The Language of Thorns Read online

  Servants came and banked the fire, doused the candles. He’d fought bravely, and yet somehow, he always ended up here, alone in the dark.

  Clara did not come that night.

  The nutcracker awoke to shrill squeaking and found the Rat King at his bedside. He sat up hurriedly and reached for his saber, realizing as he grasped at his sword belt that his weapon was gone, and at the same time, that he could move again.

  “Peace, Captain,” the Rat King said. “I have not come to fight, only to talk.” His voice was high and reedy, and his whiskers twitched—yet the monster still managed to look grave when he spoke.

  This creature had the nutcracker’s blood on his filthy paws, and would have murdered Clara too. But if he came to speak under conditions of a truce, the nutcracker supposed he must honor that. He dipped his chin the barest amount.

  The Rat King adjusted his felt cloak and looked around. “Do you have anything to drink? If only they’d stuck you in a liquor cabinet, eh?”

  Cabinet. The nutcracker frowned at the word. He’d been resting in the barracks, had he not? And yet as he looked around, he saw that what had simply seemed the vague shapes of beds and other soldiers were strange items indeed. Girls with glass eyes and stiffly curled hair were propped against the wall. Rows of soldiers with bayonets at their shoulders marched in frozen lockstep.

  “I don’t know,” he replied at last.

  The Rat King perched on the gilded lip of an enormous music box. But was it enormous? Or were they small?

  “When was the last time you ate?” he asked.

  The nutcracker hesitated. Had it been with Clara? In the Land of Snow? The Court of Flowers? “I can’t recall.”

  The Rat King sighed. “You should eat something.”

  “I do eat.” Surely he did?

  “Something other than walnuts.” The Rat King scratched behind his ear with his little pink claws, then removed the crown from his gray head and placed it gently in his lap. “Do you know I started life as a sugar mouse?”

  The nutcracker’s confusion must have shown, for the Rat King continued, “I realize that’s hard to believe, but I was just a confection. Not even for eating, just for looking at, a charming little marvel, a testament to my maker’s skill. It seemed a shame that I should go untasted. My first thought was, I wish someone would eat me. But that was enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “To get free of the cabinet. Wanting is why people get up in the morning. It gives them something to dream of at night. The more I wanted, the more I became like them, the more real I became.”

  “I am perfectly real,” protested the nutcracker.

  The Rat King looked at him sadly. Sitting there, without his crown in the dim light, his whiskers drooping slightly, he looked less like a dreadful monster than a sweet-faced mouse.

  A memory came to the nutcracker. “You had seven heads—”

  The Rat King nodded. “Clara imagined me fearsome, and so fearsome I became. But a rat can’t live with seven heads always talking and arguing. It took us hours to make the simplest decisions, so when the others were asleep, I cut them from me one by one. There was an awful amount of blood.” He shifted slightly in his seat. “Who are you when she isn’t here, Captain?”

  “I am …” He wavered. “I am a soldier.”

  “Are you? What is your rank? Lieutenant?”

  “Lieutenant, of course,” answered the nutcracker.

  “Or is it captain?” the Rat King inquired.

  Are you my soldier? Are you my prince?

  “I—”

  “Surely you must know your rank.”

  Are you my darling?

  “Who are you when no one picks you up to hold you?” asked the Rat King. “When no one is looking at you, or whispering to you, who are you then? Tell me your name, soldier.”

  Are you mine? The nutcracker opened his mouth to answer, but he could not recall. He was Clara’s prince, her protector. He had a name. Of course he had a name. Only the shock of battle had driven it from his mind.

  He’d fought bravely.

  He’d taken Clara to meet his mother.

  He’d ridden a horse through a gleaming field of stars.

  He was heir to nothing. He was prince of a marzipan palace.

  He slept on spun sugar. He slept on gold.

  “You walk and talk and laugh when Clara dreams with you,” said the Rat King. “But those are her desires. They cannot sustain you. My life began with wanting something for myself. I wished to be eaten, then I wished to eat. A piece of cake. A bit of bacon. A sip of wine. I wanted these things from their table. That was when I moved my legs and blinked my eyes. I wanted to see beyond the cabinet door. That was when I found my way into the walls. There I met my rat brothers. They are not charming or pretty, but they live even when no one is looking. I have made a life in the walls with them, unwatched and undesired. I know who I am without anyone there to tell me.”

  “But why did you attack us?” said the nutcracker. The blood. The screaming. “I know that was real.”

  “As real as anything. When Clara was a child, she dreamed of heroes, and heroes require a foe. But the desire to conquer was the will she gave me, not my own. It is simple hunger that keeps me alive now: crumbs from the cupboard, cheese in the larder, a chance to venture outside to the woodpile, see the wide sky, feel the cold bite of the snow.”

  Snow. Another memory emerged—not the place of dreaming that Clara so longed for, but a new place beyond the cabinet. She had taken him outside one night. He had felt cold. He had seen clouds moving over the starlit sky. He had taken the air into his lungs, felt them expand, exhaled, seen the puff of his breath in the chill night. He remembered trees clustered against the horizon, a road, the desperate desire to see what lay beyond it.

  “That’s it, Captain,” said the Rat King as he slowly rose and placed the crown back atop his head. “It helps to live in the shelter of the walls where there are no human eyes to look upon me. It helps to be a rat who no one wants to look at. Your desire must be stronger if you wish to get free of the cabinet, if you wish to be real. She loves you, though, and that will make it harder.”

  Clara loved him. And he loved her. Didn’t he?

  The Rat King nudged open the cabinet door. “One last thing,” he said as he skittered onto the ledge. “Beware of Droessen. You were meant to be a gift to Clara, a means of enchanting her and nothing more.”

  “He loves her too, then?”

  “Who knows what the clocksmith loves? Best not to ask. I think the answer would please no one.”

  The Rat King vanished, his pink tail slithering behind him.

  Clara tried to stay away. She managed it for a night, the wine and the guests a happy distraction. But the next day, she snuck from the skating out on the lake and ran to the cabinet, clutching the nutcracker beneath her coat and racing up the stairs to the quiet of the attic.

  Are you my soldier? she whispered as the cold winter light made bright squares on the dusty floor.

  Are you my prince? She tucked a walnut between his jaws.

  Are you my darling?

  Are you mine?

  It did not take long this time. The nutcracker’s body stretched and his head split to reveal her handsome prince’s face.

  “I am,” he said. He smiled as he always did, touched his gentle hand to her face, but then trouble came into his eyes.

  He pressed his fingertips to his mouth, licked his lips, and frowned as if the taste of walnuts did not agree with him.

  “Where will we go today, my prince?” Clara asked.

  But he did not take her hand. He sat up, ran his fingers through the beam of sunlight from the window, and then rose to peer out through the glass.

  “Outside,” he said. “I’d like to see where that road goes.”

  The request was so ordinary and yet so unexpected, Clara couldn’t quite make sense of it for a moment. “That isn’t possible.”

  “It’s what I w
ant.” He said the words as if he’d made some great discovery, a new invention, a magic spell. His smile was radiant. “Dear Clara, it’s what I want.”

  “But it cannot be,” she replied, unsure of how to explain.

  His cheer vanished and she saw fear in his eyes. “I cannot return to the cabinet.”

  Now she understood. At last. At last.

  She took his hands. “You need never return to the cabinet. Only take me with you to your home and I will forsake this place. We can stay forever in the land of dreams.”

  He hesitated. “That is what you want.”

  “Yes,” said Clara, tilting her head up. “It is what I have always wanted.” The fervor of it filled her. Sweat broke out over her neck. Kiss me, she willed him. In all the stories a kiss was required. Take me from this place.

  She could not wait. Clara stood on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his. She tasted walnut and something else, maybe lacquer. But he did not take her hand, did not draw her closer. She felt no wind on her face nor horse galloping beneath her. When she opened her eyes, she was still in the same dull, dusty attic.

  The nutcracker brushed his knuckles against her cheek. “I want to go outside,” he said.

  Now Clara scowled and stamped her foot as if she were the child she’d been when Droessen had first placed the nutcracker in her arms instead of a girl of seventeen. I want. She was not sure why those words enraged her so. Perhaps it was because the nutcracker had never spoken them to her before.

  “I told you,” she said more sharply than she intended. “It cannot be. You don’t belong here.”

  “I will take you outside,” said Frederik.

  Clara flinched at the sound of her brother’s voice. He stood at the top of the attic stairs, gazing at the nutcracker with fascinated eyes.

  “Get out!” she cried. He was not supposed to be here. He was not supposed to share this. She rushed at him, frantic with fear and shame, and tried to strike him, to push him back toward the stairs.

  But Frederik simply held her wrists, keeping her at bay. He was a year older and far stronger. He shook his head, his eyes never leaving the nutcracker. “Stop it, Clara.”

  “I remember you,” said the nutcracker, watching him. He came to attention and saluted. “My commander.”

  Frederik gave Clara a warning look and let her hands drop. With a bemused grin, he returned the nutcracker’s salute.

  “Yes,” said Frederik, walking toward him. “Your commander. I sent you to die a hundred times.”

  The nutcracker frowned. “I remember.”

  “How changed you are,” Frederik murmured.

  Confusion crossed the nutcracker’s face. “Am I?”

  Frederik nodded. “I’ll take you downstairs,” he said softly, as if coaxing a kitten with a bit of food. “I’ll take you outside.”

  “Where does the road go?” asked the nutcracker.

  “To Ketterdam. A magical place. I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “Frederik,” said Clara angrily. “You cannot do this.”

  “We’ll say he’s my friend from school. We’ll say he’s just enlisted.”

  She shook her head. “We can’t.”

  “Mama will be so pleased to have a dashing young man in uniform join us for dinner.” Frederik’s smile was sly. “You can waltz with him at the party tonight.”

  Clara didn’t want to waltz with him at a stupid party. She wanted to dance with him in a bluebell cathedral. She wanted to be greeted as a princess by a chorus of swans. She wanted wings. But she could say none of that to Frederik, who stood so close to the nutcracker now, his hand on his shoulder as if in fact they were good friends from school, as if her prince was a young captain, ready to join the Kerch forces in his blue coat with its shining buttons.

  “Frederik,” she pleaded.

  But her brother was already leading the nutcracker across the attic, already nudging him toward the stairs.

  “Come, Clara,” Frederik said, that sly smile spreading wider. “It’s what he wants.”

  The kiss had confused him. When Clara had begged to be taken to the dreaming land, the nutcracker had almost forgotten himself in the strength of her want. Then, in the watery sunlight of the attic, she’d turned her face to him in invitation, pressed her lips to his, and he’d felt desire—hers or his? It had been impossible to untangle, but he must have wanted her, because suddenly he could feel the cold from the window again, drawing him outward to the gravel drive, the woods, the snow. Then Frederik was there with his blazing eyes and claiming gaze, the power of his longing bright as a flame, dangerous. The nutcracker felt his resolve soften, turn waxen and easily molded. He thought if he looked at the place where Frederik had touched his shoulder, he might see the deep depressions of Frederik’s fingers still there, the emphatic divot of his thumb. The nutcracker’s thoughts of the road and what might lie beyond faded.

  Down the stairs they went. The house was already filling with guests for the last evening of Nachtspel. How luminous they all were, how sharp in their lines, how needful their eyes as they looked at him in his false uniform and saw a lost son, a lover, a friend, a threat. He managed to greet Clara and Frederik’s parents, execute the appropriate bow.

  Frederik called him Josef, and so he was Josef. Clara said she’d met him one afternoon at a sledding party and it was so. Where was he from? Zierfoort. Who was his commanding officer?

  “Father,” complained Frederik with a wink at the nutcracker, “do not vex Josef with so many questions. I promised him good food and entertainment, not an interrogation.”

  They fed him roast goose and fried dough stuffed with currants. He licked sugar from candied plums, drank coffee spiced with caraway seeds, followed by little cups of wine. The flavors made him feel wild, almost demented, but he knew he mustn’t lose himself. There, in the corner of his vision, the dark blot of the cabinet, propped against the wall like an open casket full of glassy eyes and splayed limbs. And there, Droessen, the clocksmith, the man in velvet who had studied Clara as if he wished to take her apart, who now watched the nutcracker with cold blue eyes.

  Another memory came: Droessen reaching into the cabinet. Tell me, the clocksmith whispered. Tell me her secrets.

  The nutcracker felt a horrible shame. How easily he’d betrayed Clara, spoken every one of her wishes and desires, described the places they’d visited together, every creature, every magical vista. No torture had been necessary. He’d simply talked. He had not been made to be a soldier but a spy.

  He could make no amends for that now. He knew he must hold to the shape of himself, to the desire for the outside just a few steps, just a door or an open window away. Ketterdam—he must remember. But the world began to blur—the scent of perfume, perspiration, Frederik’s arm around his shoulder, Clara’s feverish eyes as they danced. How he knew the steps he could not say, but they spun and spun and she whispered to him, “Take me from this place.”

  He kissed her beneath the stairs. He kissed Frederik in the darkened hall.

  “Do you love her?” Frederik asked. “Could you love me too?”

  He loved them both. He loved no one. In the dark shadows beyond the circle of light cast by the flames of the fire, the nutcracker caught the shine of black eyes, the glint of a tiny crown, and knew it must be the Rat King. My life began with wanting something for myself.

  The nutcracker thought of the bend in the road and what might lie beyond it.

  One by one the guests departed in their carriages or headed upstairs to fall into their beds.

  “He can sleep in my room,” said Frederik.

  “Yes,” said the nutcracker.

  “I will come to meet you,” murmured Clara.

  “Yes,” said the nutcracker.

  But he did not go to Frederik’s room. He lingered on the stairs as the candles were extinguished and the lower floors went silent. Then he descended again to the dining room. It was time; the doors that would lead to the rest of the world were a dark shape again
st the wall, but he needed to see the cabinet once more.

  Moonlight poured in through the windows, making the dining room look like the galley of a sunken ship, hidden deep underwater. The cabinet sat silent in the corner. It looked bigger now that the room was empty of people.

  He crossed to it slowly, listening to his boots echo in the empty room, smelling the remnants of the fire, the green wood scent of the pine boughs clustered on the mantel and above the windows. As he approached the cabinet, he could see his shape repeated in the glass panels of its doors, a little shadow growing, growing. He peered inside and saw the winter tableau of sugar mice and tiny trees, the soldiers in their rows, the marionettes with their gruesomely tilted heads and limp strings, the dolls sitting listless, cheeks rosy, eyes half-lidded.

  “I know you,” he whispered, and touched his fingers to the glass. The perfect little fairies dangling from wires with their filigree wings and their gossamer skirts, wide-hipped Mother Ginger, and the Queen of the Grove with her green skin and silvery antlers.

  “I made them all.” The nutcracker whirled to find Droessen watching him from the center of the room. His voice was smooth as buttercream. “Every hinge, every daub of paint. I fashioned the world of her dreaming from the details you told me. And yet it is the toys she loves and not me.” He walked so silently, as if he might be made of feathers or smoke. “Do you admire my handiwork?”

  The nutcracker knew he should nod and say that he did, yes, he did, for this was the clocksmith the Rat King had warned him about, the one who had wanted Clara, or her wealth, or her family, or something else entirely for himself. But the nutcracker found it hard to speak.

  “I confess,” said the clocksmith, “I am proud. I love to have my creations looked upon, see children smile. I eat the wonder in their eyes. But it seems not even I knew the marvels I might achieve.”

  He was close now, and he smelled of tobacco and linseed oil. He smelled familiar.

  “I should go,” the nutcracker said, relieved to find he could still speak at all.