The Toymaker's Apprentice

by Sherri L. Smith

  Stefan paused. This was not going as he had imagined. And each mouse the room-sweepers missed would be a spy for the Queen below. How he proceeded could affect his father’s captivity before Stefan even had a chance to act. If only he had his own silver whistle, like the one Christian had used to clear the barge . . . but it had been lost over the side with its owner.

  “Sire,” he began, giving a significant look at the corners of the room, “may I approach the throne?”

  King Pirliwig sighed. “Yes, yes, of course. Be quick about it. We haven’t got all day.” He laughed, short and loud. “Well, we do, but we’d rather not spend it all here. Well then, boy, what’s so hush-hush we can’t share it with the mice?” he asked in a reasonable whisper for a man his size.

  Stefan stood a step below the king and leaned in. “Sire, in the course of serving this court, my father was kidnapped. My cousin had reason to believe he is being held prisoner beneath the castle by mice. I must ask for your help in rescuing him.”

  King Pirliwig regarded him shrewdly. His eyebrows rose and lowered, one at a time, like the scales of justice.

  “If you can restore my Pirlipat,” he said at last, “you shall have all the men you see at your disposal, and more. I will happily help you rid my land of this scourge once and for all. Can you do it, Sir Journeyman?”

  Stefan bowed deeply. “I can, and I will. Your Majesty.” He backed away from the dais, keeping his head down until he could see Samir’s boots beside his own.

  The king harrumphed and turned to his attendants. “Get the queen!” he hollered, and a servant scurried to do his bidding.

  The king hopped up from his throne, gesturing wildly. “Well, open the gates, start the ceremonies.”

  “Ceremonies?” Stefan asked.

  “Every day seventeen suitors are admitted to attempt to cure the princess,” Samir explained.

  “That line of men outside?”

  “Mostly boys now. In seven years, it has become something of a fool’s errand.”

  “You don’t mean we have to wait—” Stefan began, but was interrupted as a plump pink woman in a shockingly pink gown came screaming into the room like a winter storm.

  “Saints be praised!” the queen shrieked, howling so loudly that her blessing sounded like a curse. Weeping, she threw herself at Samir, who held her sheepishly and said, “Madam, please. All will be well.”

  “Yes, of course, of course.” The queen brushed her dress smooth and wiped the tears from her eyes. “It’s just been dreadful here since you left, dear Samir. And where is Christian?”

  “He’s dead, Your Majesty.”

  “Dead?! Terrible, terrible! Such a tragedy!” She dabbed a sleeve at her eyes and nose. “We’ve all had tragedies, my dear. You know, Pirlipat is—” Her eyes darted left to right, searching the corners of the room. Regaining her train of thought, the poor woman sniffed, smiled bravely, and said, “Well, do what needs to be done and we shall have our sweet Pirly back soon enough.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Samir agreed.

  “Well then,” the king bellowed, “plant your boy in the middle, will you, Samir, to make it seem fair? Good lad. We don’t want to have to sit through more than we must.”

  “Sire.” Samir bowed and pushed Stefan toward the door to find his place amongst the suitors.

  “Wait! This is ridiculous,” Stefan whispered. “I’ve got the only nut! Why not get on with it?”

  Samir shushed him, but King Pirliwig had turned a deep and serious shade of red. “We are royalty, young sir. Protocols must be observed!”

  Samir ushered him away before Stefan could say anything else.

  At the far end of the great hall, on a dais exactly opposite the thrones, sat a small four-poster bed. Its posts were wrapped in pale blue silk and the canopy hung open above a mound of pillows. From where he stood, Stefan could see no sign of the princess.

  A page below the first step of the dais unraveled a scroll and announced in a booming voice: “On this, the two thousand, six hundred and forty-sixth day of our beloved Princess Pirlipat’s affliction, we invite all eligible suitors for a chance to cure the future queen and reap their rich and just rewards.” He cleared his throat dramatically. “Let the first suitor approach!”

  A boy a few years older than Stefan, who looked like he’d just been dragged out of bed, stumbled forward with a walnut in his hands. He glanced uncertainly toward his parents—a plump, well-dressed man and his wife—who stood at the side of the hall.

  “You can do it, Johan,” his mother urged, waving at him.

  Johan gave an awkward bow, climbed the dais, and shoved the nut to the back of his mouth. He chomped down.

  Something cracked. But it was not the nut.

  The boy howled in pain, and spat the nut—and part of a tooth—into his hand. Still howling, he chucked the walnut across the room.

  A servant scurried to collect it.

  Clutching his mouth, Johan stumbled off the dais. His disappointed parents shook their heads and led him away.

  Stefan patted his pocket. His squirrel tooth device clacked comfortingly against his leg.

  “Dentists must make a fortune here,” he whispered to Samir.

  “Yes, I have a cousin who is a dentist. Very comfortable work,” he agreed.

  So the line went on, one unhappy boy after the next, each failing to crack open their nuts.

  Stefan found his hands sweating as his turn approached. The dentata should work, but what if it didn’t?

  Finally it was his turn. The page leaned forward. “Remember, in order for the ceremony to be complete, the nut must be opened and presented to the princess, and then you will back down the three steps, bowing three times.”

  Stefan gave the page a blank look.

  The page frowned.

  “Fine. Um . . . thank you?” Stefan said, wondering at this latest royal nonsense.

  As he climbed the dais, the rim of the bed gave way to a smooth expanse of rich silk brocade comforter and velvet pillows. In the center of the bed, where the princess should have been, lay a wooden doll. Even Stefan’s father would have been impressed by the design, so lifelike, every hair individually carved. Each finger had been given delicate joints, as had the jaw and limbs. He had no doubt that this doll could be made to sit, stand, and even dance, with a few strings. Perhaps someone had made the marionette as a stand-in, the real princess being sick of this ridiculous ceremony.

  Then the wooden eyelids blinked and the doll frowned up at him. “Well, hurry up, clod. We haven’t got all day.”

  Stefan started. This was no doll.

  “Yes, yes, it’s shocking. I’m a hideous little manikin. You can laugh and tell all your friends later. Now go on, break a tooth and be done with it.”

  “Your Highness,” Stefan stammered, “I don’t find you to be hideous at all.”

  The doll’s painted eyes widened. “No?”

  “Not even close,” he said, seeing her strange, angular movements, so unlike a real girl, so similar to Christian’s mechanical horses. Her neck joint was flawless. “Actually, you’re really well made.”

  The princess’s painted cheeks grew redder in two perfectly round spots. “Well made? Well made! I am not a MADE THING! I AM A PRINCESS! YOU STUPID, STUPID CLOD!”

  Stefan blinked. “Sorry. I’m sorry!” Across the hall, Samir was glaring at him.

  “Who are you supposed to be, anyway? Another Drosselmeyer, did they say? When I am queen, Drosselmeyers will be banned from Boldavia. Nothing but trouble, the lot of you.”

  At that, Stefan smiled, opening his jaws, and popped the squirrel dentata inside. The gears and pulleys that delivered the compression were as small as the pieces of a pocket watch, and yet they dug into his cheeks and forced his mouth wide. The teeth themselves slid onto his own like a sleeve. The gears and pulleys aligned
so that, as he gnashed his own teeth, the dentata gnashed too.

  The girl shrieked, high and shrill. “Papa! He’s going to bite me!” she exclaimed.

  Stefan thought it more likely he was about to drool on her.

  The guards rushed forward and he could hear Samir pleading with them to let him finish the job. It was best to be quick about it.

  Stefan withdrew the little casket on its chain from his neck, thumbed the lock, and extracted the krakatook.

  “That’s just a walnut. It’s a walnut!” she called out to the assembled crowd, and began to laugh.

  He turned the nut slowly in his fingers until she could read the unmistakable script flowing across the shell. The princess fell gratifyingly silent.

  Opening his jaws wide, he placed the nut between his teeth, slowly squeezed them shut, and nibbled at the seam.

  He tasted lemons, sawdust, cedar, and sunlight. The slightest hint of the nutmeat flooded his tongue. He opened his mouth and the krakatook fell, neatly halved, into his hand. The nutmeat remained whole.

  Princess Pirlipat sat up in her bed and snatched it from his fingers. She fell upon it ravenously, devouring every last piece. Each time her jaws snapped shut and open again, they lost a little more of their mechanized look.

  Stefan removed the squirrel dentata and massaged his aching face.

  The princess was doing much the same, slapping her cheeks and pinching her legs with dexterous little hands. But while blood flowed back into Stefan’s cheeks, life flowed into hers.

  He had succeeded where so many had failed—he’d finished his master’s quest. It had cost him his father and his cousin, but Princess Pirlipat of Boldavia was flesh and bone once more. With each passing moment, her skin grew smoother, softer, until it was dimpled and pink and very much alive. The terrible rigor mortis melted from her body, revealing a beautiful young woman of fourteen years, with deep blue eyes, perfect ringlet curls, red cheeks, and a mouth perhaps still a bit too wide.

  Pirlipat didn’t bother to thank him. She reached for a mirror beneath her pillow and began to primp.

  The room was dead silent. As if, after seven years, the kingdom was afraid to believe that its trial had come to an end. Then the princess stretched from her years-long confinement, and rose from her bed.

  Everyone in the crowded audience chamber gasped. Their princess had been restored! There was a collective sigh of relief and admiration.

  But not from Stefan, who couldn’t have cared less about the beautiful girl with the sharp tongue.

  For over her shoulder, propped up in a doorway, stood his father and Christian.

  Alive.

  Both of them. Crumpled, haggard, filthy, but alive.

  Stefan’s heart threatened to break his ribs, his smile to crack his cheeks.

  “Finish the ceremony!” the page hissed.

  Stefan bowed quickly and stepped away from the bed. He bowed, stepped down, bowed again, and reached back his boot to take the final step.

  “Interloper!” a voice squealed.

  Stefan’s hands flew to his ears. The voice was like a knife of ice.

  The pages froze at their stations, their brooms silenced. And the shadows that had kept to the corners of the room flooded forward—just as they had in Stefan’s nightmares. Mice spilled into the crowd.

  Behind him stood a bloated parody of a Queen. A mouse dressed in royal purple wearing a tiny golden crown.

  She pointed a sharp claw at Stefan. “With all my might, and that of my sons, I curse thee!” she shrieked. Throwing herself forward, she sank her long, wicked teeth into his leg.

  “Mother!” someone cried. It might have been Christian, or Samir, or even his own voice. Stefan couldn’t tell. Everyone was screaming, the princess begging to be saved, her parents trying to calm her, servants rushing around, stamping at the mice.

  The world blurred. In slow motion, Stefan fell to the ground as the Queen’s venom took effect.

  His joints stiffened and he hit the floor with a sickening crunch. I’ve broken something, he thought.

  But he was wood, solid and unbreakably hard. His limbs were too heavy to move, and his jaw had clamped shut in a terrible rictus. It was as though he had retreated from his body to some small room at the back of his mind. Terror beat at the door, and hysteria begged to come in, but he did not heed them any more than the great oak heeds the summer wind.

  The last few weeks of grief, yearning, and urgency disappeared with that one bite, locked out of the little room in his mind, as surely as he was locked in.

  He had been cursed. And, with a distant understanding, he realized he had crushed the rodent Queen.

  She lay beneath him, her tiny form half-crumpled underneath his wooden leg. Her wicked eyes gleamed. “My sons shall avenge me!” she hissed in her strangely accented German.

  And then she died.

  Stefan was not so lucky.

  “MOTHER!” ARTHUR AND his brothers roared.

  The human throne room sprawled out before them, walls towering like trees, greater than the subterranean caverns beneath the city.

  “To the Queen!” Hannibal bellowed. But the battle cry was diminished, dwarfed by the scale of the room. A room full of men.

  They were so huge! And so many. The flaw in his mother’s secretive designs became clear. She had hidden her sons from the world of Men. All of their studies had little prepared them for the hulking reality.

  “Majesty!” Several mouse soldiers had reached the edge of the throne room and blocked the prince from rushing across the floor after the Queen. Here was the danger, as if it was always meant to be, the nightmare from Arthur’s dreams.

  But they surged forward. Roland and Hannibal and Charlemagne gnashed their teeth. Genghis, Alexander, and Julius—even Julius!—rolled their eyes and screamed, twinning their voices to the echo of their mother’s death curse.

  “Sire, it is too late!” the mouse soldiers cried.

  The Drosselmeyer boy had turned to wood and fallen. So very hard.

  Hands held the princes back. Arthur looked away. He and his brothers fell to their knees.

  In the giant throne room, the humans were moving. Scooping up the boy, grabbing the princess and her ridiculous bassinet, until all that was left was the small, broken figure in a tattered purple dress.

  “The clockmaker!” someone hissed beside Arthur. It was Tailitch, the spy lieutenant, pointing across the room.

  “Drosselmeyer.” All seven brothers said the word with venom, curiosity, hatred, and fear.

  He was tall, lanky of limb, with milky white hair tousled above a long face. Drosselmeyer strode swiftly toward the door. A black patch covered one eye. Like a piebald, Arthur thought. In his arms was the boy who had murdered their mother.

  Arthur knew he should do something. But he no longer had the will to move. He knelt with his brothers on the cold flagstones, unable to act. He had lost her.

  A hand pressed into his shoulder.

  “Come, sires. You must stand up.” It was the rat, Ernst Listz.

  The tutor’s words rang hollow. After a moment, Arthur pulled himself to one knee, and stood.

  “The Queen is dead,” Tailitch announced. “Long live the King!”

  Arthur had known this day was coming, hadn’t he? All along, the dreams had been preparing him for this moment, just as all of his studies were meant to prepare him for what came next.

  Arthur searched the tutor’s face, his heart breaking. “I can’t,” he said.

  Seven heads shook in disbelief. “We can’t.”

  “I’m sorry, son, but you must.” Ernst turned to the retinue of mice. “Give them a moment,” he said, and the mice turned their backs so no one would see the King’s pain.

  “We should be hunting him; kill him before he leaves the castle!” Hannibal said.

 
“We should ask for guidance,” Charlemagne fretted. “Snitter or Tailitch will know what to do.”

  “We need to prepare our mother’s burial,” Alexander said reasonably.

  “Our mother,” Roland echoed. As if a plug had been pulled from a drain, their grief swirled and threatened to pull them under.

  Hannibal fought it. “Vengeance, brothers! We must have revenge!” His spittle flew as he called them to battle.

  Revenge. Arthur closed his eyes against the bloodlust raging through his brother, the fear and confusion in each of them. Seven heads, and one shattered little heart. But this was not the time for self-pity.

  “Mother meant for us to continue,” Arthur said. “With clear heads.” His brothers might succumb to baser instincts, but he would be the son she had asked for. He would make her proud.

  “Together, now,” he said. “Together.” It was not encouragement. It was an imperial command.

  His brothers reacted, holding their heads a little straighter. Not by choice, but by Arthur’s will.

  Arthur turned to Tailitch. “Fetch the Queen’s body. And bring me the crown.”

  Tailitch bowed deeply, nose to the floor, and swept the soldiers around him into service. The Queen was gathered on the shoulders of her soldiers and carried through the tunnels to her chambers down below. The mice followed her final descent into the castle.

  Except for Arthur. He stood in the shadows of the throne room, taking in the breadth and width of the space before him.

  “You said the world was big, Ernst. This is but an inch on the map, is it not?”

  A respectful two steps behind him, the tutor replied, “Less than that, I’m afraid.”

  Arthur exhaled slowly and nodded.

  “She had large ambitions, your mother,” the rat noted. He looked older than Arthur remembered. Then again, Arthur had aged a lifetime in the last few minutes.

  “Tailitch,” Arthur said. The piebald emerged from the shadows with a deferential nod and held out his mother’s golden crown. It had been smashed by the falling boy, several tines now dented and the rim crushed flat. Arthur pulled it into shape, recalling the many days and nights when it had been their plaything. The one gift their mother had given them. It was more than a crown; it was her soul.