by Kayla Bashe
Subtly, Mathilde nodded.
"That battle—all the excitement—please, can't you take me somewhere to rest for a while?"
"I'll hold audience again as soon as I can manage," Mathilde told everyone, and lead Clara away. The Red Prince part of her moved with impeccable baring and perfect posture. Inwardly, however, she sagged with relief.
*~*~*
The two of them ended up in one of Mathilde's rooms, which had been turned into an office for the war effort. Mathilde was glad for that small mercy. She couldn't have dealt with having to see something from her childhood—or even worse, something that her father had owned and loved.
"Are you…?" Clara hesitated.
Mathilde shook her head. She swept a pile of papers off the roll-top desk's red leather and sat down with her boots on the kingdom's crest. "It's not about not wanting them to see me weak, it's—I have to be strong for them. They'll want me to go on like always. The flawless Red Prince miraculously returned from the dead to lead the rebuilding effort. I have to mourn as a leader, not as a person. If morale permits I mourn at all."
Clara sat beside her. Her eyes were very blue in the dimly lit room. "When I was a child I thought it must be terribly lonely to be a prince in a storybook."
"And now?"
"Now I know how isolated you must really feel."
"I would talk to Ross sometimes. But then he met Plum. Now they have each other, and I have…my father's monument." And she smiled, albeit bitterly, because she didn't dare stop smiling.
Clara shook her head, vehement. "If I had anything to say about it, you would never have been alone. I dreamed of you when I was a little girl. This, only this. Listening to you. Comforting you. Being your friend." Her warm fingers brushed Mathilde's sleeve.
"And you've done so much for me. More than I would have ever asked of anyone else. More than I would have ever been comfortable asking. You have a truly unselfish heart," she said softly, and, "Clara—"
The Red Prince bowed her head and began to weep. In the space of a moment she was no longer the kingdom's monarch, but Mathilde, whose childhood friends had called her Mattie. A girl of sixteen wearing her father's jacket, hastily tailored in the back of a supply wagon—the stitching crooked at the back, still too big under the armpits, too wide at the wrists. A girl who had prayed for home or death as if they were interchangeable during the years and decades of her exile. Who had not allowed herself to feel this much in far too long.
She clasped Clara's hands until it must have hurt, and Clara—as steadfast as she had been during battle—just stood there, squeezed back, absorbing it all.
At last she stopped crying. Not how she would have liked, with a soft finishing sob or dignified single tear. But with an ugly snort that ricocheted back and forth between hiccups and gasps.
"Mathilde. It's all right," Clara instructed, gently extricating her hands at last. "You need a good cry, I'll bet. Have you got any handkerchiefs?"
She stuck her hands in her pockets and shook her head. "Just—knives—" she managed to reply.
"Well, it's a good thing one of us is sensible." She handed Mathilde her own white handkerchief. It was lace-trimmed, because of course it was, with a perfect little pink-and-cream rosebud stitched in the corner. "There. Blow."
Another undignified honking noise, but a smile had started creeping in at the edges of Mathilde's sorrow. No one else would have dared dub their royal savior, the conduit of the land's innate magic, anything else than perfectly sensible.
"Are you feeling any better, Mathilde? Or perhaps I ought to be calling you the Red Prince as well. I'm only a barrister's daughter."
"Earth is a difficult world to travel to. Something about the planet's rotation eats magic, and your civilization is so backwards, we're lucky we can go there at all. But for all anyone here knows, you're that world's Prime Minister. I'm—" and she said her full name, quickly, before she could stop herself, "Mathilde Aneszka Radegund."
Clara, with her exceptional memory for words, caught the pattern of sounds instantly. "Mathilde Aneszka Radegund," she repeated, dancing around the edge of a smile.
"Again," Mathilde urged, drawing closer, mesmerized by the movement of her rose-pink lips.
"Mathilde Aneszka Radegund—Mattie—"
Before she knew what she was doing or was even aware enough to stop herself, Mathilde leaned in and kissed her.
Stay with me, she pleaded silently, as if Clara could see what she was thinking. I want you. Stay.
One final, heated press of their mouths, and Mathilde regained mastery over her own body. She scrambled back, feeling shocked and humiliated by her lapse of control, with kissing her without having first asked if it was okay to do so. "Clara, I'm so sorry—I don't know what I was thinking—"
Clara silenced her with a gesture. She smacked her lips together experimentally and ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. "Well. That's what kissing is supposed to be like, then. No wonder all the other girls are so fond of it—"
And before Mathilde could so much as lift a finger, Clara was on her in earnest: sweet, innocent, ravenous. Unpracticed, yet fully eager. Her deft hands tangling in Mathilde's hair, un-stroking every careful braid.
"I'll come back to you. I promise," Clara said when she'd caught her breath.
Mathilde nodded. "I'll bring you back. However long it takes to get everything set right again after the rule of Rats, however long it is before I can spare the magic to open a permanent portal back for you and your uncle…I think my advisors will want me to marry as soon as possible, but honesty? I'll be comparing everyone I meet to you. You're brave and funny and clever and you care about people. And about books."
Clara bit her lip. "My mother says…"
"Don't listen to her. Your world is far behind mine in terms of how people are treated, for one thing. For another—do you want to see my library?"
*~*~*
Clara was about to jump to her feet eagerly when she felt a terrible pain in her ankle where the rat had bit her, and a grey, cold fog overtook her whole body.
Much later she was dimly aware of someone—not Mathilde, and she tried to stir in protest at this—picking her up, and then after a while putting her down again; of voices explaining, and a mug of warm tea being pressed to her lips. And then, as the night went on, Clara was aware of nothing at all.
Clara returned to awareness slowly: a pounding pain behind her forehead, sweat prickling everywhere her nightgown touched skin. Her mother was leaning over her bedside, as was Fritz.
"Clara," Fritz said, tears filling his eyes.
He reached out to hold her hand, but their mother guided him back. "Don't touch her, darling, she's still very ill. I don't want you to get sick as well."
Sick? Clara blinked up at them both, confused. "What…what happened?"
"Lots," Fritz said solemnly.
Her mother let out a sigh. "Oh, Clara, darling, we were so worried. We found you in the foyer under the Christmas tree, burning with fever, your foot bleeding everywhere. You must have fallen against the glass cabinet where Fritz's toy soldiers were kept and cut your foot quite badly on the broken glass. You spoke of giant rats, and toy soldiers coming alive, and dancing snowflakes…"
Maybe the bite she'd gotten had been infected. Or poisoned! After all, the rats were excellent at developing poisons and other dangerous chemical weapons. "My doll. Where is she?"
The doll was shattered exactly how Clara remembered, the way Mathilde's emerging had broken the porcelain and torn the fabric.
"She must have fallen during the night. Perhaps Uncle Drosselmeyer can make you a new one. I don't see why not. It's only a doll, after all," her mother said with an elegant laugh.
Clara studied the shattered doll, puzzled. Mathilde's scarf, the one that had grown with her when she emerged from the doll, wasn't there. But if I really was that sick, and didn't know it, could I have only imagined knitting it?
The room widening to a battlefield, the Christm
as tree growing as tall as the sky…
And Mathilde. Her brave charge against the Rat King, her laugh as their sledge flew through the clouds, the way she'd leaned against Clara with trust and love in her eyes. How could she have imagined Mathilde in the grip of fever when she'd never even known anyone like her? Mathilde was so special, so magnificent. She had to be real.
"Can Uncle Drosselmeyer read to me for a bit?" Clara asked, wanting to hear his voice. He'd been there; he would know the truth. Surely he would be able to put her racing mind at rest. After all, he was the one married to the Sugarplum Fairy.
After Fritz extracted many promises from Clara to play toy soldiers when she was better, Clara was left alone.
*~*~*
She rested for a while, waking when her uncle entered.
"Ah! Tales of the Red Prince." He picked up the fine tome from her bookshelf and flipped through its gilded pages, chuckling. "I remember making this up for you…I'm glad you still like it. It does an old man good to know his work will be remembered by the young folk after he's gone."
Clara wanted to jump to her feet but struggled to even lift her head. She settled for the achievement of propping herself up on the pillows. Her heart pounded like an uncontrollable metronome, making the room spin. "But you didn't make it up, Uncle Drosselmeyer. It's true—you were there! You're Ross the Wizard…"
He hazarded a noncommittal, funny gesture. "Perhaps I'll admit to the vanity of basing the character on myself, when I was young and handsome. I did travel widely: Scotland, the Continent, even America. But the only wizardry I've ever wielded is the gift of making toys and crafting tales for my nieces and nephews. Now, what chapter should I start at?"
"The beginning, of course," Clara said, pasting on a small smile to hide her jittering frustration. "Start with 'The Birth of the Red Prince.'" Maybe he didn't want to discuss the kingdoms or his marriage to another man when anyone could pass by her room at any moment, but she trusted him. She knew he wouldn't make her feel completely abandoned.
Clara fell asleep and missed the first few chapters, waking at the start of the fourth.
Her uncle read about how the magician Ross tricked the Red Prince into drinking a sleeping potion, then stranded her in the midst of the city, surrounded by actors who would try to make her believe that she wasn't the real prince.
"It was a mean trick for him to play," Clara said softly, as he turned the page.
"Maybe so. Still, a kingdom is a great responsibility. Not just anyone is worthy of ruling, and it's only through trials that strength is revealed."
"But it wasn't fair. He didn't have to make sure everyone doubted her. Maybe he was more proving his own cleverness than anything else. Proving how smart he was to set up such a complicated scheme. I think it was thoughtless."
"As your allegorical scholars say," he replied breezily, "one passage can have many interpretations."
There was only one interpretation Clara wanted to know about.
Was Ross testing her? Was her seemingly sedate uncle as much of a trickster as his alter ego, that wizardly Ganymede?
She watched him closely as she read, alert to any sign, any wink or smile, that would say: Yes, I know you know the secret. We're in on this together—we're in this together.
But he seemed like just an ordinary uncle reading an ordinary bedtime story to an ordinary young woman. Still, she kept alert, listening as carefully as she could even when exhaustion caused her eyes to flutter closed.
"Uncle…the Sugarplum Fairy isn't actually a girl," she interrupted. "You know that."
"If you say so, Clara. Would you like anything to eat or drink?"
Not the slightest bit of emotion in his voice. He was just humoring his ill niece. Had it really all been a dream?
"Tea, please," Clara said tonelessly. She wanted to believe that the connection she shared with Mathilde had been real. If she concentrated, she could still feel the softness of Mathilde's hair. Of her lips. But when all the evidence seemed to be against her, it was hard to know what to do or think.
*~*~*
As Mathilde recovered further from her long imprisonment in the form of a doll, her kingdom recovered from the long years of war. She spent many hours meditating in the former battlefields, a mug of Lady Tisane's brews in hand, connecting to the land's magic to help fields and rivers from chemical warfare. She visited soldiers who were struggling in the hospitals and let them know that she, too, had shared in their suffering. And even though her relationship with her old friends had been irreversibly altered, the loneliness on her shoulders grew lighter until she no longer felt crushed beneath its weight.
She visited Mother Ginger's grave with Admiral Evans and his bright-eyed son, and he invited her to his estate for dinner. She was even able to get a smile from him by bringing up self-deprecating stories of how she'd failed during basic training; afterwards, Mattie wrote to her every day, full of admiration for his namesake. But there was something—someone—missing. Someone as beautiful as the roses that had started to once again bloom in the palace garden. She confronted her oldest friend in the servants' hallway by the Sugarplum Fairy's quarters—he'd always used that passageway to sneak around.
"Ross. Where's Clara?"
"Clara?" His eye widened in mock confusion. "The human girl, you mean?"
"Yes. My Clara. The only Clara that matters, even if everyone who worked in this palace went by Clara."
He smiled that smile which seemed too wide for his face—which revealed rather too many teeth to be altogether a smile. Suddenly she was reminded that he had never been human.
The Sugarplum Fairy serves the people, but who does Ross serve? The land, only the land—and he does what's best for the kingdom, not its rulers…
No one ever wants to know what's under his eyepatch, not even the Sugarplum Fairy.
Mathilde battled down the urge to grip her saber. "Ross," she said, and with the effort of discipline, met his one-eyed gaze. It felt as if he could peer into every detail of their interactions. For a moment she almost looked away. Then she steadied herself and breathed deeply.
Let him look! I'm fond of her—I have an inkling I'll love her once I know more about her, and I want to know all of her. Her whole jeering, outdated world could hear me sobbing into her shoulder and I bloody well wouldn't care—
Ross's gaze broke from hers. She felt winded, as if he'd set her to run laps around the castle.
He drew his cloak around himself thoughtfully. "You really do mean to look after my niece, then. I've grown fonder of her than I ever thought I could be of a mortal from that backwards dimension—there's more of my soul in her than if I'd fathered her myself."
"You don't trust me with her?" She teased, happy to return to their normal self-deprecating camaraderie.
"I've always known I could trust you with my life…well, if I were mortal and had a life to lose. But an uncle likes to make sure. Let me know if you need a hand with your paperwork. I'm sure I have a spell somewhere to make it faster."
Mathilde snorted. "If I want to lose all concept of how time works, I'll let you know."
It was only afterwards, a hundred pages of recent history later, that Mathilde realized his omission—he'd never told her where Clara was.
*~*~*
"Clara," her mother said one day, when Clara was feeling better and had begun to be up and about. "Clara, listen to me, put your book down—no, really, do put it down. Do make an effort to look like you're listening. Come into the sitting room with me, won't you?"
Clara folded her book.
"No, I didn't say put it on your wrist, I said put it down. Come with me, darling."
She did as she was told and followed her mother. "Yes?"
"Archie—you must remember him from the party—he was here during your convalescence."
"It was very kind of him to look in on me," Clara said, unsure where this was going.
"He asked for your hand in marriage, and I told him that I would give him my blessing
. All that's left is for you to agree to the match. You will, won't you?" She wrung her hands. "Please, Clara. I've been so worried you would be lonely, and with your father dead these past five years it would comfort me greatly to know your future happiness was assured."
If Mathilde isn't real, I should say yes, Clara told herself. I shouldn't disappoint the people who love me. I don't want my mother to cry. Maybe I feel nothing for him, but it's not as if there's anyone else in my life.
She bit her lip, trying to decide how to answer.
Her mother was sitting on the same couch Clara had used as a hiding place when she'd helped Mathilde defeat the Rat King.
As she sat in contemplation, memories of that magical night overtook her. Not just Mathilde, but everything else.
Flying through the clouds, the landscape spread like a snowy quilt below. Using my memory for everything I read to help a leader remember her subjects.
Standing up to the Rat King, even when I thought I could never be brave.
It didn't matter if her encounter with those people, with those places, didn't exist. The courage she'd found within herself would always remain.
Clara folded her hands in her lap, looked down at her dainty brown boots, and did her best to speak calmly, even as her voice shook. "I never question you. Not because I'm scared of your anger, but because I'm frightened of disappointing you. I don't want you to have that sad, lost look in your eyes…the look I saw when Father died. But you keep making decisions for me. You claim it's because you want me to be happy and satisfied with my life—only, Mother, what made you happy at my age makes me feel trapped. I've never wanted to marry. Nor do I care what society thinks of me. I would never, never want to break your heart, Mother. But there are things I must do to preserve my own."
"And Archie?"
Clara swallowed. She didn't dare meet her mother's eyes. Didn't dare look at the disappointed hope within. "He's a perfectly kind and inoffensive boy, and yet…I simply can't marry him. I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me where our judgments differ."