay. At every visit, she hoped his mother would greet her as a daughter rather than a guest, that she would open a new door on a wedding bower.
Instead the dinner gong would sound or she’d hear Frederik stomping up the stairs or her mother’s voice calling, and she would find herself sailing back through the starry sky to the cold, empty attic, her joints stiff from lying on the slats of the floor, the hard body of the nutcracker beside her, shrunken and ugly, the leavings of walnuts between his wooden jaws.
She would place him back in the cabinet and return to her parents. She would try to smile at the drab world around her, though her cheeks were still warm with sunshine, though her tongue was still sweet with the taste of honey wine.
As for the nutcracker, he was sure of nothing, and sometimes it frightened him. His memories were a blur. He knew there had been a battle, many battles, and that he’d fought bravely. Hadn’t he been made for it? He had been born with a bayonet in hand.
He’d fought for her. But where was she now? Where was Clara? She of the star eyes and soft hands. They’d faced the Rat King together. She’d wrapped him in her kerchief. He’d bled into its white lace folds.
Clara. Why could he remember her name and not his own?
He’d fought bravely. At least he thought he had.
The details were hard to recall—the screams, the blood, the squealing of the rats with their thick pink tails and teeth like yellow knives, gums red with blood from the bites they’d taken. How those teeth had glistened in the golden light! Had it been sunrise or sunset? He remembered the smell of pines.
He squinted now, from his place in the barracks, through the wide plate-glass window. But the view confused him too. He could see a long table set for a feast, candied fruit, pine boughs laid upon the mantel. But everything was far too large, as if seen through a distorting lens.
He counted the brass buttons on his fine blue coat. Whose uniform did he wear? Which country was his home? Who had polished the dust of the battlefield from his boots?
Had there been a battle? Had he fought or only dreamed of fighting? Other memories seemed clearer. He was a prince, her prince. She’d told him so. He’d wanted nothing more than to show her all the wonders of his home, to explore its endless horizons. And yet, why did he feel no gladness when he returned to the palace where he supposed he had been raised? Why was everything as new to him as it seemed to be to her?
Nothing felt certain. He was sure the streets they’d walked had been narrow before, bordered by houses with frosted roofs instead of wide boulevards that swept past mansions tiled in gold. Gifts of nougat and sweet cream had pleased Clara before, but now he gave her jewels and gowns because he knew she would prefer them. How he came by this knowledge, he could not fathom.
He watched the people at the table—giants it seemed, and yet there was Clara, who he’d held in his arms. Sometimes her eyes strayed to him and he tried to cry out to her, but he had no voice, no way to move his limbs. He must have been injured.
He watched her eat her supper and speak to … it took him a moment to remember—Frederik, her brother, a commander in the war, bold and sometimes reckless, but the nutcracker had executed every order given. There was another familiar face at the table, a man with long hair and pale blue eyes who studied Clara as if she were a piece of machinery to be taken apart and put back together. I know him, thought the nutcracker. Droessen. I know his name. But he could not think how. This man did not look like a soldier, though he had the bearing of one.
A memory clawed up through the nutcracker’s thoughts. He was lying on his back, staring at shelves packed with clocks and slumped marionettes. He smelled paint and oil, the fresh shavings of wood. Droessen loomed over him, huge and cold-eyed with terrible focus. I was wounded, thought the nutcracker. Droessen must be a surgeon then. But that wasn’t quite right.
The meal ended. The guests drank little glasses of garnet-colored liquid. Clara sipped at hers, cheeks flushed. They played games before the fire, and someone shouted, “It’s snowing!”
They raced to gather around the great window, but the nutcracker could not see well enough to tell what interested them so. There was talk and laughter and then they were all racing out of the dining room to … he did not know. He did not know what lay beyond this room. It might be a palace or a prison or a pine grove. He knew only that they were gone.
Servants came and banked the fire, doused the candles. He’d fought bravely, and yet somehow, he always ended up here, alone in the dark.
Clara did not come that night.
The nutcracker awoke to shrill squeaking and found the Rat King at his bedside. He sat up hurriedly and reached for his saber, realizing as he grasped at his sword belt that his weapon was gone, and at the same time, that he could move again.
“Peace, Captain,” the Rat King said. “I have not come to fight, only to talk.” His voice was high and reedy, and his whiskers twitched—yet the monster still managed to look grave when he spoke.
This creature had the nutcracker’s blood on his filthy paws, and would have murdered Clara too. But if he came to speak under conditions of a truce, the nutcracker supposed he must honor that. He dipped his chin the barest amount.
The Rat King adjusted his felt cloak and looked around. “Do you have anything to drink? If only they’d stuck you in a liquor cabinet, eh?”
Cabinet. The nutcracker frowned at the word. He’d been resting in the barracks, had he not? And yet as he looked around, he saw that what had simply seemed the vague shapes of beds and other soldiers were strange items indeed. Girls with glass eyes and stiffly curled hair were propped against the wall. Rows of soldiers with bayonets at their shoulders marched in frozen lockstep.
“I don’t know,” he replied at last.
The Rat King perched on the gilded lip of an enormous music box. But was it enormous? Or were they small?
“When was the last time you ate?” he asked.
The nutcracker hesitated. Had it been with Clara? In the Land of Snow? The Court of Flowers? “I can’t recall.”
The Rat King sighed. “You should eat something.”
“I do eat.” Surely he did?
“Something other than walnuts.” The Rat King scratched behind his ear with his little pink claws, then removed the crown from his gray head and placed it gently in his lap. “Do you know I started life as a sugar mouse?”
The nutcracker’s confusion must have shown, for the Rat King continued, “I realize that’s hard to believe, but I was just a confection. Not even for eating, just for looking at, a charming little marvel, a testament to my maker’s skill. It seemed a shame that I should go untasted. My first thought was, I wish someone would eat me. But that was enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“To get free of the cabinet. Wanting is why people get up in the morning. It gives them something to dream of at night. The more I wanted, the more I became like them, the more real I became.”
“I am perfectly real,” protested the nutcracker.
The Rat King looked at him sadly. Sitting there, without his crown in the dim light, his whiskers drooping slightly, he looked less like a dreadful monster than a sweet-faced mouse.
A memory came to the nutcracker. “You had seven heads—”
The Rat King nodded. “Clara imagined me fearsome, and so fearsome I became. But a rat can’t live with seven heads always talking and arguing. It took us hours to make the simplest decisions, so when the others were asleep, I cut them from me one by one. There was an awful amount of blood.” He shifted slightly in his seat. “Who are you when she isn’t here, Captain?”
“I am …” He wavered. “I am a soldier.”
“Are you? What is your rank? Lieutenant?”
“Lieutenant, of course,” answered the nutcracker.
“Or is it captain?” the Rat King inquired.
Are you my soldier? Are you my prince?
“I—”
“Surely you must know your rank.”
Are you my darling?
“Who are you when no one picks you up to hold you?” asked the Rat King. “When no one is looking at you, or whispering to you, who are you then? Tell me your name, soldier.”
Are you mine? The nutcracker opened his mouth to answer, but he could not recall. He was Clara’s prince, her protector. He had a name. Of course he had a name. Only the shock of battle had driven it from his mind.
He’d fought bravely.
He’d taken Clara to meet his mother.
He’d ridden a horse through a gleaming field of stars.
He was heir to nothing. He was prince of a marzipan palace.
He slept on spun sugar. He slept on gold.
“You walk and talk and laugh when Clara dreams with you,” said the Rat King. “But those are her desires. They cannot sustain you. My life began with wanting something for myself. I wished to be eaten, then I wished to eat. A piece of cake. A bit of bacon. A sip of wine. I wanted these things from their table. That was when I moved my legs and blinked my eyes. I wanted to see beyond the cabinet door. That was when I found my way into the walls. There I met my rat brothers. They are not charming or pretty, but they live even when no one is looking. I have made a life in the walls with them, unwatched and undesired. I know who I am without anyone there to tell me.”
“But why did you attack us?” said the nutcracker. The blood. The screaming. “I know that was real.”
“As real as anything. When Clara was a child, she dreamed of heroes, and heroes require a foe. But the desire to conquer was the will she gave me, not my own. It is simple hunger that keeps me alive now: crumbs from the cupboard, cheese in the larder, a chance to venture outside to the woodpile, see the wide sky, feel the cold bite of the snow.”
Snow. Another memory emerged—not the place of dreaming that Clara so longed for, but a new place beyond the cabinet. She had taken him outside one night. He had felt cold. He had seen clouds moving over the starlit sky. He had taken the air into his lungs, felt them expand, exhaled, seen the puff of his breath in the chill night. He remembered trees clustered against the horizon, a road, the desperate desire to see what lay beyond it.
“That’s it, Captain,” said the Rat King as he slowly rose and placed the crown back atop his head. “It helps to live in the shelter of the walls where there are no human eyes to look upon me. It helps to be a rat who no one wants to look at. Your desire must be stronger if you wish to get free of the cabinet, if you wish to be real. She loves you, though, and that will make it harder.”
Clara loved him. And he loved her. Didn’t he?
The Rat King nudged open the cabinet door. “One last thing,” he said as he skittered onto the ledge. “Beware of Droessen. You were meant to be a gift to Clara, a means of enchanting her and nothing more.”
“He loves her too, then?”
“Who knows what the clocksmith loves? Best not to ask. I think the answer would please no one.”
The Rat King vanished, his pink tail slithering behind him.
Clara tried to stay away. She managed it for a night, the wine and the guests a happy distraction. But the next day, she snuck from the skating out on the lake and ran to the cabinet, clutching the nutcracker beneath her coat and racing up the stairs to the quiet of the attic.
Are you my soldier? she whispered as the cold winter light made bright squares on the dusty floor.
Are you my prince? She tucked a walnut between his jaws.
Are you my darling?
Are you mine?
It did not take long this time. The nutcracker’s body stretched and his head split to reveal her handsome prince’s face.
“I am,” he said. He smiled as he always did, touched his gentle hand to her face, but then trouble came into his eyes.
He pressed his fingertips to his mouth, licked his lips, and frowned as if the taste of walnuts did not agree with him.
“Where will we go today, my prince?” Clara asked.
But he did not take her hand. He sat up, ran his fingers through the beam of sunlight from the window, and then rose to peer out through the glass.
“Outside,” he said. “I’d like to see where that road goes.”
The request was so ordinary and yet so unexpected, Clara couldn’t quite make sense of it for a moment. “That isn’t possible.”
“It’s what I want.” He said the words as if he’d made some great discovery, a new invention, a magic spell. His smile was radiant. “Dear Clara, it’s what I want.”
“But it cannot be,” she replied, unsure of how to explain.
His cheer vanished and she saw fear in his eyes. “I cannot return to the cabinet.”
Now she understood. At last. At last.
She took his hands. “You need never return to the cabinet.
Only take me with you to your home and I will forsake this place. We can stay forever in the land of dreams.”
He hesitated. “That is what you want.”
“Yes,” said Clara, tilting her head up. “It is what I have always wanted.” The fervor of it filled her. Sweat broke out over her neck. Kiss me, she willed him. In all the stories a kiss was required. Take me from this place.
She could not wait. Clara stood on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his. She tasted walnut and something else, maybe lacquer. But he did not take her hand, did not draw her closer. She felt no wind on her face nor horse galloping beneath her. When she opened her eyes, she was still in the same dull, dusty attic.
The nutcracker brushed his knuckles against her cheek. “I want to go outside,” he said.
Now Clara scowled and stamped her foot as if she were the child she’d been when Droessen had first placed the nutcracker in her arms instead of a girl of seventeen. I want. She was not sure why those words enraged her so. Perhaps it was because the nutcracker had never spoken them to her before.
“I told you,” she said more sharply than she intended. “It cannot be. You don’t belong here.”
“I will take you outside,” said Frederik.
Clara flinched at the sound of her brother’s voice. He stood at the top of the attic stairs, gazing at the nutcracker with fascinated eyes.
“Get out!” she cried. He was not supposed to be here. He was not supposed to share this. She rushed at him, frantic with fear and shame, and tried to strike him, to push him back toward the stairs.
But Frederik simply held her wrists, keeping her at bay. He was a year older and far stronger. He shook his head, his eyes never leaving the nutcracker. “Stop it, Clara.”
“I remember you,” said the nutcracker, watching him. He came to attention and saluted. “My commander.”
Frederik gave Clara a warning look and let her hands drop. With a bemused grin, he returned the nutcracker’s salute.
“Yes,” said Frederik, walking toward him. “Your commander. I sent you to die a hundred times.”
The nutcracker frowned. “I remember.”
“How changed you are,” Frederik murmured.
Confusion crossed the nutcracker’s face. “Am I?”
Frederik nodded. “I’ll take you downstairs,” he said softly, as if coaxing a kitten with a bit of food. “I’ll take you outside.”
“Where does the road go?” asked the nutcracker.
“To Ketterdam. A magical place. I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Frederik,” said Clara angrily. “You cannot do this.”
“We’ll say he’s my friend from school. We’ll say he’s just enlisted.”
She shook her head. “We can’t.”
“Mama will be so pleased to have a dashing young man in uniform join us for dinner.” Frederik’s smile was sly. “You can waltz with him at the party tonight.”
Clara didn’t want to waltz with him at a stupid party. She wanted to dance with him in a bluebell cathedral. She wanted to be greeted as a princess by a chorus of swans. She wanted wings. But she could say none of that to Frederik, who stood so close to the nutcracker now, his hand on his shoulder as if in fact they were good friends from school, as if her prince was a young captain, ready to join the Kerch forces in his blue coat with its shining buttons.
“Frederik,” she pleaded.
But her brother was already leading the nutcracker across the attic, already nudging him toward the stairs.
“Come, Clara,” Frederik said, that sly smile spreading wider. “It’s what he wants.”
The kiss had confused him. When Clara had begged to be taken to the dreaming land, the nutcracker had almost forgotten himself in the strength of her want. Then, in the watery sunlight of the attic, she’d turned her face to him in invitation, pressed her lips to his, and he’d felt desire—hers or his? It had been impossible to untangle, but he must have wanted her, because suddenly he could feel the cold from the window again, drawing him outward to the gravel drive, the woods, the snow. Then Frederik was there with his blazing eyes and claiming gaze, the power of his longing bright as a flame, dangerous. The nutcracker felt his resolve soften, turn waxen and easily molded. He thought if he looked at the place where Frederik had touched his shoulder, he might see the deep depressions of Frederik’s fingers still there, the emphatic divot of his thumb. The nutcracker’s thoughts of the road and what might lie beyond faded.
Down the stairs they went. The house was already filling with guests for the last evening of Nachtspel. How luminous they all were, how sharp in their lines, how needful their eyes as they looked at him in his false uniform and saw a lost son, a lover, a friend, a threat. He managed to greet Clara and Frederik’s parents, execute the appropriate bow.
Frederik called him Josef, and so he was Josef. Clara said she’d met him one afternoon at a sledding party and it was so. Where was he from? Zierfoort. Who was his commanding officer?
“Father,” complained Frederik with a wink at the nutcracker, “do not vex Josef with so many questions. I promised him good food and entertainment, not an interrogation.”
They fed him roast goose and fried dough stuffed with currants. He licked sugar from candied plums, drank coffee spiced with caraway seeds, followed by little cups of wine. The flavors made him feel wild, almost demented, but he knew he mustn’t lose himself. There, in the corner of his vision, the dark blot of the cabinet, propped against the wall like an open casket full of glassy eyes and splayed limbs. And there, Droessen, the clocksmith, the man in velvet who had studied Clara as if he wished to take her apart, who now watched the nutcracker with cold blue eyes.
Another memory came: Droessen reaching into the cabinet. Tell me, the clocksmith whispered. Tell me her secrets.
The nutcracker felt a horrible shame. How easily he’d betrayed Clara, spoken every one of her wishes and desires, described the places they’d visited together, every creature, every magical vista. No torture had been necessary. He’d simply talked. He had not been made to be a soldier but a spy.
He could make no amends for that now. He knew he must hold to the shape of himself, to the desire for the outside just a few steps, just a door or an open window away. Ketterdam—he must remember. But the world began to blur—the scent of perfume, perspiration, Frederik’s arm around his shoulder, Clara’s feverish eyes as they danced. How he knew the steps he could not say, but they spun and spun and she whispered to him, “Take me from this place.”
He kissed her beneath the stairs. He kissed Frederik in the darkened hall.
“Do you love her?” Frederik asked. “Could you love me too?”
He loved them both. He loved no one. In the dark shadows beyond the circle of light cast by the flames of the fire, the nutcracker caught the shine of black eyes, the glint of a tiny crown, and knew it must be the Rat King. My life began with wanting something for myself.
The nutcracker thought of the bend in the road and what might lie beyond it.
One by one the guests departed in their carriages or headed upstairs to fall into their beds.
“He can sleep in my room,” said Frederik.
“Yes,” said the nutcracker.
“I will come to meet you,” murmured Clara.
“Yes,” said the nutcracker.
But he did not go to Frederik’s room. He lingered on the stairs as the candles were extinguished and the lower floors went silent. Then he descended again to the dining room. It was time; the doors that would lead to the rest of the world were a dark shape against the wall, but he needed to see the cabinet once more.
Moonlight poured in through the windows, making the dining room look like the galley of a sunken ship, hidden deep underwater. The cabinet sat silent in the corner. It looked bigger now that the room was empty of people.
He crossed to it slowly, listening to his boots echo in the empty room, smelling the remnants of the fire, the green wood scent of the pine boughs clustered on the mantel and above the windows. As he approached the cabinet, he could see his shape repeated in the glass panels of its doors, a little shadow growing, growing. He peered inside and saw the winter tableau of sugar mice and tiny trees, the soldiers in their rows, the marionettes with their gruesomely tilted heads and limp strings, the dolls sitting listless, cheeks rosy, eyes half-lidded.
“I know you,” he whispered, and touched his fingers to the glass. The perfect little fairies dangling from wires with their filigree wings and their gossamer skirts, wide-hipped Mother Ginger, and the Queen of the Grove with her green skin and silvery antlers.
“I made them all.” The nutcracker whirled to find Droessen watching him from the center of the room. His voice was smooth as buttercream. “Every hinge, every daub of paint. I fashioned the world of her dreaming from the details you told me. And yet it is the toys she loves and not me.” He walked so silently, as if he might be made of feathers or smoke. “Do you admire my handiwork?”
The nutcracker knew he should nod and say that he did, yes, he did, for this was the clocksmith the Rat King had warned him about, the one who had wanted Clara, or her wealth, or her family, or something else entirely for himself. But the nutcracker found it hard to speak.
“I confess,” said the clocksmith, “I am proud. I love to have my creations looked upon, see children smile. I eat the wonder in their eyes. But it seems not even I knew the marvels I might achieve.”
He was close now, and he smelled of tobacco and linseed oil. He smelled familiar.
“I should go,” the nutcracker said, relieved to find he could still speak at all.
Droessen laughed softly. “Where could you possibly have to go?”
“To Zierfoort. To my regiment.”
“You are no soldier.”
I am, thought the nutcracker. No, he scolded himself. You are pretending to be a soldier. It is not the same thing.
The clocksmith laughed again. “You have no idea what you are.”
Josef. That was his name, wasn’t it? Or had it been another guest at the party?
“Who are you?” asked the nutcracker, wishing he could back away, but there was nothing behind him except the glass cabinet. “What are you?”
“A humble tradesman.”
“Why did you make me betray Clara?”
Now a smile split Droessen’s face, and none of the kind ladies and handsome gentlemen who had welcomed the clocksmith into their parlors would have recognized this wolf, his many teeth. “You owe no loyalty to Clara. I made you in my workshop,” he said. “Between your jaws, I placed a child’s finger bone, and then crack.”
The nutcracker shook his head. “You are mad.”
“And you are made of wood.”
The nutcracker splayed his hand over his own chest. “My heart beats. I breathe.”
The clocksmith’s grin widened. “A bellows breathes to grow a fire. A clock ticks. Are those things alive?”
Maybe, thought the nutcracker. Maybe they’re all alive.
“You do not dream,” said the clocksmith. “You do not want. You have no soul. You are a toy.”
I am a toy. The nutcracker felt his heartbeat slow. No. Hadn’t he believed Clara when she’d said he was a prince who loved her? Hadn’t he believed it when Frederik claimed the nutcracker was his soldier to command? Both of those things had been true. Neither of them had been true. Then perhaps he was a toy but also alive.
The Rat King had warned him: your desire must be stronger.
“I want … ,” began the nutcracker. But what did he want? He could not quite remember. How had all of this begun? “I was—”
The clocksmith leaned closer. “You were a baby I took from a foundling home. I fed you on sawdust until you were more wood than boy.”
“No,” said the nutcracker, but he felt his belly fill with wood chips, his throat choke with dust.
“You were a child I stole from a sick ward. Where you had tendons, I wound string. Where you had bones, I fixed wood and metal. You screamed and screamed until I took your vocal cords and made your throat a hollow I might fill with silence or any words I liked.”
The nutcracker crumpled to the ground. He could not cry out for help. His head was empty. His chest was empty. His mouth was bitter with the taste of walnuts.
Now Droessen leaned over the poor broken toy. He seemed too large, too tall, too far away, and the nutcracker knew that his own body was shrinking.
“You were an idea in my head,” said the clocksmith. “You were nothing, and to nothing you will return when I think of you no more.”
The nutcracker looked into Droessen’s pale blue eyes and he recognized the color. He painted my eyes to look like his. The nutcracker felt the idea of himself fading as he understood that he was only Droessen. That he had only ever been Droessen.
Over the clocksmith’s shoulder, he glimpsed the moonlit drive and the snow-covered fields beyond. The road winding … where? To a city? To Ketterdam? He longed to see it—the twisting canals, all the crooked houses packed together. He imagined the city rooftops crowded up against one another, the boats on the water, fishmongers calling to their customers. It didn’t matter. It was not enough. I am a toy. I need nothing but a shelf to wait upon.
He felt himself lifted, but the clocksmith did not place him back in the cabinet. Instead he strode toward the fire. The nutcracker wondered if Clara and Frederik would weep for him.
Then the clocksmith grunted, cursed. The world spun as the nutcracker found himself falling. He hit the floor with a terrible crack.
Click, click, click. The nutcracker heard the skitter of claws over wood, followed by a chorus of squeaks. Rats poured from the walls, crawling in a wriggling flood up the clocksmith’s trousers. He kicked and batted at them, stumbling backward.
“Remember yourself,” said a high reedy voice at the nutcracker’s ear. The Rat King tipped his crown.
I am a toy, thought the nutcracker. I remember my maker leaning over me, a paintbrush in his hand, the concentration on his face as he completed this gift for the girl he hoped to beguile. The nutcracker had been cursed from the start. If only he’d been made by a generous hand. If only he’d had a true father.
“That’s the way, Captain,” cried the Rat King.
“Get away, you vile things!” Droessen snapped, kicking out at the squirming creatures.
A father. The nutcracker felt his fingers bend. Someone kind, who wanted nothing from his son but that he might find his own happiness. The nutcracker stretched his legs. Someone who wanted the world for him, instead of a place on a shelf. A father.
The nutcracker lifted his head. Droessen was striding back toward him, but he was no longer a giant.
The nutcracker thought of the road again, but now he saw the road was a future—one his father would want him to choose for himself. He imagined the snow in his hair, the ground beneath his boots, the limitless horizon, a world full of chance and mishap and changing weather—gray clouds, hail, thunder, the unexpected. A new sound echoed in his rising chest, a round thump, thump, thump.
There would be woods along that road, animals in them, a river floating with ice, pleasure boats tethered with their sails trussed for the winter. He would grow hungry on that road. He would require food. He would eat cabbage rolls and gingerbread and drink cold cider. His stomach rumbled.
“I should have burned you as kindling the day I made you in my shop,” the clocksmith said. But it was too late. The nutcracker rose and met his gaze, eye to eye.
“You couldn’t,” said the nutcracker. “You loved me too much.” It was not true. But Clara had made him a prince through the power of her desire; he could desire too.
Droessen laughed. “It seems you have a gift for fancy.”
“You are my father,” said the nutcracker.
“I am your maker,” snarled the clocksmith.
“You breathed life into me with all the love in your heart.”
The clocksmith shook his head, took a step backward as the nutcracker advanced. “I crafted you with skill. Determination.”
“You gave me your eyes that I might see.”
“No.”
“You gave me to Clara that she might wake me like a prince in a fairy tale, to Frederik so I might learn the ways of war.”
“You were my messenger!” gasped the clocksmith. “My spy and nothing more!” But his voice sounded strange and small. He stumbled as if he could not quite make his legs work.
“You dreamed a son,” said the nutcracker, his need driving him on. “No clumsy clockwork, but a boy who might learn, a boy with a will and wishes of his own.”
Droessen gave a strangled cry and toppled to the floor in a wooden clatter, his limbs stiff, his mouth twisting, his teeth bared.
“You wanted only that I might live,” said the young man as he knelt to look at the crumpled doll lying in a heap on the floor. “You would have sacrificed your own life to make it so.”
He picked up Droessen, cradled him gently in the crook of his arm. “That’s how much you loved me, Father.” He opened the door to the cabinet and placed the charming little doll with its pale blue eyes inside. “Enough to give your life for mine.”
The young man left silently through the front door of the house and headed east along the road, toward the sun rising in the gray sky.
At the beginning of everything, he discovered loneliness in the quiet of his own thoughts. He felt the echoes of longing in his fast-beating heart—an ache for Clara, for Frederik.
Then all of that was gone. Unwatched and alone, he took his first steps on the snowy path. He was nameless again, with no one to move his limbs or offer him direction, with no one to dictate his next step but himself.
Back at the house by the lake, the Zelverhauses, their guests, and the servants slumbered on. They did not wake until nearly noon, when they stumbled from their beds, minds still clouded with peculiar dreams. They found the front door to the house had been left open and snow had blown into the entryway. There were two sets of tracks leading to the road.
Clara’s father and friends took the horses and found Clara an hour later, miles from the house, half-dressed, feet bare, lips blue from the cold.
“He wasn’t supposed to leave without me,” she wept as her father bundled her onto his mount. “Where is my winged horse?”
“There, there,” he said. “There, there.”
Unfortunately, by the time the party returned, the whole house was awake to witness Clara stumbling up the front steps in nothing but her nightdress and her father’s coat, her face swollen from weeping, her hair a dark tangle. It had been discovered that Droessen had departed sometime in the night, and soon there were whispers of a midnight assignation, a mad infatuation, all made more scandalous by that faint, intoxicating whiff of the unsavory that had followed the clocksmith everywhere from the start. The rumors grew worse when days, then weeks passed and Droessen’s shop remained shuttered. No one seemed to remember the young soldier in his bright blue uniform.
Clara took to her bed, and there she remained for a month, speaking to no one and refusing to eat anything but marzipan. She wanted only to sleep and dream of dancing with her prince and taking flight with the Queen of the Grove. But eventually she could make herself sleep no longer and she’d had her fill of almond paste.
She rose, bathed, and came down to breakfast to find that her reputation was in ruins. Clara didn’t care. She could not imagine marrying some ordinary merchant’s son or choosing to live in one gray world for the rest of her life. She considered her options and decided there was nothing for it but to become a writer. She sold her pearl earrings and moved to Ketterdam, where she took a small apartment with a window facing the harbor so that she could watch the ships come and go. There, she wrote fantastical tales that charmed children, and under another name, she penned rather more lurid works that kept her in nougat and sweet cream, which she always took care to share with the mice.
One morning she woke to hear that someone had broken into the clocksmith’s shop and stolen all his wares. She put on her coat and made her way down to east Wijnstraat where a crowd of onlookers had gathered as stadwatch officers stood around, scratching their heads. A woman who lived across the canal claimed she’d seen a man enter the shop late the previous night.
“A soldier he was,” she said. “Dressed all in uniform. And when he came out, he wasn’t alone. He led a whole parade down the street. Lords and ladies in velvet finery, a boy with wings. I even heard a lion roar.”
Her husband shuffled her away quickly, claiming his wife had been sleeping poorly of late and must not have realized she was dreaming. Clara returned home, a new idea for a story tugging at her thoughts, and stopped only to buy some caramels and a bag of orange sours.
When Frederik graduated from school, he took up the family business and boarded one of his father’s vessels to fetch a shipment of tea from Novyi Zem. But when it was time to return home, he hopped another ship, and then another, stopping in ports only long enough to mail a postcard or, occasionally, a parcel. He sent home a packet of tea that made a flower bloom beneath the drinker’s tongue; another that, when sipped before bedtime, assured you would dream of the city of your birth; and a blend so bitter one sip would make you cry for three hours. Frederik’s parents wrote letters begging him to return and take up his responsibilities. Every time, he vowed to do just that. But then the wind would change direction and the sea would lift, and he would find himself shipboard once more, certain another world must wait beyond the next horizon.
So the Zelverhaus family was disgraced and their empire was left without an heir. The house on the lake grew quiet. After that strange night and the gossip that followed, Althea and her husband threw no more parties and visitors were rare. At the few quiet dinners they hosted, guests left early, eager to be out of the dining room where they had once enjoyed themselves so freely, but where they now had the sense of being watched by someone or something that meant to do them harm.
On such a night, after another lackluster dinner, Althea Zelverhaus drifted aimlessly through her grand home. The hour was late. She hadn’t bothered with a dressing gown, but wore only her cotton nightdress, and with her hair down, she might have been mistaken for her daughter. She thought about answering Clara’s latest letter or opening the strangely marked parcel Frederik had sent from some foreign clime. But when midnight struck, she found herself standing in the dining room, before the glass cabinet.
After the clocksmith’s disappearance, her husband had wanted to take an axe to it and all of its contents, but Althea had claimed it would only lend credence to the rumors, and the cabinet had remained in its corner, gathering dust.
Something was missing from its shelves, she felt sure of it, but she couldn’t say what.
Althea opened the cabinet door. She reached past the sugar mice and fairies to the small, ugly doll she had never noticed before. There was something familiar in the jut of his chin, the smart cut of his velvet coat. She ran her finger down one tiny lapel. Now that she looked closer, his angry little face held a certain charm.
Are you my soldier? she crooned in the quiet of the moonlight. Are you my prince? She opened her mouth to laugh at herself, but the sound never came. She clutched the doll closer.
Are you my darling? she whispered as she began to climb the stairs.
The clock chimed softly. Somewhere in the house she could hear her husband snoring.
Are you mine?