The Enchanted Sonata Read online

  “Prince Nikolai Volkonsky, crown prince of—”

  And she stopped abruptly, for the drawing room around her had flickered, and she felt herself in a palace of white, a city of snow-covered streets, moon-cast shadows, and the thick scent of ice and gingerbread.

  The vision—well, not exactly a true vision, but a scratched phonograph recording of one—faded back to the drawing room as Clara’s voice stopped.

  “Go on,” Mother urged, “read us the story.” It seemed Mother hadn’t seen the vision of the words like Clara had.

  Shaking off the confusion (and a little nervousness), Clara lifted her chin, took a deep breath, and began reading in a bold voice:

  Prince Nikolai Volkonsky, crown prince of Imperia and soon to be Emperor of Imperia, was an orphan…

  In just a few words, the light gathered around Clara, the memory of Johann and the concert faded, and Clara was swept into a world of glittering white forests, palaces of colored domes, and the life of a young, brave, and sort-of handsome prince.

  Prince Nikolai Volkonsky, crown prince of Imperia and soon to be Emperor of Imperia, was an orphan.

  Which wasn’t to say that he was alone. Good heavens, he wished he were alone. He would have given his left arm to be alone once in a while. The moment the rising sun hit the panes of his royal suite windows, attendants swept in to ready him for the day, open the curtains, smooth his bedsheets, starch his stockings, link his cuffs, hold the boxes that held the cufflinks, and usher him with greatest ease into a new day. Attendants stood by the doors, relieving him of the trouble of ever turning a latch.

  Thousands of servants, in fact, filled the Imperial Palace, a great expanse of white hallways, glistening ormolu chandeliers, tall mirrors, painted murals, perfumes and polish. Attendants washed windows, polished knobs, filled gas canisters, cooked, kept the books of the treasuries and wardrobes, and plucked the leaves from the trees before they fell in the autumn. There was even a servant who cracked Nikolai’s egg every morning.

  (Nikolai, once—when he was fifteen—had told the girl that he could very probably do that himself, and she had left the dining room in tears. And so, each morning Nikolai mutely watched a servant tap the tip of his boiled egg three times with a tiny spoon.)

  Nikolai, of course, was fond of all the servants. They were his family; or closest to it. All of Imperia was. He felt a deep connection to every part of it: the children who played in the streets after school, the thick chugs of the trains across miles of railways, the church spires that needled over the rooftops, the abbeys and monasteries in the forest mountains, the rolling farmlands and the vast walls and soldiers that kept the country safe. Imperia was, in fact, his greatest joy...and his greatest agony.

  “I haven’t done anything to earn this,” he said one morning, as he was being fitted for his coronation uniform, a red outfit crested with diamonds. It weighed nearly as much as he did.

  “Sir?” said the Master-of-the-Suite.

  “Well. I mean,” said Nikolai, stiffly turning. “My father, you know, he was twenty-nine when he became emperor. He was at least a lieutenant by then.”

  The Master-of-the-Suite looked confused.

  “Do you think I even deserve it?” said Nikolai.

  “Deserve it, sir?” said the Master-of-the-Suite. “You were born it.”

  “That’s not the same thing, Master Grigory.”

  He didn’t deserve it. Nikolai knew, deep down, that he didn’t. He had just two days before his eighteenth birthday, his coronation was not long after, and Nikolai knew he would be ascending to the throne as a great fraud.

  No one made him feel this more than his guardian and Imperial regent, General Drosselmeyer.

  “You missed your Letter-writing and Penmanship lesson this morning, Nikolai,” said the old general, as Nikolai rushed into the Gallery for their daily State of the Empire review.

  “Ah, well, I was being fitted for my coronation uniform, you see, and then I was waylaid at the gardens,” said Nikolai as he breathlessly took a seat at the table. “Master Curator was asking all these questions about pulling up the fountain pipes for new marblework—”

  “Miss Borodin’s feelings were very hurt, Nikolai,” said the General.

  There was an awkward pause.

  “As such,” said the General, “I feel it is appropriate that you lose the privilege of attending the Skuchnii Pesni opera next Saturday.”

  Nikolai tried to keep the relief from showing on his face.

  “That is a loss,” he said, in his best Disappointed Voice.

  Such was his interaction with the Empire’s regent. Nikolai had long ago given up trying to win admiration from the old General. In the five years since Nikolai’s father had been killed, the General had run the country with steely effectiveness, leaving nothing for Nikolai to manage.

  People were talking. He could feel it. The whispers when he went to Mass, the eyes on him when he walked through the gardens. They were just as uncertain about him as he was.

  He just needed a chance. Something to prove he could be a good emperor. He needed to...to lead a battle charge against a rat volnakrii or join the regiments on the southern border or...or something. Anything to prove he could manage the country. He just needed a chance.

  * * *

  That chance came one night as Nikolai lay asleep, and the sound of a flute pierced the cold December air.

  When the flute played that night, only the children could hear it.

  Throughout the Imperian Empire, they sat up in bed, rubbing the sleep from their eyes. They had all heard music before: the cannonade of church bells, the fife and drums in army parades, the music from the Krystallgradian Symphony Hall as the musicians inside rehearsed all day.

  But this music was different.

  A jaunty string of notes, it wound through the rooftops and streets, seeping underneath doors and into chimneys. The melody conjured the taste of caramel sugar; laughter on a spring day; ice skates scraping a frozen pond. It twined around the children’s ankles and curled around their arms and teased them softly from their beds. Music drew them from their homes, and into the wintery Imperian streets. Toddlers wobbled forward, leaving tiny footprints in the snow, and babies, leaning forward and cooing with the song, were sleepily carried by the older children.

  All the Imperian children, in cities and countryside alike, left their homes and walked the streets. Their parents slept on, stirring a little for the draft from the open doors, but they did not stir. They couldn’t hear the flute.

  At the northernmost tip of the Empire, the Imperial Palace glowed white and gold. When the oddly beautiful music resonated through the grand halls, Prince Nikolai couldn’t hear it. At seventeen, nearly eighteen, he was too old to be a child. It could be argued, in fact, that he hadn’t been a child since he was twelve. But either way, Nikolai continued sleeping, his lanky form sprawled over his bed, and the music that called to the children did not rouse him.

  But the servants’ children, who often helped in the gardens and tables and polished the sofa legs and played in grand halls when no one was looking, they heard it, and they were lifted from their beds, slipping into the halls and to the courtyard outside, drawn forward into visions painted by the flute melody.

  And they really were visions, too. Every child saw something different. For some, a candy shop stood at the end of the prospekt, attendants in red-and-white arranging chocolates into pyramid displays. Other children saw houses full of books and soft chairs to curl into for a long read. And others saw bounding dogs with sticks in their mouths, eager to play.

  The poorer children in country towns like Lesnov and Derevo and Lode saw visions of tables set with puddings and bread in the shape of wreaths, they saw warm homes and soft beds and piles of already-chopped wood. Their feet stepped in time with the flute’s playful melody.

  The music found its way through the fashionable district of Krystallgrad, in the Polichinelle’s Candy Emporium, a massive building of cafes and
candy shops. Alexei Polichinelle, the oldest boy of the Polichinelle family, sat in the kitchens, translating a Belamore recipe book. He paused for a moment. Had he heard something? Some strange, distant harmonics, tugging him to put his book down and follow the scent of exotic caramels and spices...but no. He had been a soldier, and now at nineteen, was no child. The smell faded.

  In the vaulted lobby a floor up, a red-headed attendant on night shift didn’t hear the music either, only humming as she restocked candy jars along the walls. She was sixteen, perhaps young enough to hear it, but she had been raised in the Indomitable Sisters’ orphanage, which made one grow up quickly.

  The masters of the candy emporium, Master and Madam Polichinelle, did not hear it, and they slept on in their room nestled beneath the Emporium rooftops. The few customers of the shop (Polichinelle’s was open at all hours) sipped on their cocoa in the festooned rooms of checkered floors and oil paintings, reading the Krystallgradian Star and hearing nothing.

  But the Polichinelle children heard it. All of Alexei’s younger siblings—eleven of them!—threw the covers aside and slipped from the bedrooms in the towers of the shop, quietly descending the spiral staircases and tiptoeing through the hall to the Shokolad Prospekt, a grand street with snow-crossed cart tracks. The second-oldest sibling carried the youngest, just a baby, breathless at the vision of diamond-encrusted dresses being stitched, just for her. Her little brothers saw bounding dogs, her little sisters, dolls and colored pencils. Absolutely none of them saw pots of candy confections that needed stirring within endless kitchens.

  And then—just as the children had slipped from their doorsteps and were nearly touching the visions—the music stopped.

  And then the flute began again, but with a new song: this one shrill and tight, starting low and sweeping upward to piercing highs. This one brought a tight, dark magic that wrapped around the children like a rope, and squeezed. The visions blackened and fell to dust before them and the new melody vibrated through the children who heard the music. They cried out—

  Chaos wrung the city streets as a brittle flute cadenza played.

  And the children were twisted and pressed small into new forms. In a blur, they clattered to the streets in every shape and size of toy. Toys!

  Small girls who clutched rag dolls became dolls themselves, with painted blushy cheeks and heads of golden curls. Stable boys from the palace transformed into rocking horses with silver bridles. Children who loved to draw became colored pencils. Boys became wooden whistles, whips and hoops. Toys of every shape and size tumbled to the ground, silent and unmoving.

  And the song ended.

  At the top of the street, the flutist who had played the music tucked his flute under his arm to keep it warm. His bright blue eyes examined his handiwork, toys strewn across the prospekt. Was there sadness in them? Or was that a glassy brightness? It was difficult to tell. Looking at the man was a somewhat Medusian experience. One could look at him long enough to see his golden curls, his half-smile, see that he was young enough to be a university student but old enough to wear a vest and tie and look quite dashing in them. But a person would rarely observe him longer than a glance, because the gentleman musician would turn to look back, and his blue eyes were just a little too bright and sharp and didn’t blink as often as they should and one would suddenly feel very, very uncomfortable.

  Flute still tucked under his arm, the musician strode down the prospekt, leaned down and picked up a stuffed bear, small enough to fit in his hands, and brushed the snow gently from it. The child couldn’t feel the cold, he knew, not in this form. But he set the bear down gently anyway.

  Lifting the flute back to his lips, the man blew, playing several notes with flawless tone, and with that strange musical magic, he disappeared.

  He reappeared in the streets of the next city, swathed in the light of streetlamps, and began playing again. Once more, Imperian children were drawn from their warm homes, leaving empty beds and open doors for the visions in the brittle night air.

  Again and again.

  Of all the children, perhaps the easiest to lure from their beds lived in the orphanage of the Indomitable Sisters’ Abbey. They dressed in the same coarse beige clothes of the nuns. They ate the same lumpy food as the nuns, and worked as hard. They liked the nuns, but they knew the Abbey wasn’t the same as having your own mother and father, and often they kept watch on the distant train station, hoping that when it brought the mail, it would also bring parents who wanted them and take them Home.

  When the flute music sounded, none of the orphans bothered with shawls or coats, but in a rush they flocked from the Abbey, through the garden and out the gate, and into the mountain path. They left bare prints over the rugged trail, hurrying through the pine trees to the station below, where they could clearly see a steaming red train, and a crowd of hopeful parents waiting for them. They filled the station platform, bundled in muffs and scarves and smiling in the single pinprick of station light. Frightened that the train and the parents would leave without them, the children ran.

  All but one. A small boy of six, Pyotr. He struggled to keep up, lagging farther and farther behind. He had been born with a twisted foot, and walked with a crutch in an awkward three-legged gait. Never before had he wished so desperately to go quicker; for his crutch to not sink so deeply into the snow, for his frozen feet to not trip over the rocks. In the distance, looking directly at him, from the train platform, stood a mother and father. Waiting for him.

  Pyotr knew this feeling of desperate hope. Parents would sometimes visit the Abbey, talking gently to the nuns and looking at the orphans gathered in a classroom with slates. Their eyes would light on Pyotr, and his heart would beat so quickly it felt like it would burst—and then they would see his crutch beside him, and the light in their faces would fade. Every time, parents would move on from Pyotr, and find another orphan to bring home with them.

  But this mother and father were different. Pyotr felt it. The man with a bristly mustache and fuzzy hat was smiling directly at him, and his wife with jeweled hair combs beamed. They didn’t care that he was lame. Pyotr knew they didn’t. His new parents wanted him.

  “I’m very strong!” Pyotr called out. “I’m six already! I split wood for the nuns every day!”

  The man on the platform far below waved at him, beckoning him on. Pyotr hurried forward with newfound excitement.

  And then, just rounding the edge of the ravine, Pyotr’s lame foot snagged on a tree root. He fell forward, losing his crutch, and in a moment was tumbling down the side of the ravine. His crutch whipped from his arm. A puff of fresh snow, his fall studded with rocks. Freezing white coated him. A bare, twisted tree stopped his fall with a painful thumpf.

  The howl of the wind and the thunder of the river below masked the enchanted music, and Pyotr was no longer under its spell. Still, he crawled up the hill on all fours, desperate with fear that his new parents had chosen another boy. When he reached the crest of the hill, his fears were confirmed: Every parent was gone, and so was the train.

  Just before dawn, the panicked Indomitable Sisters found Pyotr at the station, huddled in the lamplight and clutching a stuffed dog. Pyotr was half frozen in the midst of dozens of toys, and of all the children in Imperia, Pyotr was the only child who remained a child.

  * * *

  High on the roof of the Krystallgradian Symphony Hall, the flutist twisted his flute apart and carefully cleaned it as the sun rose. All across the city and on the prospekt beneath him, toys pinpricked the snow in dark shapes.

  In the distance, the first parents’ cry sounded. They had found their child. Or rather, what remained of their child.

  The musician gently folded his sheet music—A Child’s Dream and March of the Toys—and carefully slipped it into his satchel.

  “That turned out rather well,” he said to himself. “Of course, the melody was a little out of tune, but that’s only to be expected, of course. Cold air.”

  He inhaled deepl
y, closing his eyes and lifting his chin, listening to the shimmer of the cold dawn air and sun rays cresting over the mountains. When he opened his eyes, they fixed unblinkingly on the distant Imperial Palace, where he knew Prince Nikolai Volkonsky would soon be awaking to the sound of his kingdom in chaos.

  The musician smiled.

  Prince Nikolai sharply awoke.

  Something was terribly wrong. He could feel it.

  He pulled himself from his vast bed and to the window that stretched from ceiling to floor and peered out at the frosted gardens. Topiaries stood like white statues among the marble statues. Mist hung among them, pale in the pre-dawn light.

  He’d had this feeling before. On the battlefield, just before the rats had appeared from their forest nests and attacked. He’d been in the army for almost two years, as every Imperian boy became a soldier at sixteen, and the prince was not above the law. From his service, he was familiar with this feeling. It meant the stench of rat breath, rat blood staining the snow, rat bites, the thick smell of canon sulfur and gunpowder, and the cry of wounded men and rats strewn across the ground. Had rats somehow gotten past the soldiers, the wall, and into the city?

  The prince peered out his window. No rats emerged from the mist. The gardens were silent.

  But something wasn’t right.

  And now, Nikolai heard it: a distant cry in the direction of the city, joined louder until it became a chorus. Then, panicked voices that resonated behind him through the Palace halls, rising in volume, and then, the harried knock at his door.

  “Highness,” said the Master-of-the-Suite, sending a shaft of light across Nikolai’s room.

  Nikolai turned, seeing the confusion and fear etched in the servant’s face. And he immediately knew: it was worse than rats.