From the shadows of the piano, the magician began the song again. March of the Toys. The flute melody jauntily played like gentle slide: easing from the large form of charging red uniformed guards, then smaller, and smaller, condensing into toy nutcrackers.
Toy nutcrackers! They piled onto the floor in streaks of red and gold, guns clattering, none larger than a foot tall. General Drosselmeyer fell to the ground as a nutcracker, his rifle a tiny wooden toy in his arms. A pained eyepatch covered one of his eyes. The other eye, still piercing gray, glazed ahead.
The flute melody filled the halls of the Palace, bringing soldiers to their knees and then to the fine rugs as toys. In the courtyard, horses reared as their masters fell off, all stiffening into the forms of nutcracker soldiers.
It wasn’t just the soldiers who heard the playful melody. Through the kitchens and halls of the Palace, the servants fell to the ground as well, platters clanging, spoons clattering. Every sort of toy: dolls, stuffed dogs, toy pots and pans.
In the Gallery, Nikolai was struggling to breathe. He felt as though a heavy weight pressed his lungs in. His body creaked. Unlike all the other toys, he could still move and was sort of alive. As though he hadn’t been transformed entirely. He blinked as a brown shoe stepped into his filtered wooden vision.
“You might feel a little bit uncomfortable,” Erik Zolokov said. “That’s only natural, of course. It’s because you’re still partly human; you’re not all toy. Everyone else in the Palace is, however. I am sorry, I had to put them under the spell, too. They would too easily guess who you were. You understand, of course?”
Nikolai strained to look up—an action which tilted his entire torso—and Erik Zolokov was smiling down at him with that rotten, smug little smile. With every ounce of strength he could muster, Nikolai stiffly pulled himself to his feet and lunged.
It was more of a lurch. When human, Nikolai had been spry and quick. Now every part of him was all straights, joined together with stiffly balled joints. Nikolai stumbled, and hit the ground hard on his shoulder. The crash vibrated through him and his arm came unattached. It clattered across the floor a length away, and the world spun.
Erik Zolokov was laughing. It sounded like a bag of broken glass being shaken.
“That was...really enjoyable to watch, actually,” he said. “It was like a calf trying to jump a fence. You’re going to have to do better than that, of course. If, by the dawn of your birthday—that is in just thirty-six hours, by the way—you haven’t proven yourself a true emperor (and, honestly, I don’t think you will), I will find you and finish March of the Toys, transforming you completely. I will turn the children back, but you—you will be a toy forever, and it will be an honor to end a very terrible and inept reign before it begins.”
The magician pulled out the sheet music he had tucked into his vest and sorted through it, finding a new piece of music.
“Good luck, Prince Nikolai Volkonsky,” he said, bringing the rosewood flute to his lips. “I will be watching you.”
With a half-measure of flute song, Erik Zolokov vanished.
Nikolai’s mind and thoughts splintered, as wooden as he was.
The Coffee Room of Polichinelle’s Candy Emporium—one of the many rooms in the Emporium—was deathly silent, even though it was full of people. They sat five-to-a-table, crowding the spindly bistros and chewing on their coffee, their arms full of toys.
They all had toys: a woman sat next to her husband, cradling a box of colored pencils and a brass telescope. Another woman had three miniature rocking horses peeking out of her purse. An old grandfather with wiry, sullen brows cradled a little porcelain doll with very ruffly skirts. A father paced, a Faberge egg in each hand.
The north-facing wall was made of glass arches, which gave an excellent view of the Symphony Hall across the prospekt, and far beyond, the glowing onion domes of the Imperial Palace. Parents crowded the great windows, biting their lips and fogging the glass, all eyes on the distant Palace, and speaking in hushed tones.
“They had the Koroleva line running,” said one man. “Soldiers all the way from the south border.”
“My son is in the Zerkalo Regiment Two,” said another. “Regiment Three is there. He knows some of the soldiers there tonight.”
“How long d’you think it will take to break the spell?”
“It can’t be long. It didn’t take long to change the children, did it? Their beds were still warm, weren’t they?”
“I hope it’s soon,” said a quiet voice, one of the mothers at the tables.
“‘Course it’ll be soon,” assured one of the men at the windows. “The magician will be staring at the wrong end of five hundred rifles. He won’t have a choice.”
“It’s taking a while,” another man added. “Do you think anything’s wrong?”
There was a pause.
“I’m—certain the prince has it all managed,” said the woman next to him.
There was an even longer pause.
“He is a bit of pancake-head, though,” said one of the Krystallgradians at the table.
The longest pause of all.
“Well,” said another father. “He is just a boy.”
“My cousin works as the assistant to the assistant of the prune hedger, very important job, that,” said another man, with pride. “He’s seen the prince. Once. Said he’s known to always skive out of his lessons. Not a good sign, if you ask me.”
“An emperor should take things seriously,” another woman agreed.
“Maybe that’s why General Drosselmeyer always has to do things for him,” said another bitterly.
“Oh, now,” interrupted a voice, weaving through the tables and people. “Give the prince a chance. None of us really know him, after all.”
The voice came from the Polichinelle attendant, Elizabeth Kaminzki. Everyone, however, called her Zizi, and everyone who went to Polichinelle’s liked her. Her red hair was pinned up in a bun with a candy-shaped pin, her fine figure tamed with a Polichinelle’s uniform of skirt, apron, and blouse, and even though her eyes were tired, they sparkled. She was very pretty, mostly because she always had a smile on her lips and a kind word for everyone.
Normally Zizi worked the night shift. Today, however, she’d also taken the day shift, because so many attendants needed to be home with their families, and someone had to pour coffee, stock the candy bins, and sweep up the powdered sugar in the Pastry Cafe. Now she was on the night shift again. She hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-eight hours.
That was all right. She liked being at Polichinelle’s. It was the best place to hear all the news. When people came to Polichinelle’s, they had stories to tell. Today they spoke of how they had found their children as toys in the snow, how their sons and nephews had been called to the Palace, and now they ruminated for hours about the magician. Why did he turn the children into toys? What did he want? When telegrams came, people ran to the Emporium, slips of paper in their hands, bursting to share whatever small bit of news they had.
Zizi had heard every sort of rumor today and cautiously allowed herself to hope. She knew the Polichinelle children: little Marie, who watched Zizi scoop candies from the bags into the jars, counting each scoopful, one, two, three, seven, eight; Kiril and Dmitri, the twins, who tried to carry bags of sugar far too big for them; Natasia, the oldest girl, who decorated miniature tarts with iced flowers, pursing her lips as she dabbed them with the frosted paintbrush. Most of the children knew Zizi’s name. And Zizi knew them well enough to recognize them when she found them as toys that morning as she left her night shift. They lay in the snow, matryoshka nesting dolls. Lined up by size in down the steps, painted richly with accents of silver.
Now, Zizi poured coffee, adding spoonfuls of cream to the sprinklings of cinnamon and ordering the most downcast customers to “Drink that, it’s good for you.” Everyone needed cheering up, and she was no Polichinelle attendant if she couldn’t do that.
“The prince will do all right,” she assure
d the crowd in the Coffee Room. “He’s just...unproven, that’s all. We had soldiers in the Krystallgradian Horse Regiments here but two months ago, and they said that the prince was a very good soldier. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
As though to prove Zizi wrong, a ruckus sounded from the prospekt beyond. Everyone’s attention diverted from the Palace to the street six stories below.
Several horses, bridled and saddled but without riders, barreled along the edge of the prospekt bridge. Their hooves clattered and their eyes and nostrils flared in the streetlamp light below. They were headed straight for Polichinelle’s.
“By the saints!” said Zizi, and she immediately was out the door and down the hall, running through the back stairways, her feet tangling over each other. In a moment, she had burst out into the cold and met the horses as they careened into the backstreet, knocking over garbage bins and crashing into old candy palettes and into her.
Zizi’s vision was a jumble of horse legs, sweaty flanks, whipping reins, and horses galloping so close to her she could see veins on their muscles and their wild, rolling eyes. She grabbed at one bridle as a hoof filled her vision and she panicked and thought, I am going to have a hoof print in my face for the rest of my life—
A pair of dark, large hands seized the reins, yanking the horses away just in time. Zizi fell to the ground in a spatter of snow. When the world stopped spinning, she looked up and saw the handsome face of Alexei Polichinelle frowning down at her.
Zizi knew Master Alexei Polichinelle, of course. Everyone did. The eldest child in the Polichinelle family, and heir to the Candy Emporium. He was a genius when it came to creating truffles, and trying new sugar combinations. Because of that, customers often called him The Chocolate Prince. Like her, he had the night shift, but often worked the kitchens. When he was on the shop floor, he was either bringing in heavy boxes from the back, or had his nose in some exotic recipe book.
The first time he’d ever spoken to her was this morning, when she had brought the eleven Polichinelle toys back inside, carrying them in her apron.
“Magic?” Alexei was saying to the group of men who had hurried into the emporium with slips of telegram paper. “But the fairies—”
“M-Master Alexei,” Zizi had stuttered.
Alexei Polichinelle had turned from the men and frowned at her—by the saints, he could frown—and Zizi had no words for him as she opened her apron, revealing the eleven Polichinelle matryoshka dolls.
Alexei’s dark brow had furrowed as he examined the dolls’ painted features, and his face had turned from anger to shock to something Zizi would never have expected of The Chocolate Prince: his eyes welled up. With shaking hands he brought the matryoshka dolls into his arms and turned quickly, barking orders at the attendants to find Master and Lady Polichinelle.
Master Polichinelle had a stern face, a black pointed mustache, and wore two swords crossed on his back. Lady Polichinelle, a full head taller than her husband, wore the most elaborate skirts that glided across the tiled floors. She wore jeweled rings on every finger, even her thumbs. They had questioned Zizi about where she had found the Polichinelle toys and asked what exactly was going on, and Zizi, of course, could not answer. Alexei had brooded at the glass counter behind them, carefully lining the dolls in a row.
Now, Alexei still had that brooding expression now as he grasped the reins of one of the horses, keeping it from following its companions back into the prospekt.
“Miss Kaminzki!” he scolded, working to calm the horse down. “Are you trying to get trampled?”
He knows my name? Zizi thought, heart fluttering. Out loud, she stammered, “I—I was trying to keep them from trampling someone.”
“Good job,” said Alexei.
Zizi couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.
Alexei stroked the horse’s nose and spoke quietly to it, and it tamed a little.
“This is a military horse,” said Alexei darkly, nodding to the insignia on the saddle. “Krystallgradian North Forest Horse Guard Regiment Number Two.”
“I thought all the North Forest Guards were at the Palace,” said Zizi, daring to stand beside Alexei and examine the saddle.
“They are,” said Alexei darkly. “Or they were. I fear, Miss Kaminzki, that something has gone very wrong.”
* * *
Something was going very wrong all over the borders of Imperia.
In the frosted forests near Rat Territory, soldiers returned to their bunkers after a long day of training, looking forward to a hot coffee and maybe a game of cards, when a playful flute melody pierced the air. It twisted through the trees and into their bunkers. Heads raised, brows furrowed...and the soldiers gave strangled cries as they fell to the ground, all in the form of toy nutcrackers.
Further away, on the Empire wall just outside Koroleva, the soldier and officer on guard grimly speculated about the news of the day, the magician and the children. The soldier had just gotten a Christmas package from his family and was sharing a bag of Polichinelle licorice drops with the colonel, the salted, rich flavor melting over his tongue.
“I’m the youngest in my family, of course,” the soldier was saying, “but I’ve telegraphed my sister. Haven’t heard anything about my nephew, Alyosha. Hope he’s all right.”
“It’s all the children, soldier,” the colonel was bitterly saying, for he had gotten a telegram from his wife earlier that day, and he was in a bad temper.
The soldier shrugged and nodded, and brought a pair of binoculars to his eyes, surveying the frozen landscape beyond the wall. The vast wall around the Empire wasn’t just a wall, it was a long expanse of brick, stone, and fortress, with bunkers and barracks and telegraph offices and watchtowers along it. Five soldiers on horseback could ride side-by-side atop it. Imperian flags were posted every three miles, and there was even flowery wallpaper in some of the officers’ quarters.
The soldier with the binoculars nearly put them away, but paused, peering into the darkness at the expanse of wall before him. A man without a coat was walking atop the wall toward them. Even in the darkness, the soldier could see the man’s smile, and he shifted, uncomfortable.
“Colonel,” the soldier began, and said nothing more, because the man had brought a flute to his lips, and played.
The melody twisted around the soldier and colonel and even the soldiers sleeping in the barracks below, and squeezed. The binoculars clattered to the ground, followed by two toy nutcrackers, the marks and medals of a soldier and colonel painted on their uniforms.
Across the Empire, at the Abbey train station, two regiments of Rail Guard soldiers stomped their feet in the cold, waiting outside the telegraph office. A passenger train steamed beside them. They had been on their way to the Palace via railway, but halfway there had gotten the news that the Palace was already full of soldiers and there was no room for them.
This was disappointing. They’d been looking forward to fighting the magician, who had done terrible, terrible, really exciting things to the Empire. Now, they stood outside the train, stretching their legs and waiting news from the Palace. Perhaps they’d get news that the Palace needed them after all.
A man appeared in the distance, over the crest of a ravine hill. The same ravine hill Pyotr had fallen down the night before.
“Ho there, sir!” one soldier called from the platform, spotting him. “Where did you come from?”
“Are you looking to board?” said the officer of the regiment, noting that the man did not wear a coat. “This train is out of service, I’m afraid. All the trains are. The Abbey can take you in if you need a place to stay the night.”
He motioned to the Abbey on the hill, but the man did not appear to hear him. Soldiers peered up at him, trying to discern what was in his hands. A rifle! No—a flute. He brought it to his lips, and the shrill melody shimmered in the frigid air.
In less than a minute, every soldier clattered to the station platform as a nutcracker. Some had black hair, some white; some held to
y rifles, some held swords. Some were tiny, like a tree ornament, and some were large as giftbox. Some had gold swirls painted on their chest, some had buttons. But all were now nutcrackers.
March of the Toys wove its way through all corners of the Empire to the soldiers’ ears, and before midnight, like the children and those at the Palace, they had all become toys.
It wouldn’t be long now before the rats realized there was no longer anyone to guard the borders and the walls, and it wouldn’t be long now before they clawed their way into the cities, seeping through doors and entrances, and filling the Empire.
Fairies are unusual creatures.
They are as vain as they are beautiful, fickle as they are kind, stubborn as they are giving. They never speak to humans, because they either can’t or don’t want to.
They’re magic...but theirs is small magic. Ushering in the first snowflake of winter; painting the leaves red in autumn; caressing a blossom open in the spring; kissing newborn babies on the head, and then disappearing in a puff of sparks.
Often their magic wasn’t just small—it was useless. In rare moments of munificence, they would bestow nonsensical gifts, like books with nothing written on the pages. Or pens that couldn’t hold ink. Or spiriting people to cities across the Empire for no reason, or even to other worlds. In the Krystallgradian volnakrii of 1822, when the rats were sweeping over the barricades and bunkers and soldiers, the fairies created a downpour, causing all the rats to get stuck in the mud. It, however, also made the soldiers get stuck in the mud, so it hadn’t been much help.
Still, Imperians considered them very good luck, especially if you saw one. That didn’t happen often.
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