“Of course. You two go ahead. I’ll follow in a moment. I’ll take a quick look at the doll to see what I’m up against.”
Marie and her father had made it almost to the ballroom when Mrs. Stahlbaum met them. “Where’s Drosselmeier? The guests are asking about him.”
“You left him alone with a bag of tools and a broken doll!” she cried after they explained. “Am I the only sensible person in this household?” She shook her head in exaggerated frustration and sent Marie to fetch the inventor.
Feeling no need to knock, as the door was cracked open, Marie quietly stepped inside. She paused to watch as Drosselmeier untied the doll’s handkerchief-bandage and stared down at the toy a long moment.
“You’ve had a rough time of it, haven’t you, lad?” With a sad smile, he gently touched the nutcracker’s broken jaw. “Did I do wrong in bringing you here?”
The doll’s face shifted slightly, as if a shake of the head was caught before the head could fully turn. A single tear slid from its blue eyes.
Marie gasped.
Drosselmeier jerked around. “Marie!”
She gaped at the doll, then at her godfather. “His face…it moved.”
Drosselmeier put the doll down on the desk and caught Marie’s arm as she hurried to it. He blocked her way. “Forgive me, Marie. It was a touch of magic, that’s all.”
She tried to get around him, but he gently prevented her.
“But his face, I saw it move. There’s always some expression in his eyes, but this—” There was something magic about the doll, she knew it. She’d known it all along. Why had no one else seen it?
“The merest bit of magic.” Drosselmeier’s face creased in distress. “All I can conjure. It helps with the fixing. Please, Marie, don’t mention this to the others.”
Her heart fell as her hand slipped from her godfather’s. “Only your magic?” What about all the other times she’d seen such life-like expressions in the doll’s eyes? They couldn’t all be residual magic from her godfather’s touch.
“Only a touch of…of mine, yes.”
Her stomach clenched as Mouserinks’s words echoed in her ears. “You don’t use magic.”
He startled at her tone and took her by the shoulders, his gaze intense. “Not in the way the magicians do. Not like Mouserinks, whatever he may say. You must believe me.”
Her twisted insides began to uncoil at his fierce denial. She knew that fierceness well, and the integrity that fed it. “I do. But what is it you’re not saying?”
She kept her gaze fixed on him, and after a moment, he looked away, sighing. “You know my position on magic. Even though I acknowledge some humans have a small, natural capacity for it—myself included—because I say we shouldn’t make deals with the magical creatures to gain more magic, people would harangue me for using magic at all, if they found out. You know how some people are.”
Marie knew this, but what about the doll? She narrowed her eyes at him. Drosselmeier said nothing.
“Please don’t say anything,” he said at last, pain lining his face. “It’s for the best.”
Regret and sympathy stabbed Marie’s tender heart. Stifling her curiosity, she took his hand. “I didn’t mean to distress you. Forgive me. I do trust you, and I won’t say anything.”
The nutcracker was fixed. So was his face. Not a hint of expression lingered in his eyes. Despite the lateness of the hour at which the party ended, Drosselmeier stayed to repair the doll and fix a malfunctioning clock. After he left, Marie did a quick sketch to reveal any expression in the doll’s eyes she might have missed. But there wasn’t one. Unless, it was a shuttered look that taunted her tonight.
“I will discover your secret,” she warned the nutcracker as she set it atop her waist-high, glass cabinet of dolls. She sighed as his face remained blank. “If you have one. Perhaps I’m the one acting strangely. Talking to a doll.”
The nutcracker, with the white handkerchief back around his head for the night, stared blankly. Perhaps the little sword, taken from one of her brother’s toy soldiers and inexplicably added by Drosselmeier to the nutcracker’s uniform, had inspired the doll’s soldierly stoicism. Marie shook her head at the thought, her eyes drooping. She really needed sleep.
As she undressed, Mouserinks’s note fell from her sleeve to the rug. Ignoring it, she slipped into her nightdress and brushed out her hair, not bothering to pick it up until she made her way to her bed. She laid it on the nightstand, unopened, and burrowed under her covers.
But her hand refused to snuff out the candle.
It wouldn’t hurt to see what Mouserinks had to say.
Dear MS,
I saw the indignation in your eyes last night when I spoke of your godfather’s behavior. Forgive me, but I believe he is suffering and hiding it from those he loves best. I know what influence you have with him. I beg you to speak to him. Though we disagree on many matters, Drosselmeier is a worthy opponent, and sometimes ally, among the king’s council.
Please believe me when I say I seek only his benefit, and that of his nephew. If you are still opposed to me, then burn my letters and forget I ever spoke of it. But the consequences will be on your own head.
Yours truly,
MR
Marie huffed and tossed the letter onto the nightstand. She would rather burn both messages and forget his insinuations. She threw back the covers, slid her feet into her slippers, marched to her desk, where she removed the first note from her sketchpad, and tossed both letters into the low fire. She watched with satisfaction as the grayish sheets browned and shriveled.
Wrinkling her nose against an odd scent mingling with that of burning paper, she dove back under the covers. The only thing she remembered after her head touched the pillow was that she’d forgotten to remove her slippers.
Chapter 4
THE ARMY WAS coming. Her bewitched house mice led by that cruel Mouse King with his seven crowned heads. Was it the clicking of their claws over the wooden floor that woke her? Or the grandfather clock striking the hour? Or was she awake at all?
Marie opened her eyes, her gaze following a moonlit path from where it slipped between a gap in her curtains like a thin footpath widening until blocked by the wooden planks of her floor. Just beyond that moonlit road, the clicking of claws drew her notice. A line of mice scurried from the fireplace, a grayish tint to its low flame, toward her doll cabinet. One started up the wood trim.
She shuddered and almost drew the covers over her head, but a sudden thought sent her gaze to the top of the cabinet. The nutcracker! They might smell the pecans Fritz had cracked with it and try to eat it.
Marie pushed the covers aside and tried to sit up, but the room shifted, forcing her to lie back down. That odd scent from when she’d burned the letters crashed into her awareness, stronger than before, and wreaked havoc on her stomach. She pushed up again, managing to sit up and slide her legs over the side of the bed. She checked the rug for mice and moved to stand. Something didn’t feel right. Why was the floor getting larger? Her stomach lurched. She was falling.
Marie screamed as she hit the rug, her feet stinging with the bad landing. The braided rug’s rounds spread before her like waves waiting to crest. Apparently, she hadn’t woken after all, for she was no bigger than a doll, and not much taller than the mouse watching her from the rug’s edge.
Backing away, she searched for a dropped button or needle or anything to fight with, but her floor was clean. “Calm down, Marie. This is only a dream. And you’re not afraid of mice.”
The mouse lifted its nose as it sniffed the air. The tip of its nose was as high as her head. Her heart thumped. She wasn’t afraid of mice…but they’d never been this big before.
The mouse started toward her, and Marie ran. She stumbled on the uneven rug and fell to her knees. The mouse barreled toward her, sure to trample her if it didn’t eat her. She scrambled up and dashed for the draping fabric of her bedcovers. Could she climb to safety?
She stumbled
again at the pop of a firing gun and the squeal of a mouse. The mouse pursuing her reeled from another hit, and her bedroom roared with the sounds of battle: the beating of a drum, the boom of guns, the yelling of soldiers, the screaming of mice.
Her brother’s tin soldiers filed in from his adjoining room, stiff yet mobile. Her own toy soldiers already battled an army of gray mice. A brown-haired drummer no taller than she beat an advance. Smoke from rifles drifted into the air. A cannon boomed, its shot scattering a line of mice. The soldiers—her soldiers—ran forward, led by the nutcracker doll.
Something sweeter than wonder filled her, pushing out her fear. The nutcracker wore her handkerchief around his arm like a knight going into battle. His gaze, so very alive and full of purpose, found hers before he turned away and waved a command to his soldiers. A few broke off from the line and started toward her.
Marie watched as the nutcracker and his troops advanced against the mice, feeling a bit like a princess watching her noble knight fighting a dragon for her. Then a mouse started toward her. Before she had time to be afraid, the tin soldiers dispatched it, circled around her, and began to clear a path for her toward the base of the doll cabinet.
As they pressed forward, Marie vaguely wondered when her dream would turn against her, as they so often did, forcing her to wake just before a monster caught her. Would she talk to the nutcracker before she woke? It was her soldiers who cheered and the mice who screamed in defeat—this dream might not betray her. And he was almost within reach, conferring with his officers at the cabinet’s base, not ten paces away.
But then one of her own soldiers cried and waved wildly toward the fireplace. The Mouse King stepped from the flames and passed into the foray. Standing upright, clothed in a black cloak and bearing a long, curved sword, he cut his way through a group of tin soldiers, his seven hideous heads hissing and spitting and spinning this way and that.
She’d been wrong. The dream would turn on her.
Marie’s heart thudded against her ribs, and her gaze met the nutcracker’s. She thought she saw fear, and determination. She’d never seen those there before. He turned away and shouted to the soldiers, many deserting him for her, and charged ahead toward the Mouse King.
She yelled at the soldiers rushing toward her to go back and help, but they heeded not a word of hers. She waved frantically to the battle, where the victory she’d once been sure of seemed to be slipping into the claws of the mice, but the soldiers stood firmly around her. Her hands fell limp and useless to her sides. The toys had their orders and would not disobey them, and she had no weapon or training to help in their place.
Inspired by the arrival of their lord, the mice pushed back the tin soldiers, driving Marie and her guards closer to the cabinet. The ranks between her and the mice thinned. Over the pounding of her heart, Marie felt her waking approach, saw the likely cause of it storming toward her.
The Mouse King broke through her outer ring of soldiers, tossing her guards aside with one hand and wielding his long sword against them with his other. Her soldiers pushed against her, urging her to climb up the cabinet, but she planted her feet. What was the point of running? She never escaped in her dreams.
The clang of tin on wood reverberated around her as the soldiers took the Mouse King’s blows and fell. He threw one into the cabinet behind her, cracking the glass. She wrapped her arms around her waist, begging her limbs to hold their ground even as the odor of mouse filled her nostrils. The Mouse King raised his sword against her last guard and reached out a clawed paw to snatch her.
Then her nutcracker jumped—jumped, fluidly, not like the lumbering soldiers—in front of her guard, blocking the Mouse King’s strike and shoving him back. The king’s hiss, echoed by his bewitched army, sent a tremor down Marie’s spine. He lunged forward and engaged with the nutcracker in a fierce ringing of sword against sword. The soldiers and mice gave way for them as if knowing this was the battle that would decide their fate.
The nutcracker stumbled, and Marie’s heart fair stopped. It may only be a dream, but she had to save him. Marie looked over her floor, at the fallen soldiers and mice. No weapons presented themselves. She stared down at one of her fallen guards, its body stiff and toy-like again. The trembling of her hands worsening at each clash of the swords, Marie knelt beside the soldier and tugged at his sword. It wouldn’t budge, having melded back against the soldier when it fell.
She tugged again, but her hands slipped over the smooth metal and she tumbled backward to the floor. Her gaze caught something gray scurrying from one of the Mouse King’s crowns. A tiny mouse ran down the black cloak, jumped to the floor, and darted toward her.
Marie surged to her feet as the nutcracker yelled, “Kill it. Don’t let it near her!” His remaining soldiers hurried forward, but the king’s did the same, diverting their attention. The tiny mouse slipped between them all.
Marie kicked at the mouse, dancing back and forth to avoid its sharp teeth. Off to her left, where her nutcracker and the Mouse King fought—moving nearer to her with each stroke—she heard a laugh and the king’s hissing faerie tongue. The sounds flowed past her, somehow resolving into known words in her mind.
“There’s no escaping, Miss Stahlbaum. You’re coming with me.”
“I am not,” Marie said with a growl as she tried stomping on the mouse.
A grunt and a horrible scraping sounded from her left as the nutcracker leaped backward over a fallen soldier and kicked it into the Mouse King. The faerie lord stumbled back but righted himself.
“I grow tired of this game, doll maker. You’re both coming with me now.” One of his heads disappeared.
Marie screamed as the tiny mouse at her feet began to grow. Before her scream ended, the Mouse King, one-headed, stood in front of her. He grabbed her wrist, and she slapped him.
“Marie!” her nutcracker yelled as the one-headed Mouse King slung Marie over his shoulder.
She pounded his back through his thick cloak, but then her ears caught a yelp from the nutcracker as he barely avoided the six-headed Mouse King’s blade. She stilled. She had to get ahold of herself and think. One-Headed was carrying her toward the fireplace, and Six-Headed was driving her nutcracker that way too. It must be the portal to his faerie realm. How could she keep them from reaching it?
“The crown,” her nutcracker yelled. “Knock off his crown.”
Marie grabbed the Mouse King’s heavy cloak, gathered it, and flung it over his head. His crown tumbled off. He stumbled as she writhed about, further unbalancing him, and they fell forward.
He released her as they hit the floor. She scooted away and kicked him as he grabbed for her. The clang of metal on metal ringing in her ear, she shrank back, trapped between him and the flying swords of Six-Headed and her nutcracker.
One-Headed groped for his crown. She pushed to her feet and kicked his arm away from it. He sprang up, a strange shimmer about him, and lunged for her. She faltered as she spun away and fell to the right.
A cold, hard hand, feeling oddly of painted wood, caught her elbow. A sword passed beside her, into One-Headed.
A howl of rage echoed from the six-headed Mouse King, and five gray mice ran down his cloak and plopped to the floor. He sprang forward. The nutcracker shoved Marie aside and parried the Mouse King’s blow. Distracted by his anger, the Mouse King let the nutcracker’s next stroke come so near that it should have grazed his arm, but neither he nor the fabric of his cloak seemed to notice.
The nutcracker stumbled over one of the mice. Desperate to distract the faerie, Marie snatched off her slipper and hurled it at the Mouse King, knocking askew one of his crowns. The air around him shimmered as the crown toppled off. Cursing, he swung wildly at the nutcracker, but the nutcracker parried the blow and rammed his sword through the Mouse King’s chest.
The faerie king screamed and lurched toward Marie. Horror struck her at the sight of the sword piercing his chest. She ran blindly. She tripped over a tin soldier and fell into the broken
glass of the cabinet, and knew no more.
Chapter 5
THE FIRST THING Marie felt upon waking wasn’t the warm sunlight of Christmas morning streaming through her window, but the sting of a cut and the pressure of fabric pressed against her wrist, right where it hurt. The acrid odor of gun powder and smoke tainted the air. Marie let out a relieved breath.
She’d woken in her dream, and surely in a dream world where tin soldiers fought overgrown mice, a nutcracker doll could talk. And she had so much to ask him. Who was he really? Why did he come alive at Godfather’s touch? Was he a prince under a curse? Could she free him? Why did the Mouse King want them?
But when she opened her eyes, it wasn’t the sturdy, wooden nutcracker that stepped lightly away from her, but a man. A tall man, familiar in a way, like a younger version of her godfather, with thick brown hair instead of gray tied back at the nape of his neck. His jaw was square, though not outlandishly so as the nutcracker’s, but in a strong, manly sort of way, and he wore an elegant suit fit for a day at the king’s court. He had the same blue eyes as her nutcracker.
And her in her nightclothes and her hair in wild disarray. Blushing, Marie instinctively reached down to smooth her nightgown, but when she touched it, her fingers reminded her she was in a dream. In place of her nightgown was an elegant, light blue gown that matched the man’s darker blue suit and light waistcoat.
The prince’s mouth—for who could he be but a cursed prince?—quirked into a smile at her wonder, and he held out his hand.
“Who are you?” Marie asked as she took his hand, allowing him to help her rise. Could she trust answers from a dream? But then, something about this night did not seem like a dream. The sensations of pain and smell and sight were too real. Yet surely it was only a dream.
“I am the nutcracker, but,” he added quickly, “more than that I cannot tell you.”
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