The Toymaker's Apprentice Read Online Free Page A

an apprenticeship. Stefan’s motherused to laugh when she saw them. The Wild Hunt, she’d called them, after the Welsh tale of gods that hunted the souls of men.
    If the women in front of him had their way, his father would be remarried within the year. Stefan refused to be a pawn in that arrangement. He didn’t want a new mother, just time to properly mourn the one he’d lost.
    â€œI’m fine, Mrs. Waldbaum.” He plucked his sleeve from her grasp and gave the women a slight bow. Mrs. Waldbaum was an apple-cheeked older woman with three children, two of them boys just about apprenticing age. Behind her, Drusilla Prue, a dour stick of a woman who had never married, stood with a basket on her arm. The rest of the committee looked much the same. Plump or thin, short or tall, they were all draped head to toe in black gowns, overcoats and bonnets, with baskets of food and drink on their arms, and a feverish gleam in their eyes.
    â€œI’ve brought knockwursts fresh from the butcher,” Miss Prue said proudly, “and a bottle of my elderflower cordial. It will settle your father’s stomach. Grief causes such indigestion ! ” She forced her pinched face into an expression of sympathy. “You poor, dear boy,” she cooed. Coming from her, the sound was as jarring as hearing a stork meow.
    Stefan made no move to open the door.
    Finally, Mrs. Waldbaum brushed him aside. “I’ll just let your father know I’m here . . . that
we
are here, all of us, in his time of need.” She bustled through the door, the rest of the Wild Hunt following in a rustle of skirts and coats.
    Stefan waited outside a moment longer. It
was
cold today. His arms were goose-pimpled and his nose had gotten chilly.Dragging his feet, he followed the ladies inside just in time to hear Mrs. Waldbaum screech, “Oh ! A Moor ! In your very house ! How unexpected ! ”
    Stefan bit his lip to keep from smiling. Laughing, even at the startled Mrs. Waldbaum, felt disrespectful to his mourning. The thought of more people patting his head and cooing over him was even worse. He escaped up the ladder to his sleeping loft. Pulling on a too-small coat from last year that hadn’t made it into his duffel bag, he clambered through the trapdoor in the roof and left the murmur of the adults behind.
    The rooftop of his father’s shop was pitched to keep snow from piling up dangerously in winter, but if you sat with your knees to your chest, you could perch comfortably for hours. It had been his mother’s favorite spot, and now it was his.
    Before him, slate and shingled roofs stretched to the horizon like a sea of frozen waves dotted with church steeples. The drizzle had stopped and the sun shone pearl-like above the town’s distant clock tower. Stefan’s jaw unclenched and sorrow flooded in.
    His mother was dead and buried. And he had failed to leave before his father came home. Stefan had watched him age years in the past few days since her death. To have to look him in the eye and tell him the last of his family was leaving—Stefan could never do that.
    And so, the future stretched out before him as monotonous as the rooftop sea. He had outgrown the rooms downstairs. Next, he would outgrow the city, and then, like a dog chained too long to a house, he would grow until the shackles cut into his ankle and crippled him for life. Painful, yes, but the hurt hewould cause his father by leaving would be far worse. Stefan sighed. He would stay in Nuremberg and help his father. He would fend off the Wild Hunt for at least a year, until his father could decide for himself if he wanted to marry again.
    The thought made him queasy. But he would feel differently in a year, he hoped. In fact, if his father remarried one of those nosy women with children of her own, then maybe Stefan would be free to leave.
    â€œOne year,” Stefan said out loud.
    There was a rustle as the trapdoor opened. A