Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (21 page)

Me? I got to be the bad one.

It’s a lot more fun that way.

The Priest

Talos wasn’t much of a kingdom, in truth. More of a duchy, or a principality fallen on lean times. So far as I could tell from my readings in the castle library, only several accidents of history, an old treaty or two, a few well-considered dynastic marriages, and,
once, the intervention of the Brass Golem of Bourgoigne, had kept the Kingdom of Talos an independent throne. It’s a difficult world to make your way in if you can’t field an army of steam-powered war machines or a strong coven of mage-mechanicians. Talos mostly has peasants, barley, and apples. You can live on barley and apples, plus some herding or hunting, but agricultural produce makes for lousy ammunition when hostile airships come humming over the horizon with their lightning lances sparking.

Still, King Grimm served well enough, and, continuing the policies of his father and grandfather, sold the surplus bounty of his fields and orchards to his larger neighbors at sufficiently cheap prices that they never felt bestirred to come claim the lands of Talos for their own.

The true jewel in his crown was Perrault. She was a grandniece of the King of Winter, through his sister the Frost Princess. Perrault hadn’t inherited any of her distinguished family’s magic, not that I could ever tell, but she certainly had both their beauty and their brains.

Only one shadow lay upon the royal marriage, and it was long and dark and disturbing as an eclipse of the sun. Though they had married young, and were carrying on through their middle years as healthy and hale as any two might ask, Perrault and Grimm had never been able to conceive a child.

This of course represented a problem for the succession, though King Grimm could always name one of his brothers or nephews the Crown Prince and resolve that issue. But, more, it was a stain upon their desires. Both king and queen passionately wished to be parents, to have an heir natural-born of their flesh and blood. There were alternatives of course, but the laws of Talos required that the reigning monarch be blood-born rather than some laboratory creation. Such as me, for example.

You can therefore imagine my mixed emotions when King Grimm and Queen Perrault fell in with a traveling mountebank who styled himself Dr. M. T. Scholes, Surgeon and Specialist in Matters of the Seed and Spirit.

The Queen of Talos

My husband is a dear, dear man, but if he hadn’t been born to take the throne, I honestly don’t know what he would have done with himself. Grimm is many things—steadfast, loyal, moral, gentle, fierce—but clever will never be one of them.

Most people close enough to the court to be familiar with Grimm’s qualities simply assume I married the throne. Which up to a point is true. He was newly crowned when he came courting me in my father’s mansion in our country by the umber-sanded shores of the wine-dark sea. When you consort with a king, you consort with his throne, regardless of your intentions concerning yourself and the world.

So of course when this tall, handsome man with a face you could strike coins off of called upon us, clad in leather and velvet with a gold circlet on his head, I knew he was a throne come calling. Kings don’t simply drop by, after all. There had been heralds and envoys and a somewhat embarrassing inspection of both my father’s premises and my father’s daughter by the Lord High Counselor, who at that time was Godfrey the Shrewd.

On that first-and-final visit before we were graced with the royal presence, Godfrey had brought the king’s Truthsmeller. A vile machine, I thought it then and still I think it now, exemplary of the worst excesses of the steamwright’s art. It clumped on six clumsy, clawed legs, with a body like a mechanical leech and an articulated copper snout that would give nightmares to a corpse. But the thing had good punchtapes whirling in its processors, and sensory organs modeled after those of certain insects with postmortem feeding habits, and it could scent a lie at thirty paces. I did not know this then, of course, but in the years since I have found my own uses for the vile machine, sitting as I so often do at Grimm’s side as he dispenses justices, hears petitions, and treats with envoys from larger and more powerful states.

What I knew then was that an ugly, six-legged monster
wanted to put its snout beneath the hem of my belled skirt, and my father, though visibly uncomfortable, was prepared to allow this of the wrinkled old man who was the machine’s master.

I objected, of course, strenuously, and very nearly began showing off my training in the sword dance to the likely detriment of everyone involved, before father and Godfrey calmed me down. “This is for everyone’s good,” Father had said—one of those stupid lies parents tell children in order to truckle them along. “This is for the king’s good,” Godfrey had responded—one of those pieces of startling honesty that can inspire trust even in a stranger.

So the Truthsmeller sniffed at my undergarments and took the measure of my soaps and bath oils, while Godfrey interviewed my father and, through him, me. His concerns were obvious enough—were we climbers, seeking favor or pursuing a political agenda? Even though the king’s men had come to our house unbidden at the first, we could have been clever enough to lay a slow trap of years baited by beauty. Stranger plots have come to pass, succeed or fail.

In the end, I was deemed an innocent girl, which while true I found myself somewhat resenting. Then Grimm arrived, riding not some enormous destrier or war charger but a graceful, modest palfrey that I would not have hesitated to mount. He did not come in the full royal style, either, but as a man bareheaded and quiet, with even a spark of anxiety in his eyes.

It was that secret, hidden fear I loved first and best, for it told me that beneath the crown there was still a man who did not think he ruled the world and everyone in it.

So we courted, and wed. I swiftly realized that Grimm was not my equal in matters of the mind, but he had a good heart and a gentle manner and a genuine desire to better the world for his people. In truth, would you rather wed sharp-edged wit or simple kindness? And kindness in kings is famously elusive.

With such a husband, and a place in life, who could deny a bride’s longing to be the mother to a child of her heart?

NARRATIVE INTERLUDE THE FIRST:
FORGING BEAUTY

Father Brassbound followed Queen Perrault down the spiral stairs that led into the dank foundations of the Royal Palace of Talos. The door behind them was in the Lesser Rose Garden, a huge, rusted iron monstrosity set into the base of the Windhook Tower. To pass in three steps from the sunlit idyll of the ranks of polyantha to the mossy, shadowed coils of the stone bowels of the castle always disturbed him.

“My lady.” He was nervous—the familiarity itself betraying Father Brassbound’s deep sense of uncertainty—“Why do we go below this day?”

“Because,” she replied in a voice tinged with gentle exasperation, “I want to show you something.”

“I am not so fond of laboratories,” the priest said. “My own forging was a painful, drawn-out process.”

“We forge nothing this day,” the queen assured him.

That they had managed to separate themselves from Queen Perrault’s scuttling crowd of maids, ladies-in-waiting, courtiers, and guards was itself something of a minor miracle. As Father Brassbound well knew, royalty was almost never alone. They were attended even in the privy, at least much of the time. Their most intimate moments took place within earshot of a valet, a ladies’ maid, and at least two guards.

That she took this trip into the bones of the palace alone except for him was a momentous occasion. Momentous, and smacking all too readily of secrets.

He did not like secrets so much. His God was not a god of secrets, though of course the church had its Holy Mysteries. But those were available to any man who took the right vows and swore to the correct loyalties.

The queen…she was a woman of fierce intelligence and strong desires. Father Brassbound feared that in her.

They soon debouched from the winding tunnel of the stairs into
the barrel-vaulted expanses of this particular basement. The queen, carrying a lantern, adjusted some valves and pressed a button that caused sparkers all around the vast, damp space to echo like a battalion of iron crickets.

“Lux fiat,”
muttered the priest.

“Indeed.” He could hear the tense smile even in the queen’s voice.

The lights flared to life, illuminating a dozen dozen devices, from a great, hulking revolutionary with lightning cables thicker than his thigh to worktables covered with delicate glassware arranged for the miracle of a chemical wedding. Other shapes were shrouded with clothes, or lurked in shadows behind the pillars that supported the downward leap of the vaulting. Though the priest had no sense of smell, he was certain the place would be redolent of oil, metal, and mold.

Queen Perrault walked over to a great brass-bound tank filled with a dark green fluid. Tubes ran in and out while pumps ticked slowly over, moving dark and viscous fluids from a series of glass cylinders into the shadowed, foggy depths of the tank.

He looked, but was able to see little. Whatever went on in there was obviously meat rather than brass, but beyond that, Father Brassbound could not say.

“I will be pregnant soon,” the queen announced.

He was quite taken aback at this improbable declaration. “Your Highness?”

“You will help me create and maintain the appearance of gravidity,” she said, glancing back at him. Her brown eyes, so light they were almost amber, flickered in the gaslight that burned from two dozen sources around them. Not tears, he realized.

Determination.

“Pregnancy has but one cause, and a highly predictable outcome,” Father Brassbound offered cautiously.

“We will forge our outcome,” she said, turning back to the tank. “Dr. Scholes has been very, very helpful to me. The fluid he guided me in preparing is almost steeped enough to host she who will be my daughter.”

“You cannot,” he almost squeaked. “Only a child of your body can inherit the throne.”

“So far as the world knows,” the queen replied calmly, “she will be the child of my body.”

“What does His Highness say to this plan?”

This time her voice was sad, far away, echoing from an exile’s distance. “So far as Grimm knows, she will be a child of my body.”

“My Queen,” Father Brassbound said slowly. “I serve you in all things so long as I do not betray the church and my faith in God to do so. I…If need be, I, I can stand beside you and bear false witness to the court in this matter. But I cannot…cannot betray the king.”

“Who speaks of betrayal?” Her eyes were glittering with tears. “Dr. Scholes and I will use the homunculi of his ejaculate and the blood-egg of my own body to make our daughter come to life. It is no different than what my body does by instinct and through the virtues of vital essences. I will merely use my hands instead of my uterus. She will still be Grimm’s child, and mine.”

“But not born of your body.”

“No, Father.” Perrault’s voice dropped, almost a growl, as she threw a switch and the tank began to bubble. “Born of my
will
.”

The priest knew then that no matter the qualms of his conscience, he would obey the queen in this as well.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE II

The Eighth Child

Triskaidecalia was always a terrible child. I was five when she was born, and remember well how difficult Mother’s labors were with her. Trisk was so loath to emerge into the world that she nearly ruined Mother and Father’s years-long project of timing their offspring.

We were to be a coven, see, born to our power and our
hierarchy. Una, the first of us, was to be the greatest, our leader. Triskaidecalia, the last of us, was to be the trickster, the tease, the final rivet in the smooth machine of our lives.

That any of us might have other opinions on the matter was something that had clearly never entered the heads of our parents. They were master and mistress of the seasons. We were merely buds nourished beneath the frost and brought forth by the blessing of the summer sun.

I don’t suppose anybody with a lick of sense would expect a
thirteenth
child to be normal in any way, but Trisk took willful rebellion to an art form. I, not being old enough to concoct clever evasions or young enough to be let off the duty for reasons of parental common sense, wound up being her babysitter, nurse, and nanny from the time Mother weaned her, just before my sixth birthday.

Never was there a child so eager to cut holes in clothing, urinate in shoes, color on ancient walls already decorated with masterful murals, and otherwise misbehave. This even before she began to come into dangerous powers like fire-setting and steam breath. She might as well have been a cat, she was so pointlessly and pridefully destructive.

Trisk’s saving grace was her charm. She was a cute child and is an attractive woman to this day. Her charisma, when she chooses to employ it, can stun oxen at twenty yards. One simply couldn’t bear down the full force of wrathful justice on a child smiling so sweetly as she protested her innocence, even with the bloody knife still in her hand.

And no, that’s not a metaphor.

So she grew, bedeviling us all. Once Trisk was old enough to learn simple cantrips, Mother and Father saw their coven fully formed, sufficient to craft a fae ring or do the fire dances, and they began to train us in earnest.

They had Plans, you see.

You’d think being the Queen of Summer and the Winter King would be a sufficiency of power and prestige for most people. But Summer and Winter are ever being usurped by Autumn and
Spring, those transitional upstarts who can never make up their minds quite what they want to be. Ever down the long years had Mother and Father desired an upper hand, control over the transitions, to make the other two seasons their biddable servants.

We, the Equinoctial Coven, were to be the instrument of that change in power.

Unfortunately, no one had informed Triskaidecalia of these plans in advance. As they were slowly unfolded before our gathering of thirteen, she frequently and loudly denounced them as vain and foolish and petty and stupid.