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Yeva wondered if her father had simply misheard her question, but she kissed his cheek and told him she was very fond of cherries indeed.
“You have been a loyal friend, and so I think I must name you,” Semyon said to the river as he tried to wring the water from his ragged coat. “I will call you Little Knife because of the way you flash silver in the sunlight and because you are my fierce defender.”
“It belongs to Little Knife, and Little Knife does as I ask. Besides, what could a river want with a mirror?” “That is a question for the river,” replied Baba Anezka.
hair, and did his best to polish his boots. When he checked his reflection in the mirror, he was surprised at the sullen face and inky eyes that stared back at him. He’d always thought himself quite handsome, and the river had never told him differently.
But the duke was not so sure. A prince would make a fine son-in-law, but Semyon must have great power to accomplish such extraordinary tasks, and the duke wondered if he might make use of such magic.
“Papa, forgive me, but what way is this to find a husband? Soon I will be very rich, but will I have a good man?”
Yeva sighed, weary of asking questions that went unanswered. She kissed her father’s cheek and went to say her prayers.
“Little Knife,” he called. “I need you. If I do not find the coin, then another man will have Yeva and I will have nothing.”
“Now slice through the ground and fetch me the coin, Little Knife, or what good are you to me?”
What if I bring the coin to the duke and he sets yet another task? What if he takes it and murders me where I sit?
Yeva frowned. “What is little about the river?” she asked. But no one heard her question.
all reached for the coin—and the river roared. It seemed to hunch its back like a beast preparing to charge, a wild, pulsing swell that crested over the crowd.
But the river did not stop.
most said they saw a woman with arms like breaking waves, with hair like storm-cloud lightning, and breasts of white foam.
A voice spoke, terrible in its power, rumbling with the sound of rain-choked waterfalls, of tempests and floods. “I am no blunt knife to cut your sorry bread,” it said. “I feed the fields and drown the harvest. I am bounty and destruction.”
“Your tongue is not fit for my true name,” the river boomed. “I was once a spirit of the Isenvee, the great North Sea,
forced to keep that cursed wheel spinning, in endless service to this miserable hamlet.
It was Yeva who found the courage to speak, for the question to ask seemed simple. “What do you want, river?”
Or will you come with me and be bride to nothing but the shore?”
Then, as the duke stood stunned and quaking in his wet boots, the river wrapped Yeva in its arms and carried her away. Through the woods the
Where the millpond had been only minutes before, there was just a muddy basin. There was quiet, no sound but the croak of lost frogs and the slap of gasping fish flopping in the muck.
remember that to use a thing is not to own it. And should you ever take a bride, listen closely to her questions. In them you may hear her true name like the thunder of a lost river, like the sighing of the sea.
From the very first year Droessen visited the house by the lake, troubling rumors followed. During
the De Kloets, wore mourning through Nachtspel and into the new year after Elise De Kloet gave birth to a baby composed entirely of dandelion fluff.
one of the Zelverhaus cousins had a bloom of little gray mushrooms break ...
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a boy visiting from Lij claimed he’d woken to find a single wing jutting from bet...
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Were these strange occurrences linked to the clocksmith? No one could be certain, but they whispered about
So Althea smiled, repeated, “Most unusual indeed,” and left it at that. It all seemed harmless at the time.
Droessen was not just unusual in his talents or his habits, but also in his greed.
He wanted money for his inventions. He never wanted to have to say yes sir, no sir, right away sir again.
No, he needed a girl, still malleable, one that he could make admire him.
He would learn her wants and wishes. He would deliver them to her, and in time, she would come to love him for it. Or so he thought.
he had never truly understood people or the workings of their steady-running but inconstant hearts.
“He loves the snow,” she said, then clutched her doll closer and fell back into slumber.
she had the sudden thought that inviting the clocksmith into her home years ago had been a terrible mistake.
it could not be and yet she was sure of it—it seemed the toy soldier had turned his square head to look at her. And there had been sorrow in his eyes.
where she would lie on her side amid the dust motes and whisper to him until he whispered back.
You are a soldier. You fought bravely on the front and returned to me, your darling. You killed a monster for me once, a rat with seven heads, on the last evening of Nachtspel. You are a prince I woke from a curse with a kiss. I loved you when no other would, and you chose me for your queen.
And at last, sometimes after mere moments, sometimes after what seemed like forever, his jaws would move and he would speak.
the grotesque rictus of his face softened into tender human lines.
As for the nutcracker, he was sure of nothing, and sometimes it frightened him.
Clara. Why could he remember her name and not his own?
I know him, thought the nutcracker. Droessen. I know his name. But he could not think how.
“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.
“Do you have anything to drink? If only they’d stuck you in a liquor cabinet, eh?”
was it enormous? Or were they small?
“Do you know I started life as a sugar mouse?”
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.”
“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.”
The nutcracker opened his mouth to answer, but he could not recall.
