This is for Katie the Elder, who also feels the lack.
Once upon a time there was a man who had no children.
One day he tripped over a piece of wood that groaned when he kicked it.
So he carved it into a puppet and called it his son.
Fakir toppled backward into the dark lake, and the water his falling body displaced closed over him as swiftly as a courtier effacing a breach of protocol. The chill that had clawed at his flesh while he grappled with Kraehe's minions held him now in a gentler grip; a perfidious ease denied the wounds he had taken. Cuts and bruises, he thought, reflexively dismissive. Cracked rib, maybe. Not that it matters ...
He sank relentlessly, dragged down by the weight of his boots and the practice leathers that served him for armor and the sword his right hand refused to release. Lohengrin's sword -- he hadn't disgraced it, hadn't failed Charon or Mytho ... or her ... or himself. He had made good his boast: he had changed fate, striking the blow the Knight of The Prince and the Raven could not. Now it's her turn. He hoped she had the wit to follow his lead, to tear the rent in the story wider and cheat the Raven of her prize. She's got to have sense enough for that. She's got to.
His throat still barred from escape the last breath he had drawn, but he made no other gesture to save himself. He had spent his strength to prevent the diving crows from skewering him; the stroke that shattered Mytho's sword had in turn drained his will. Soon enough, this last instinct too would exhaust itself and let him rest. I won, he thought. It's over. I'm done.
Not yet.
The denial irked him: he let his head fall back, as once he would have stared down his nose at a first-year student who contradicted him. The hell you say. I'm finished with this story.
Nothing troubled the pall of water that swathed him, but the answer thrummed in his ears again. Not yet.
Just because I haven't been torn in two? His eyelids lifted in quest of his interlocutor, but the gloom was impenetrable. I am not going back up there to be slashed in half for -- indignation tightened his muscles -- for completeness's sake! Haven't I done enough?
Not yet.
Uneasy now, he tried to turn his wrist, to haul the sword up to guard. His heart began to thud behind lungs rebellious for want of air; his throat spasmed in thwarted gulps. Who are you? What do you want? The knife in his boot was out of reach and the sword hung from his arm like an anchor. If he couldn't raise it, he'd be a sitting -- he'd have no defense. Can't you just leave me alone?
Not yet.
Something caught him at knees and chest, arresting his descent for a last assault, the vengeful claws seeking his heart -- or, no, he really had broken a rib, damn it, let go! His lips gave way in a whimper of agony; helpless, he swallowed water and darkness as his captor stole his victory with his peace.
But the wooden boy was mischievous and willful.
No matter how often the man reproved him, he went his own way.
He offended all the neighbors with his tricks,
so at last they tied a rope around his neck and hanged him.
Taking the boy's body firmly in her arms, Edel stepped off the storyline into a muddle of events. They jostled and jolted her, but her frame was constructed to withstand such shocks. Of the boy's structural integrity she was less certain, so she raised her voice and dropped a quatrain into their circumstances like a spindle.
"Crawler, here no crow shall spy you;
Neither hap nor weird deny you
Leave to spin your tomb and die
To live again, a butterfly."
Her words gathered contingencies, twisting them into a thread of plot as fine as spider silk. Edel took another step forward and felt the strand sag beneath her foot -- then it tautened, springing back as it found anchorage elsewhere in the story.
She strode out briskly along the line, unhampered now by random incidents. Only time still pressed. Her master's attention was occupied by the main plot, in which neither she nor the boy had any further part to play, but until Herr Drosselmeyer recalled her, she remained in the tale as his proxy: to manipulate the action, to illuminate its mysteries, and (most important of all) to be wherever she was needed, without regard to the unities. Dropped from her master's notice, she might act without his sanction, but who could tell how long the contest between the two princesses would hold his interest?
Her pace quickened, but she had already reached the junction between her own narrative and the history of Goldkrone. The Brunnenplatz took silent shape around her: a foggy cobblestone square hard by the old cathedral, empty and dark as the windows of the counting-houses opposite, a mile and more from the bottom of the lost lake.
She could not remember when last she had been called upon to travel thus. Her master had grown to abhor such shortcuts: crude shifts, he called them, unworthy of a true artist -- which she assuredly was not. Remember your place, he'd said as he cut the heartstrings she'd so unexpectedly developed. A cheap deus ex machina, that's what you are, and all that's fit for this degenerate age. He'd closed her torso with a snap and left her sitting slumped at the workbench while he paced. The Greeks could winch Pallas Athena herself down from the heavens to cleanse a man of blood-guilt ... or Artemis to rescue a virgin sacrifice at the very foot of the altar! And I must dangle a marionette from the flies and sing "Hi Lili" to get anyone's attention. Magic realism, pah! And then he'd sent her out to guide Princess Tutu and the Prince's Knight to the threshold of the labyrinth at whose heart lurked tragedy ...
Edel laid the boy's body on the ground beside the fountain. Water soaked his clothes and hair, dribbled from his nose and half-open mouth, but he did not stir. She knelt and turned his head to the left, then pressed her hands, one atop the other, sharply into the muscle below his ribs. His chin flooded; he choked on the backwash, but she drove her palms down once more and forced his lungs clear. A breeze swept across the square, ruckling Edel's blouse and the puddle spreading on the stones. The boy gasped, coughed, and began wheezily to breathe again.
Edel sat back on her heels. Duck had not wanted the boy to die: she had wept and dropped to her knees on the rough sand, calling his name as he sank, her face as pale as the feathers that framed it. Yet when she rose to face Princess Kraehe's challenge, her eyes were dry. Edel had decided then that she had no more need of tears. If Duck found her way out of the labyrinth with the Prince, let the boy Fakir be there to greet her, to smile on her success. That, Edel judged, was a proper ending.
Had she done enough to bring it about?
She considered the boy once more as the wind whispered around them. His breaths were quick and shallow, his skin clammy. That was not right. Human beings were warm creatures, their flesh aglow from within, stimulated by something tenderer and fiercer than her master's weights and cogs. The boy had shone no less brightly than Duck, for all he'd tried to muffle the gleam, but now he seemed to Edel like a candle guttering in a storm lantern. She put her hand to his cheek, tracing the line of his jaw. Cold. Too cold.
The answer was obvious, yet she hesitated.
After a moment, she reached for her jewel box and it materialized under her seeking fingers. She rummaged through a side compartment full of beads and baubles (chalcedony for battle, onyx for fortune, carnelian for joy ...) to find a glassy, blue-gray stone crudely knapped into the shape of a triangle. Taking it in her right hand, she drew the pinecone-hilted dagger from its sheath in the boy's boot. Flint for resolution; steel for truth and faith. Strange to call upon those virtues as she betrayed the author of her being -- but perhaps her master would appreciate the irony, a last service from his feckless factotum.
Three times she smote the stone against the blade. Sparks flew, catching in her skirt, setting it afire. As the flames consumed her linen dress and gnawed at the linden beneath it, she raised the knife above her head. In the unscarred mirror of the flat, Edel glimpsed her own face bathed in light.
Then, with a single, wrong-handed stroke, she severed her strings.
What else can a boy expect, who does not heed his father?
What else can a father expect, who treats his son as a puppet?
Fakir rolled instinctively toward the pleasant bloom of heat, but was brought up short by the wrench to his battered ribs. Aching, his mind still half-drowned in strange dreams, he lay on his back and searched the hard pallet of his childhood for a quilt to ward off the autumnal nip. 'S not time t'get up, is it?
The reply chuckled in his left ear. Not yet.
Relieved, he drowsed again, drawing strength from the warmth that drifted across him like a breath of Indian summer. His nose wrinkled at the smell of burnt cloth until the wind bore it away.
Author's Note: The lack of a transition scene (or even a hint of one) explaining that Edel rescues Fakir before he reappears at the end of episode 13 has always struck me as a small failure of art. Thus I remedy it. In addition to the usual references to classical literature and Hollywood movies, this story takes particular inspiration from Christina Rossetti's caterpillar poem, which underlies Edel's quatrain. The framing story harks back to the original Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi.