“Look for him behind his children,
We’re his offspring, every one
Look for him behind the daydream
See his face before we’re done!”
A host of rats swirled beneath the hem of Eleanor’s nightgown. She shrieked at the tickle of their tails and the chatter of their little metal teeth. As the song’s last note faded, the soldier dropped his hands from her waist. In two blinks he was toy-size and marching over the floor. The rats ran in a wet black line into an open toy box, followed by the soldiers. The ballerinas leapt skyward and caught hold of their strings, shrinking into flat paper figures with their arms outthrown. Soon the whole shop was tucked away and still. Early light tapped at the windows, and all that was left of the night was the crown in Eleanor’s hair.
Her brother was nowhere to be seen.
“Thomas?” she whispered. Then she said it louder. Soon she was circling the shop, crying his name, fear tightening its grip on her throat.
“Have you lost him?”
Eleanor spun toward the back of the shop. The voice had come from behind a painted screen, made to look like a theater stage with its curtains tied back. Through its fabric she could see the figure of a man, too long and thin as a finger bone. He spoke again.
“Little girl who thought she had nothing, have you lost your brother, too?”
“What have you done with him?” She would not allow her voice to tremble.
“What have I done? I’ve given him the gift of all his dreams come true.” The figure bowed, his spidery outline folding nearly in two. Then he stepped from behind the curtain.
He was a man unnaturally tall and extraordinarily dirty, his skin as oil-stained as his suit. Under the filth he was handsome, in a curdled, wicked way: eyes keen, bones sharp, mouth as wide and fleshy as a rotten fruit.
“Where is Thomas? Give him back.”
“As you wish.” The toymaker kneeled, heaving open a chest to reveal her brother curled inside it, fast asleep. Eleanor rushed to him, shaking his shoulder and calling his name, but he slept on.
“What have you done?” she cried. “Wake him up!”
The toymaker watched the slumbering boy, his face tender. “Would you interrupt his dreaming? And then how would my pretty things run? I can only do so much with ribbons and ratchet wheels. My creations feed on the dreams of children who lie asleep, spinning the enchantments I pluck from their heads. How many things might I make from this sleeper? And what would you give me to wake him instead?”
Eleanor reached for her brother, then stopped. He looked so peaceful. Here she stood, shivering in her nightgown, as he lost himself in visions that carried him far beyond the reach of long nights and bare cupboards and their mother’s endless crying.
Envy wrapped cold green hands around her heart. Thomas had always been the easy child. Easy to love, at ease in the world. A comfort to her mother in ways she would never be. He could soothe her sorrows when Eleanor could not.
“Myself,” she said. “I would give myself.”
The toymaker twitched one hand, dismissively. “I have no use for hungry girls. I make beautiful things, curious things. What would I make of dreams with claws and teeth?”
Eleanor flushed. “I have nothing else to offer.”
“Aha.” He put up a finger. “You have nothing else yet. But one day you’ll be a bride. On another you’ll become a mother. And when your first child comes of age, it will be mine. Do you agree to my terms?”
Eleanor considered the life he laid out for her. A girl, then a wife, then a mother. A life in which the only mysteries open to her lay beyond the place where Death waited, tapping his pocket watch.
“I will have no children,” she said. She’d seen her own mother in childbed twice. One baby was buried before it was old enough to speak, the other given to its father to live a kinder life somewhere else. Eleanor would never, ever become a mother.
“Have children or not, my terms are unchanged. Do you accept them?”
“I do.”
Gently the toymaker touched Thomas’s cheek, leaving a smudge of oil behind. The boy opened his eyes at once. It took longer for the dreamer’s smile to leave his lips.
Sister and brother walked over the diamond-hard streets in their nightclothes and cloaks and boots. They let themselves into their quiet apartment, the whole place gone gray with their mother’s sleeping breath. Eleanor lifted the toy crown from her hair and hid it away, then lay beside Thomas. He reached for her hand.
“Eleanor,” he whispered. “I was having the most wonderful dream.”
* * *
Thomas died at the end of winter. Since their night at the toymaker’s he’d been dozy and drifting, and slipped so easily into fever he was gone before anyone knew he was ill. The sickness that took him swept through town and stole away more than half its children. By spring the toy shop had closed its doors and the toymaker moved away. No one could bear to see the playthings glinting through his windows with so many little ones lost.
Eleanor grew up. The night she spent playing in a wakeful toy shop faded to memory, then dimmed to a dream. She didn’t think about the toymaker and her promise. Two summers after Thomas’s death their mother, not so old and still beautiful, married a widower twice her age, and they moved into his house. Two more years came and went, and the old man took an increasing interest in giving his stepdaughter away. Soon there were dances held in his hall, one a week until Eleanor determined it would, in fact, be better to accept a young man’s suit than to spend her life in clumsy courtship.
The boy she said yes to had a richer father and a softer heart than she deserved, and a romantic streak that allowed him to love her on the basis of her dark eyes and the moods he interpreted as shyness. Even Eleanor knew she was lucky.
On her wedding day her mother dressed her in a burden of white lace and combed her hair, looking into the glass over her daughter’s shoulder. Though they were safe now, her mother’s face still held the shadows of the hard years. “I have a gift for you,” she said, her mouth almost smiling.
The thing she lifted into the light was made of tin cut delicately as lace, studded with paste diamonds. She settled it into her daughter’s hair.
“I found it among our old things,” she said. “Who knows where it came from. It’s just a plaything, but isn’t it pretty? It’s good luck to wear a piece of the past on your wedding day.”
The crown’s fine teeth dug into Eleanor’s scalp as she gripped her intended’s hands and listened to the judge who married them. Its false stones threw little lights against the walls of his chambers. When she closed her eyes she saw a yellow-haired soldier and the warm speckled back of a clockwork hare.
Her new husband winced, then winked at her. Don’t be nervous, he mouthed, turning his hand to show her where her nails had bitten into his skin.
* * *
There was always going to be a baby. Eleanor didn’t accept that until she was too far gone to deny it, knuckles between her teeth to hold back the hysteria that threatened to leak from her throat. Her husband’s face went so soft when she told him. There was nothing he wouldn’t forgive her now: her impatience, her forgetfulness, her formless anxiety.