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.”