Porcelain Princess

 

   

  Porcelain Princess

   

  Jon Jacks

   

   

  Other New Adult and Children’s books by Jon Jacks

   

  The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly

  The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale

  A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things – The Last Train

  The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator

  Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year Circus

  P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers

  Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)

  Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg

  Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien – The Boy in White Linen

   

   

  Text copyright© 2014 Jon Jacks

  All rights reserved

   

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. It remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

  Thank you for your support.

   

   

  ‘Although she may sound like the stuff of fairy tales, the Porcelain Princess is actually as real as you or me…(But) without your belief in her, the Porcelain Princess can only weaken, becoming once more as lifeless as the clay she was originally so lovingly formed from.’

  Excerpt from The Porcelain Kingdom

   

  *

   

  Chapter 1

   

  The Porcelain Child

   

  She was working as quickly as she dared now.

  Everyone who saw her could see she was suffering from the Fading. She was now quite transparent, such that anyone could quite clearly make out whatever lay beyond her.

  Worse still, as she worked she could tell that her fingers were less substantial than they had been only a few days previously. Almost through will alone, she ensured the consistency of the clay by turning it like a never ending whirlpool in her hands, creating substance and solidarity from what could so easily have dried out and been nothing more than particles of dust.

  Even so, the clay she was delicately moulding would at first refuse to obey her probing and caressing, and it would take many attempts to achieve the effect she desired.

  The face had to be angelically beautiful. The body – despite its puppet-like joints – had to be as realistic as possible.

  Fortunately, as any creator of objects or stories realises, the material you work with seemingly possess its own will to take form; a will that you fight against to the detriment of your creation. The will flows through you, as if that will is merely using you like a convenient tool to accomplish its own aims. It knows better than you what form your creation should ultimately take.

  And so her lack of substantiality actually worked to the advantage of the perfect forming of the material she worked with, for she could never hope to bend it completely to her own will.

  Even so, she hung so close over the firing of the clay, transforming it all in the crucible of flames into an ethereal, pearl-skinned beauty, that the heat would have burned her badly had she not already been so lacking in substance.

  Her husband would tell her to rest, to let him finish her work; but she refused. This, after all, would be her gift to him before she finally Faded from this world.

  ‘She will be the daughter we never had time to have,’ she insisted. ‘But you, you my dearest, must promise me that you will grant our daughter life.’

  And as his wife began to finally fade away to nothing before him, and they could no longer even hold hands, her husband promised; he would find the Illuminator.

  And she smiled, and whispered, ‘I love you’; for they both believed that the Illuminator could grant their daughter the gift of life.

   

   

  *

   

   

  Chapter 2

   

  ‘Shhhussshhh!’

  No matter how quietly the two boys tried to move through the darkened interior of the caravan, the wooden floor creaked loudly beneath their feet.

  ‘Who’s going to hear us?’ the other boy hissed back, yet keeping his voice low just in case. ‘These silly puppets?’

  He contemptuously knocked a group of puppets hanging from a pillar by their strings, setting them clattering noisily.

  ‘Shhhussshhhh! People passing by outside might hear us, idiot!’

  ‘So? They’ll just think it’s that ogre of a Puppet Master and his daughter. Only we know they’ve both headed off somewhere!’

  Quickly and expertly opening and rifling through drawers and cupboards, the boys casually cast aside anything that wasn’t worth stealing.

  ‘What’re you giggling at?’ one of them gruffly demanded of the other.

  ‘I didn’t giggle; only girls giggle! I thought it was you giggling!’

  ‘Are you calling me a girl?’

  ‘Course I ain’t! It must be the wind whistling through the planks of this old heap!’

  Rising up from where he’d been kneeling by an opened cupboard, he glanced nervously around the small, incredibly cluttered room.

  ‘Gives me the creeps, it does, all these weird puppets. All like little demons hanging from their strings.’

  He grabbed at a cluster of puppets dangling from the ceiling, glaring fearfully at their sharply angled faces, their mischievously wide eyes and grins.

  ‘Boo!’ shrieked a larger, even more devilish face as it suddenly came at him from out of the darkness.

  ‘Yaarrrgghh!’ the boy screamed in horror, falling backwards as he tried to hurriedly get away.

  The Devil laughed wickedly. He glowered down at the fallen boy.

  ‘Oh, you should’ve seen your face!’ he shrieked, immediately transforming into the boy’s friend as he whipped away the evil-looking mask.

  ‘What? Kraig, you idiot!’ the fallen boy growled angrily.

  Picking up a wooden ornament he’d thrown aside as worthless earlier, he hurled it at his still chuckling friend.

  ‘You almost scared me to death! I thought these ugly puppets had come to life!’

  Kraig laughed all the more.

  ‘You’re the idiot, Karl! Puppets don’t come to life! Look!’

  He violently shook a group of hanging puppets.

  ‘Boo!’ he snarled directly into their faces.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Karl answered dismissively as he scrambled back onto his feet. ‘What about the Porcelain Princess then, smarty pants? She’s a puppet. And she’s alive!’

  ‘Hah! That’s just a story!’

  ‘What do you mean, just a story? You’ve heard tinkers and travellers swear they’ve seen her. They say she’s real enough!’

  ‘I’m not saying she’s not real! I’m saying I don’t believe she was ever a puppet! Besides, she’s made of porcelain; not stupid bits of old wood and papier-mâché like this ugly lot!’

  He shook and glared at the dangling puppets once more.

  ‘This place still creeps me out,’ Kraig admitted.

  Karl felt edgier than ever as he noticed the glittering glass and painted eyes looking back at him out of the darkness.

  ‘You saw how they’d managed to paste one of their posters to the top of the old bell tower. It’s too Faded to hold our weight; so how’d they get it up there?’

  Kraig wasn’t listening anymore; he was trying the door lea
ding through to the caravan’s living quarters, but it was securely locked.

  ‘I reckon,’ he said, thinking aloud, ‘that if we started a small fire, we could burn enough of this door away to clamber through.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you!’

  ‘What? Stop it, Karl; it doesn’t work on me, idiot!’

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ Karl insisted petulantly, not wanting to be fooled again. ‘It was you, sort of throwing your voice, or something.’

  ‘Throwing my voice?’

  Turning away from the door, Kraig was surprised to find that Karl was right behind him. The voice he’d heard had seemed to come from somewhere farther back inside the cart’s darkened store room.

  ‘But if it wasn’t you – arrrgghhh!’

  Small, roguishly grinning faces suddenly rushed out of the darkness towards the two boys.

  ‘Wwwaaarrrghhh!’ Karl wailed in terror along with Kraig.

   

   

  *

   

   

  Using their strings as rope swings, a group of puppets swept towards the cowering boys.

  Letting go of their strings to drop to the floor, the puppets surrounded and trapped the two terrified thieves against the door. Even though no longer fixed to their strings, the puppets still moved as if alive. With their legs confidently splayed, and their hands on their hips, their eyes twinkled with mischievous glee.

  ‘Please, please don’t hurt us,’ Karl pleaded as he and Kraig nervously clung to each other.

  ‘We…we weren’t really going to take anything, honest,’ Kraig added hopefully, unnerved by the steady glare of the grinning puppets.

  ‘We know,’ sternly replied a puppet the boys took to be a beautiful yet evil witch.

  ‘You…you do?’ Karl stuttered unsurely. ‘How…how?’

  ‘Because we also know how the Porcelain Princess came to life,’ said a puppet dressed as if he were an aging yet still frightening wizard.

   There were only four puppets, the boys soon realised. And they only came up to the boys’ waists. But they were alive. Moving, speaking, breathing, as if they were children suffering some strange physical affliction rather than puppets with a magical life of their own.

  Yes, the boys had heard tales of the Porcelain Princess; but they had never actually seen her. Besides, the Porcelain Princess was said to be beautiful, kind, and wise – and no difference in size to a real girl. But these puppets? One was a wicked witch, another a malicious wizard. The third could be either a treacherous Joker or an even more dangerous Devil, going by the immense horns sprouting out of the top of his head. The fourth, although a pretty enough young girl, had an untrustworthy, Elvin sharpness to her face.

  The boys shivered in even more terror as something slithered out of the darkness.

  It was a puppet dog, clutching what appeared to be a real bone in its jaws. Looking up at the terrified boys, it dropped the bone and hungrily licked its lips.

  ‘How…how did the Porcelain Princess come to life?’ Kraig asked, anxiously stumbling over every word as if he feared hearing the puppets’ answer.

  ‘Well,’ said the elf-like puppet, ‘I reckon she was once a naughty girl like me.’

  ‘Or maybe, like me, even a boy.’ Suddenly jumping up to grab a pair of hanging strings, the Joker lunged towards the two boys, bringing his evilly grinning face close up to theirs. ‘A boy caught stealing from the Puppet Master!’

  ‘You…you were children?’ Karl’s eyes widened in horror.

  Each of the puppets nodded gloomily. Even the dog, who added a sad bark.

  With a warm smile, the Joker deftly slipped to the floor once more.

  ‘The Master will be so glad you’ve decided to join us.’

  ‘Wwwwaarggghh,’ the boys howled.

   

   

  *

   

   

  Chapter 3

   

  With a sharp shrug of her shoulders, Carey moved the heavy sack on her back into a relatively more comfortable position.

  Fully loaded with the posters she’d collected, the sack was awkwardly unbalanced. There was a danger she might tip everything out as she leaned back to look up towards the very top of the town’s old bell tower.

  ‘That’s obviously another one that the others will have to collect when they head out later,’ she said, marvelling at how they had managed to place the poster way up there in the first place.

  Grudo nodded in agreement. The tower was suffering so badly from the Fading that it hardly had any more substance than a mirage. It was now nothing more than a mere wisp of reality in the evening light. It would probably be gone completely in a few days.

  ‘We might have to leave it, Carey,’ Grudo pointed out sadly.

  ‘We’ll see; they’ll have to come out here as soon as we’re sure there’s no one around to see them.’

  Carey didn’t like to leave any poster behind. She spent a lot of time painting them, and almost as long making the thick, hardy paper from a mix of pulped bark and leaves. Sometimes, however, by the time they came to the end of their shows, a poster placed earlier on a Fading building was now irretrievable, as the structure was no longer capable of supporting even Ferena. (There didn’t use to be any problem, of course, when Ferena’s wings had still worked!)

   Still, placing a poster on a high, Fading building always helped draw the crowds in. The townspeople might not be able to read the poster’s details, but from its vivid splashes of bright colours they would recognise it as yet another promotion for the String Theatre that had been pasted all around town overnight. And no one ever failed to wonder how it had been placed there, especially when it shouted out its promise of thrills and magical tales from a building that was now so insubstantial people could effortlessly walk through its walls.

  Even when a poster had to be left behind, it became a reminder to the townspeople of the wondrous, almost unbelievable stories they had been entertained with when – the building finally unable to support even something made of paper – the poster slowly fluttered down through ghostly floors and walls to come to rest on the bare earth.

  Placing a huge, consoling hand on Carey’s shoulder, Grudo deftly used the move to remove her back pack and swing it up onto his own shoulder. Here it joined the half-dozen sacks of posters he’d collected.

  ‘If only Ferena could still use her wings…’ he said wistfully.

  Carey burned with shame. Of course, she had thought of the very same thing only seconds ago. But, somehow, coming from Grudo – even though he didn’t mean it in such a way, and even though he would be horrified to realise how much it hurt her that her failings were so obvious to everyone – it sounded like an admonishment.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll find the land where the Illuminator lives one day, Grudo,’ she pronounced determinedly as they both turned away from the tower and started heading back towards their caravan. ‘The lands we’re passing though at the moment are suffering from the Fading far more than those we performed in only last week. I’m sure it’s a sign that we’re drawing closer!’

  Grudo’s eyes widened in distress as it dawned on him that Carey had taken his comment as a criticism of her skills.

  ‘Carey, I didn’t mean–’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Carey reassured him with a wan smile. ‘Like you, I was just thinking out loud.’

  ‘You know Carey, even if you’re right that we’re drawing closer to the Illuminator’s lands, we don’t know for sure that he’ll be able to help us. Even the stories that contain truths often also contain lies – and we can never, ever be sure which is which.’

  Grudo may have looked like the offspring of a giantess and an even uglier ogre, but his heart was the equal of Ferena’s, his mind even sharper than Durndrin’s when it came to wisdom.

   Carey shrugged.

  ‘I know I often read too much into the stories; I know I believe parts of the stories that others d
ismiss as remnants of fairy tales – but as I can’t think of any other solution, we have to try!’

  ‘And I know there have been many many times when we thought we were almost there, only to be disappointed yet again. You’re taking too much responsibility on your shoulders, young girl – none of us blame you, you know that!’

  Their home was now just a few more strides ahead of them. Even in the poor evening light, the immense, ornately carved caravan appeared to be aglow with colour, despite the moon’s best attempts to subdue its bright reds, yellows and greens.

  ‘But didn’t you notice, Grudo,’ Carey persisted, ‘that not only were there far more people in the audience suffering the Fading than I’ve ever seen before, but they also seemed strangely untroubled by it; just as, the stories tell us, people in the Porcelain Princess’s kingdom accept the Fading as a blessing!’

  ‘All I noticed, Carey,’ Grudo replied sagely, ‘was that everyone enjoyed our retelling of the story of the Porcelain Child; even those poor people who were Fading. Whom, I’m glad to say, we cheered up enough to be rewarded with their laughter and smiles!’

  Carey frowned, trying to think of any fact she could recall from the many stories she had read to contradict Grudo’s scepticism. But there were too many gaps in even her knowledge of the tales. And, as Grudo had rightly pointed out, there was nothing in any of the stories she had managed to collect that implied an increase in people suffering from the Fading was a sign that your were drawing nearer to the Porcelain Princess’s kingdom.

  She reached for one of Grudo’s huge, gloved hands, nestling her fledging-like hand in his.

  ‘Still,’ she said, glancing up at him with a warm smile, ‘I can’t think of any other way of recognising that we might be drawing closer, so–’

  Directly in front of them, the caravan’s heavy rear door suddenly flew open with a loud crash. Two boys almost fell out, careering wildly down the short flight of wooden steps in their eagerness to get outside.

  To stop them falling and hurting themselves, Grudo instinctively spread out his arms as both boys unavoidably barged into him.

  ‘Well, what have we here?’ he asked gruffly, looking down on the boys captured in his arms with a huge grin.

  ‘Wwwwaarggghh,’ the boys howled.

   

   

  *

   

   

  ‘Please please mister,’ Karl wailed miserably, ‘I don’t want to be a goat puppet!’

  ‘And I don’t want to be a pig, either!’ a horrified Kraig agreed. ‘We won’t tell anyone, mister, honest!’

  Carey and Grudo swapped confused glances; then they both heard the laughter coming from inside the caravan.