The Toymaker's Apprentice (34 page)

TIME FROZE.
Stefan's nightmares hovered before him. Seven heads, seven mouths, seven curses on their lips.

And then Marie's slipper slammed into the King with a loud crack.

The heads wailed in pain.

“Charlemagne
!
” the center head cried.

One of the heads lolled to the side, spilling its crown like a coin.

“She broke his neck,” another of the voices moaned. “He's dead.”

Bile rose in Stefan's throat.

Five faces roared. The Mouse King threw himself at Marie, teeth bared.

Stefan moved. Sweeping his leg across the floor, he kicked out at the mouse and pulled himself up to a sitting position.

Marie fled into the kitchen, blocking the attack with a heavy wooden door.

“Stay in there, Marie
!
” Stefan shouted.

The Mouse King turned back toward Stefan. They faced each other in the sputtering firelight. And then the beast darted into the shadows once more.

Stefan backed away from the fireplace. Away from the Christmas tree. The damp floor no longer rustled. He couldn't see or hear a thing. Worse, he couldn't find the golden key.

“Murderer
!
” The many voices echoed from everywhere at once. “You killed our brother
!
”

Sskit
!
A blade sliced the buckle from his left boot. Stefan stumbled. He kicked out with a foot and connected.

The Mouse King gasped and was gone. “No
!
” a thin voice cried. “Alexander
!
”

Then panting, and moans of pain.

“He is killing us
!
” a single voice whined. “Do something, Arthur
!
Hannibal
!
Or we will die
!
”

“Then we shall die well,” a gruff voice replied.

A fresh wave of terror pushed Stefan to move. Where was Christian's weapon? In the mirror on the wall, he caught a gleam of metal by the fire.

There, beneath the fallen sofa. He raced past the hearth to retrieve the golden key.

The wet smack of boots on sodden paper rushed toward him from behind. A voice bellowed with strength beyond its size.

“For. Our. Mother
!
” The Mouse King dove forward.

Stefan swung his weapon around.

King and key collided in the smoke-filled air.

He buried the metal shaft into the monster's chest.

The room grew still.

The bellowing heads sagged and the Mouse King grasped the key in two paws, struggling to free himself.

Stefan did the only thing he could think to do. With a sharp twist, he wound the key.

A thin wail rose from the body of the Mouse King as the unwinding key sang with his breath. A simple tune, played backward. Something a mother might hum to her newborn baby.

“Treachery,” one of the heads whispered.

The music played louder.

“No,” another head sighed.

In a slow spiral, each head grew still until only the one in the center remained, staring unblinkingly into Stefan's eyes.

With small paws he felt the stem of the key where it had entered his chest. “I tried, Mother,” he said wearily.

Stefan was mortified. This was not what he had expected. “I'm so sorry,” he said, and sank to his knees, lowering the King to the ground.

The mouse shrugged his back, arching in pain. “Ah . . . My brothers . . . are gone. I must follow. Please . . . tell your father. I would have liked . . . to have been . . . his friend.” He sighed, and the bellows inside the handle of the key expanded. The holes in the stem wailed like reeds in the wind. “I forgive you,” he whispered to Stefan. “I . . . release you. I release us all . . .”

The last echo of his voice played back through the key.

The air in the room shimmered around them as the Queen's royal curse was torn asunder.

Arthur was dead.

THE BODY DROPPED
from the end of the unwinding key.

Stefan released it quickly, frightened by what he had done. He staggered to his feet, eyes still on the strange corpse on the floor.

Marie had emerged from the kitchen. She touched his arm.

Their eyes locked. “Stefan, you're changing.”

He could feel it, like sap running through his veins. His wooden skin was melting back into flesh.

Suddenly, the front door burst open. “We need more water
!
” Christian shouted. “The fire is almost out
!
”

Marie ran for another bucket.

Stefan turned to the clockmaker. “Christian?” His voice was pained.

Christian came forward and stopped short at the sight of the Mouse King and the unwinding key. His blue eye glinted in the firelight. “God in heaven. You're cured
!
”

He strode forward and clasped his cousin by the arms. “Stefan, my dear boy, you've done it. You've broken the curse—” He looked at the fallen figure of the Mouse King. “Somehow . . . Now come, take the body. Show the mice what you have done. We can end this war.”

Stefan shook his head, his newly thawed limbs suddenly cold. “I can't,” he said softly. “I don't want to touch him.”

The murdered King lay where he had fallen, all seven heads tossed brokenly to the side.

Stefan picked up the key. He turned on his cousin in disgust. “What sort of key is this? It didn't just kill him, it
drained
him. It was terrible.”

Christian gently drew the device from his hands. “It's a soul sieve. An unwinding key. A rare clockmaker's tool for unmaking. The Brotherhood wouldn't have given it to us if it hadn't been our last hope.” The filigreed scrollwork on either side of the key was now darkened with blood. Christian pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the key down before putting it back in its sack. “It is a difficult thing, the unmaking of souls.”

Stefan shuddered. “What have I done?”

“What needed doing.” Christian placed a gloved hand on his shoulder. “The work of a clockmaster and a brave man.”

“I should have stuck with toys.”

“Buckets, gentlemen
!
” Marie broke the moment, entering with another sloshing pail for the fires outside.

“Right away.” Christian turned toward the kitchen, then paused. “Stefan, you must show them what you've done.”

Stefan hesitated. Then, with hands of flesh and a wooden heart, he knelt beside the fallen Mouse King.
This is the enemy,
he thought. But all he could see was the one young face in the center of them all.

He had forgiven Stefan with his last breath. But Stefan doubted he'd ever be able to forgive himself.

Lifting the body gently, he carried it outside.

On the steps to the townhouse, his father and Samir were dousing the last of the flames.

“Stefan, you're cured
!
” his father called to him.

Coming toward him, he saw the body in his son's arms.

“Papa.” Stefan stepped to the edge of the stairs. “Did you know him? He asked me to tell you he would have liked to have been your friend.”

Zacharias stared. “My friend? I . . . Mein Gott.” His face went pale. He dropped his bucket to the ground. “Arthur? Little Arthur?”

Stefan's face crumpled, watching his father, the kindest, best man he knew, in mourning yet again. It made him feel very young, and very old at the same time. But, there was still so much to do.

The square was a wasteland of mice and ash. The remnants of the wooden soldiers lay piled in charred, steaming heaps. What mice remained were hard-pressed by Kinyata's band of cats. Still, the small encampment on the far side of the fountain remained.

Stefan and Zacharias descended the steps and carried the broken body across the battlefield. Mouse and cat alike stepped aside as they passed. All were aware of the body in their hands.

“Mouse lords
!
” Stefan called out in a heavy voice.

There was a scuffle inside the tent. At last, the rat emissary that had addressed him appeared, flanked by a white-and-black mouse in a drab brown coat.

“I bring you your King.” Stefan laid his burden on the ground at their feet.

For a moment, he was eye level with the rat. A breath of sadness passed across the creature's face. “Make them stop, rat. This war can do no good.”

The rat said nothing. He nodded to the piebald, who was already signaling for a litter to carry the King's body.

A small horn sounded, and the mouse army broke. Chased by cats and the loss of their King, they fled down into the sewers of Nuremberg. The tent was abandoned, the King carried away by his brethren.

Mice flowed into gutters and cracks in the street. After a moment, the rat followed the body of his King, and the square was empty once more.

Months of fatigue settled on Stefan in an instant. With a tired sigh, he turned and walked slowly back to the townhouse.

His father clasped him to his chest, and Christian patted him on the back.

“Let the boy rest,” Samir said. “We will watch over him.”

Marie stood in the doorway, watching him with concern. She grasped Stefan's hand and tried to lead him to the sofa.

“No.” Stefan pulled away gently. “It's not over yet. Is it?” he asked.

All eyes turned to Christian. The clockmaker rubbed his forehead and sighed. “No. It's not. The King fought like a human. The rest will fight like mice. If we are to spare the city from famine, there is still work to be done. Go home, Stefan. You've done your part. Now the Brotherhood and I will do ours.” Shouldering the sack with the Brotherhood's key inside, the clockmaker took his leave, grimly striding into the night.

“Where is he going?” Marie asked.

“Beneath the city,” Stefan said. “The mice have gone underground. If he opens the walls to the river, their army will be washed away.”

“Drowned, you mean,” Marie said disapprovingly.

Stefan stayed silent. It was, after all, a war.

“And then, will it be finished?” his father asked quietly.

Samir shrugged, placing a hand on the toymaker's shoulder. “Let us hope so.”

CHRISTMAS DAWNED BRIGHT
and cold over a strangely sleeping Nuremberg. A fresh snow had fallen in those deepest hours between midnight and sunrise, blanketing the city in a sheet of sparkling white.

As the sun rose, households came awake, fires were stoked, and children ran downstairs to tell their parents of the strange dreams that had visited them in the night. The parents, however, had slept dreamlessly, the most restful sleep they'd had since they were very young.

Smoke curlicued from chimney stacks, joining puffy clouds in the sky.

A small gray dove made an arc through the air over the cobblestoned squares of the city. Above the black trees, it flew over the iron gate of the cemetery, where a sad-faced man laid bright tulips at the door of a crypt. Had the dove been given more than paint for eyes, it would have seen that the flowers had been carved from the coats of wooden soldiers. Their only perfume was faint smoke. But the dove flew on. Smooth wingbeats carried it skimming over rooftops, brushing wingtips against the winter-barren trees, its shadow gliding over the pristine snow. It was as if the city had been erased in the night and redrawn with only houses and the barest outlines of the natural world.

Onward the dove glided, past a squat man in a heavy coat, one of a very few people running errands this early on Christmas
morning. Over the empty stalls of the Kindlesmarkt, above the silent steps of the great university with its stone clock tower it flew, and on to the square at Englestrasse, where the fine houses and lawns slept peacefully beneath their frosted quilt.

Here it passed the squat man again, entering the back of a house on the square, ushered in through the servants' door by a man with hair nearly as white as the snow.

The dove completed its arc smoothly, swooping down to the house on Englestrasse to land in the hands of a young man standing on the roof.

Stefan caught the dove with cold fingers and examined the seals on its wings. Wooden wings, but fingers of flesh and bone. He could not decide which was more remarkable. The dove had flown well this time. Even better than the version he'd set aloft on the Danube. The wintry air hadn't compromised the clockworks inside. And yet, he was worried. Why had Gullet just slipped in through the Stahlbaums' back door?

Unlike his own home, the Stahlbaums' roof had a terrace for taking the sun in summer. He could imagine Marie's family sipping lemonade and looking down on the square below.

Stefan put the dove back in his coat pocket and stood for a moment, looking out onto the sea of white-capped roofs. His father had gone to visit his mother's grave. This view above the city was his own way of remembering her.

The air was crisp and sharp. He breathed it in, feeling older and tired, but very much alive.

Behind him, the door opened.

“I thought there was something odd about that bird,” Marie said, coming out onto the landing. She was dressed for the day
and bundled in her father's greatcoat. “Merry Christmas, Stefan. May I join you?”

“Please.”

She stepped up to the wrought-iron railing beside him and shoved her hands into her drooping sleeves. The coat was much too big for her, but she wore it like it was her own. Stefan's own coat fit him perfectly, at last.

“Strange,” she said. “How normal everything looks in daylight.”

The snow had covered much of the night's damage. Samir and Zacharias had cleared the street of debris. The scorched pavement left by the burning toy soldiers and the war-ravaged lawn in the square center would have been apparent, however, if not for this fortuitous snowfall.

“I'm sure the Brotherhood had something to do with it,” Stefan said. He pulled the dove from his pocket again and began to fiddle with it. “Do you know why Gullet is here?”

Marie shrugged. “Is that the toad of a man who's come to visit Uncle Christian? I gather he wanted to get a look at me.”

“At you? Why?” Stefan said.

Marie shoved against him with her shoulder. “Again with the flattery. Honestly, Stefan, it takes an army of mice for you to say anything a girl might want to hear.”

Stefan cringed, but found he was smiling. “Sorry. You know what I meant.”

She gave him an arch look. “Well, Herr Gullet is interested in my role in last night's affair. It seems no one has been able to talk to the cats in quite some time.”

“But you didn't really—” he began.

She shrugged, smiling like the proverbial cat with tail feathers already in its mouth. “Apparently, I did. And it's earned me some sort of scholarship.”

Stefan put the dove away one more time. “What are you saying?”

Marie broke into a grin and grabbed his hands. “I'm going to the Pagoda Tree
!
To study animals and kingdoms and cats and everything. I don't know how Herr Gullet did it, but he's impressed my father. And Christian . . . well, he's working on Mother as we speak. But he'll convince her, I know it. I'm going to be a part of your world
!
”

Stefan allowed her to swing him around, a happy circle that stopped suddenly when he dropped her hands. “Marie. This world, it's not as wonderful as it might sound. Last night we did horrible things.”

Marie grew serious. “Stefan Drosselmeyer, you dolt.
Why
do you think we did horrible things? Because we didn't
know
any better. Ignorance is the refuge of the . . . ignorant. Imagine if we had ambassadors to the other kingdoms. What conflicts we could avoid. All of this might have been resolved by negotiation long ago. Before pride and accidents got in the way. Honestly, I finally meet a boy and he's dumb as a stump.”

“Hey,” Stefan snapped back. “No tree jokes.”

Marie's glare was hot enough to melt snow. And then she laughed.

He couldn't help but laugh, too. They collapsed against each other until they sighed and stopped, Marie's cheek pressed against his chest.

His arm went around her waist as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “The Pagoda Tree,” he said softly.

“Yes.” Her glossy brown hair smelled of orange blossoms. “If the universe truly is a clock, perhaps knowledge is the key that winds it.”

Stefan buried his nose in her hair, breathing in the scent of spring on Christmas Day. “Thank you,” he said.

Marie's impish face was mere inches from his own. “For what?”

“For this.”

He leaned in and kissed her, and she kissed him back, and Christmas, and the world, went on for a little while without them.