The Language of Thorns Read online

Droessen laughed softly. “Where could you possibly have to go?”

  “To Zierfoort. To my regiment.”

  “You are no soldier.”

  I am, thought the nutcracker. No, he scolded himself. You are pretending to be a soldier. It is not the same thing.

  The clocksmith laughed again. “You have no idea what you are.”

  Josef. That was his name, wasn’t it? Or had it been another guest at the party?

  “Who are you?” asked the nutcracker, wishing he could back away, but there was nothing behind him except the glass cabinet. “What are you?”

  “A humble tradesman.”

  “Why did you make me betray Clara?”

  Now a smile split Droessen’s face, and none of the kind ladies and handsome gentlemen who had welcomed the clocksmith into their parlors would have recognized this wolf, his many teeth. “You owe no loyalty to Clara. I made you in my workshop,” he said. “Between your jaws, I placed a child’s finger bone, and then crack.”

  The nutcracker shook his head. “You are mad.”

  “And you are made of wood.”

  The nutcracker splayed his hand over his own chest. “My heart beats. I breathe.”

  The clocksmith’s grin widened. “A bellows breathes to grow a fire. A clock ticks. Are those things alive?”

  Maybe, thought the nutcracker. Maybe they’re all alive.

  “You do not dream,” said the clocksmith. “You do not want. You have no soul. You are a toy.”

  I am a toy. The nutcracker felt his heartbeat slow. No. Hadn’t he believed Clara when she’d said he was a prince who loved her? Hadn’t he believed it when Frederik claimed the nutcracker was his soldier to command? Both of those things had been true. Neither of them had been true. Then perhaps he was a toy but also alive.

  The Rat King had warned him: your desire must be stronger.

  “I want …, ” began the nutcracker. But what did he want? He could not quite remember. How had all of this begun? “I was—”

  The clocksmith leaned closer. “You were a baby I took from a foundling home. I fed you on sawdust until you were more wood than boy.”

  “No,” said the nutcracker, but he felt his belly fill with wood chips, his throat choke with dust.

  “You were a child I stole from a sick ward. Where you had tendons, I wound string. Where you had bones, I fixed wood and metal. You screamed and screamed until I took your vocal cords and made your throat a hollow I might fill with silence or any words I liked.”

  The nutcracker crumpled to the ground. He could not cry out for help. His head was empty. His chest was empty. His mouth was bitter with the taste of walnuts.

  Now Droessen leaned over the poor broken toy. He seemed too large, too tall, too far away, and the nutcracker knew that his own body was shrinking.

  “You were an idea in my head,” said the clocksmith. “You were nothing, and to nothing you will return when I think of you no more.”

  The nutcracker looked into Droessen’s pale blue eyes and he recognized the color. He painted my eyes to look like his. The nutcracker felt the idea of himself fading as he understood that he was only Droessen. That he had only ever been Droessen.

  Over the clocksmith’s shoulder, he glimpsed the moonlit drive and the snow-covered fields beyond. The road winding … where? To a city? To Ketterdam? He longed to see it—the twisting canals, all the crooked houses packed together. He imagined the city rooftops crowded up against one another, the boats on the water, fishmongers calling to their customers. It didn’t matter. It was not enough. I am a toy. I need nothing but a shelf to wait upon.

  He felt himself lifted, but the clocksmith did not place him back in the cabinet. Instead he strode toward the fire. The nutcracker wondered if Clara and Frederik would weep for him.

  Then the clocksmith grunted, cursed. The world spun as the nutcracker found himself falling. He hit the floor with a terrible crack.

  Click, click, click. The nutcracker heard the skitter of claws over wood, followed by a chorus of squeaks. Rats poured from the walls, crawling in a wriggling flood up the clocksmith’s trousers. He kicked and batted at them, stumbling backward.

  “Remember yourself,” said a high reedy voice at the nutcracker’s ear. The Rat King tipped his crown.

  I am a toy, thought the nutcracker. I remember my maker leaning over me, a paintbrush in his hand, the concentration on his face as he completed this gift for the girl he hoped to beguile. The nutcracker had been cursed from the start. If only he’d been made by a generous hand. If only he’d had a true father.

  “That’s the way, Captain,” cried the Rat King.

  “Get away, you vile things!” Droessen snapped, kicking out at the squirming creatures.

  A father. The nutcracker felt his fingers bend. Someone kind, who wanted nothing from his son but that he might find his own happiness. The nutcracker stretched his legs. Someone who wanted the world for him, instead of a place on a shelf. A father.

  The nutcracker lifted his head. Droessen was striding back toward him, but he was no longer a giant.

  The nutcracker thought of the road again, but now he saw the road was a future—one his father would want him to choose for himself. He imagined the snow in his hair, the ground beneath his boots, the limitless horizon, a world full of chance and mishap and changing weather—gray clouds, hail, thunder, the unexpected. A new sound echoed in his rising chest, a round thump, thump, thump.

  There would be woods along that road, animals in them, a river floating with ice, pleasure boats tethered with their sails trussed for the winter. He would grow hungry on that road. He would require food. He would eat cabbage rolls and gingerbread and drink cold cider. His stomach rumbled.

  “I should have burned you as kindling the day I made you in my shop,” the clocksmith said. But it was too late. The nutcracker rose and met his gaze, eye to eye.

  “You couldn’t,” said the nutcracker. “You loved me too much.” It was not true. But Clara had made him a prince through the power of her desire; he could desire too.

  Droessen laughed. “It seems you have a gift for fancy.”

  “You are my father,” said the nutcracker.

  “I am your maker,” snarled the clocksmith.

  “You breathed life into me with all the love in your heart.”

  The clocksmith shook his head, took a step backward as the nutcracker advanced. “I crafted you with skill. Determination.”

  “You gave me your eyes that I might see.”

  “No.”

  “You gave me to Clara that she might wake me like a prince in a fairy tale, to Frederik so I might learn the ways of war.”

  “You were my messenger!” gasped the clocksmith. “My spy and nothing more!” But his voice sounded strange and small. He stumbled as if he could not quite make his legs work.

  “You dreamed a son,” said the nutcracker, his need driving him on. “No clumsy clockwork, but a boy who might learn, a boy with a will and wishes of his own.”

  Droessen gave a strangled cry and toppled to the floor in a wooden clatter, his limbs stiff, his mouth twisting, his teeth bared.

  “You wanted only that I might live,” said the young man as he knelt to look at the crumpled doll lying in a heap on the floor. “You would have sacrificed your own life to make it so.”

  He picked up Droessen, cradled him gently in the crook of his arm. “That’s how much you loved me, Father.” He opened the door to the cabinet and placed the charming little doll with its pale blue eyes inside. “Enough to give your life for mine.”

  The young man left silently through the front door of the house and headed east along the road, toward the sun rising in the gray sky.

  At the beginning of everything, he discovered loneliness in the quiet of his own thoughts. He felt the echoes of longing in his fast-beating heart—an ache for Clara, for Frederik. Then all of that was gone. Unwatched and alone, he took his first steps on the snowy path. He was nameless again, with no one to move his
limbs or offer him direction, with no one to dictate his next step but himself.

  Back at the house by the lake, the Zelverhauses, their guests, and the servants slumbered on. They did not wake until nearly noon, when they stumbled from their beds, minds still clouded with peculiar dreams. They found the front door to the house had been left open and snow had blown into the entryway. There were two sets of tracks leading to the road.

  Clara’s father and friends took the horses and found Clara an hour later, miles from the house, half-dressed, feet bare, lips blue from the cold.

  “He wasn’t supposed to leave without me,” she wept as her father bundled her onto his mount. “Where is my winged horse?”

  “There, there,” he said. “There, there.”

  Unfortunately, by the time the party returned, the whole house was awake to witness Clara stumbling up the front steps in nothing but her nightdress and her father’s coat, her face swollen from weeping, her hair a dark tangle. It had been discovered that Droessen had departed sometime in the night, and soon there were whispers of a midnight assignation, a mad infatuation, all made more scandalous by that faint, intoxicating whiff of the unsavory that had followed the clocksmith everywhere from the start. The rumors grew worse when days, then weeks passed and Droessen’s shop remained shuttered. No one seemed to remember the young soldier in his bright blue uniform.

  Clara took to her bed, and there she remained for a month, speaking to no one and refusing to eat anything but marzipan. She wanted only to sleep and dream of dancing with her prince and taking flight with the Queen of the Grove. But eventually she could make herself sleep no longer and she’d had her fill of almond paste.

  She rose, bathed, and came down to breakfast to find that her reputation was in ruins. Clara didn’t care. She could not imagine marrying some ordinary merchant’s son or choosing to live in one gray world for the rest of her life. She considered her options and decided there was nothing for it but to become a writer. She sold her pearl earrings and moved to Ketterdam, where she took a small apartment with a window facing the harbor so that she could watch the ships come and go. There, she wrote fantastical tales that charmed children, and under another name, she penned rather more lurid works that kept her in nougat and sweet cream, which she always took care to share with the mice.

  One morning she woke to hear that someone had broken into the clocksmith’s shop and stolen all his wares. She put on her coat and made her way down to east Wijnstraat where a crowd of onlookers had gathered as stadwatch officers stood around, scratching their heads. A woman who lived across the canal claimed she’d seen a man enter the shop late the previous night.

  “A soldier he was,” she said. “Dressed all in uniform. And when he came out, he wasn’t alone. He led a whole parade down the street. Lords and ladies in velvet finery, a boy with wings. I even heard a lion roar.”

  Her husband shuffled her away quickly, claiming his wife had been sleeping poorly of late and must not have realized she was dreaming. Clara returned home, a new idea for a story tugging at her thoughts, and stopped only to buy some caramels and a bag of orange sours.

  When Frederik graduated from school, he took up the family business and boarded one of his father’s vessels to fetch a shipment of tea from Novyi Zem. But when it was time to return home, he hopped another ship, and then another, stopping in ports only long enough to mail a postcard or, occasionally, a parcel. He sent home a packet of tea that made a flower bloom beneath the drinker’s tongue; another that, when sipped before bedtime, assured you would dream of the city of your birth; and a blend so bitter one sip would make you cry for three hours. Frederik’s parents wrote letters begging him to return and take up his responsibilities. Every time, he vowed to do just that. But then the wind would change direction and the sea would lift, and he would find himself shipboard once more, certain another world must wait beyond the next horizon.

  So the Zelverhaus family was disgraced and their empire was left without an heir. The house on the lake grew quiet. After that strange night and the gossip that followed, Althea and her husband threw no more parties and visitors were rare. At the few quiet dinners they hosted, guests left early, eager to be out of the dining room where they had once enjoyed themselves so freely, but where they now had the sense of being watched by someone or something that meant to do them harm.

  On such a night, after another lackluster dinner, Althea Zelverhaus drifted aimlessly through her grand home. The hour was late. She hadn’t bothered with a dressing gown, but wore only her cotton nightdress, and with her hair down, she might have been mistaken for her daughter. She thought about answering Clara’s latest letter or opening the strangely marked parcel Frederik had sent from some foreign clime. But when midnight struck, she found herself standing in the dining room, before the glass cabinet.

  After the clocksmith’s disappearance, her husband had wanted to take an axe to it and all of its contents, but Althea had claimed it would only lend credence to the rumors, and the cabinet had remained in its corner, gathering dust.

  Something was missing from its shelves, she felt sure of it, but she couldn’t say what.

  Althea opened the cabinet door. She reached past the sugar mice and fairies to the small, ugly doll she had never noticed before. There was something familiar in the jut of his chin, the smart cut of his velvet coat. She ran her finger down one tiny lapel. Now that she looked closer, his angry little face held a certain charm.

  Are you my soldier? she crooned in the quiet of the moonlight. Are you my prince? She opened her mouth to laugh at herself, but the sound never came. She clutched the doll closer.

  Are you my darling? she whispered as she began to climb the stairs.

  The clock chimed softly. Somewhere in the house she could hear her husband snoring.

  Are you mine?

  YOU WISH TO STRIKE A BARGAIN, and so you come north, until the land ends, and you can go no farther. You stand on the rocky coast and face the water, see the waves break upon two great islands, their coastlines black and jagged. Maybe you pay a local to help you find a boat and a safe place to launch it. You wrap yourself in sealskins to keep the cold and wet away, chew whale fat to keep your mouth moist beneath the hard winter sun. Somehow you cross that long stretch of stone-colored sea and find the strength to scale the angry cliff face, breath tight in your chest, fingers nearly numb in your gloves.

  Then, tired and trembling, you traverse the island and find the single crescent of gray sand beach. You make your way to a circle of rocks, to a little tide pool, your wish burning like a sun in your mortal heart. You come as so many have before—lonely, troubled, sick with avarice. A thousand desperate wishes have been spoken on these shores, and in the end they are all the same: Make me someone new.

  But before you speak, before you trade some small part of your soul for the hunger writ so clear on your face, there is a story you should know.

  Kneeling there, you hear the ice moan. The wind scrapes away at you, a razor on the strop. Even so. Be still and listen. Think of it as part of the bargain.

  There was a time when the northern seas were neither so black nor so cold, when pines covered these islands and deer grazed in the meadows, when the land could be farmed up to Elling and beyond.

  In those days, the sildroher did not cower beneath the waves, afraid of sailors who might spy their smooth limbs and silver tails. They built vast palaces that sprawled along the seabed, sang songs to draw storms and keep their waters safe, and each year, a lucky few carved legs from their tails and went to walk boldly among the men of the shore, to learn their ways and steal their secrets. It was almost a game to them. For three months, they made themselves sick on human food, let their skin freckle and burn beneath the sun. They walked on grass, on cool tile, the slats of boards polished to the slick feel of silk beneath their new toes. They kissed warm human lips.

  But look at them now. No better than selkies with their wet, pleading eyes, darting from wave to rock as if waiting t
o be clubbed. Now their laws are different. They know the land is a place of danger. Yet still they long for a taste of mortal life. This is the problem with making a thing forbidden. It does nothing but build an ache in the heart.

  The old city of the sildroher was a rugged outcropping of rock, covered in the dark green sway of seagrass, so no diver or sailor tossed beneath the waves would ever know what wonders lay beneath him. It ran for mile after mile, rising and falling with the ocean floor, and the sea folk darted through its coral caverns and shell-laden hollows in the thousands. The dwelling place of its kings and queens was distinguishable only by its six spires that rose like grasping fingers around a craggy plain. Those bony spires were layered with the scales of trench-dwelling creatures so that, in the daytime hours, they glowed with blue light like a captured moon, and at night their chambers and catacombs gleamed phosphorescent in the heavy dark.

  Beneath the rock and cockleshells, hidden below the center of the city, was the nautilus hall, shaped like a great horn curled in on itself and so large you could fit an armada of ships inside its curved walls. It had been enchanted long ago, a gift from a prince to his father before he took the throne himself, and it was the heart of sildroher power. Its base flowed with seawater and the level might be raised or lowered while the rest of the hall remained dry, so that the sea folk could practice their harmonies in both elements—water or air, as the spell required.

  Song was not just a frivolity then, something meant to entertain or lure sailors to their doom. The sildroher used it to summon storms and protect their homes, to keep warships and fishing boats from their seas. They used it to make their shelters and tell their histories. They had no word for witch. Magic flowed through all of them, a song no mortal could hear, that only the water folk could reproduce. In some it seemed to rush in and out like the tide, leaving little in its wake. But in others, in girls like Ulla, the current caught on some dark thing in their hearts and eddied there, forming deep pools of power.

  Maybe the trouble began with Ulla’s birth and the rumors that surrounded it. Or in her lonely childhood, when she was shunned for her sallow skin and strange eyes. Or maybe it began not with one girl but with two, on the first day Ulla sang with Signy, in the echoing cavern of the concert hall.