by Alyssa Moon
Alexander noticed the look on her face, and softened. “Ah, well, the rats are a threat, of course,” he admitted. “But I know all the side paths and shortcuts. We’ll be fine.”
Delphine eyed him. She wasn’t convinced he could take on a rat, yet she also wanted to know more about the promised secret. She gestured down the hall. “Please lead the way,” she said, gathering her skirts with one paw in case they needed to make a dash for it. But the hallway remained silent and motionless, with no sign of rats, and eventually they passed through a wide hole gnawed in the wall.
She thought of the treaty Alexander had mentioned. As a young mouse she had been taught about the Great Betrayal of a century ago, when all the rats of the kingdom had turned evil without warning, slaughtering as many mice as they could before the mice had rallied and fought back. She knew of the War to End All Wars, and how all the other creatures—voles, shrews, frogs, and salamanders—had stood alongside the mice to stop the rats’ carnage. It had been an uneasy truce, these last hundred years, but it was all she and everyone in the kingdom had ever known. It was strange to think they were exploring chambers that hadn’t been inhabited for so long.
Alexander led her along narrow ramparts and down steep staircases, deeper and deeper into the darkness. “We’re going down into the tunnels beneath the castle. Nowadays it’s the only way to reach the hidden rooms.” He faced her. “You’ve heard the stories of the Threaded?”
Delphine laughed. “They were only my favorite tales when I was little! Along with Sir Guardefois and the Seven-Headed Cat . . . oh, and Princess Elsabet and the Magical Milk Pitcher.”
But Alexander wasn’t smiling. He was staring intensely at her, eyes gleaming. “The Threaded were here.”
“Here? Where? Peltinore?” Delphine blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“In this very castle! I found proof!” He gestured widely, then sighed. “But nobody believes me.” His elegant whiskers drooped a little, and Delphine almost felt sorry for him.
They turned down another dark, narrow corridor. Despite the faint, flickering light of Alexander’s torch, she saw only blackness at the other end. A cold breeze rolled slowly around their ankles, oozing out of the darkness ahead. The air smelled like mildew, like root plants rotting in a storeroom—the smell of slow decay.
After a few more minutes, Alexander led her over a narrow stick balanced across a waterway, and they began to head upward again, climbing steeply. Delphine breathed the fresher air with relief. Finally, they reached a pile of abandoned barrels. Alexander wriggled behind them, gesturing for her to follow.
On the other side of the barrels was an old human comb leaned sideways against a wall. “I dragged this in here,” said Alexander proudly. “So that I could get through that opening.” He pointed upward to a crumbling hole in the wall.
She followed him up the comb, climbing the teeth like rungs on a ladder, through the hole. She found herself standing in a long, mouse-size hall. A series of open alcoves had once provided places where lords and ladymice could sit and chat. The alcoves were all still decorated in luxurious furnishings of the previous century, but the dust was so thick it looked like fur had sprouted on every surface. The silence was complete. It was as if she had stepped back in time.
Alexander grinned at the look on her face. “This is part of the wing that was abandoned by the mice when the treaty was enacted. It’s been here ever since, closed away and forgotten.
“I stumbled across the entrance years ago,” he continued, threading his way down the hall on tiptoe.
Delphine wondered why he was walking so delicately until she stirred up a little eddy of dust and was immediately seized by a sneezing fit.
“I spent hours examining the frescoes, the delicacy of the brushstrokes.” He stopped in front of an alcove with what looked like filigree etched into the walls. Even under the mask of age, the gold still gleamed faintly. “Then I reached this one.”
Delphine took a step forward. “It’s lovely,” she murmured.
The back wall was decorated with a frieze of Arachne the Mortal and Rhapso the Nymph. Delphine remembered learning about them from tales of classical mousethology, archived in the books of the mouse library in the château. The two figures stood facing each other, whiskers nearly touching, a thin golden thread suspended between their paws, upon which a small spindle hung. Overhead stretched an archway of gold roses. Their tails intertwined with the stems. She took another step closer.
“Look,” Alexander said, almost whispering as he traced his pawtips along the archway of roses.
Now that he was pointing it out, she could see a hairline crack all along the edge of the archway and down either side to the floor. “It’s a door,” she breathed.
“Correct.” He reached out and pressed on the spindle in the frieze. It must have triggered a hidden mechanism, because
the entire panel started to slide away. Daylight peeked around the edges of the panel as it moved backward. Then it ground to a halt, daylight spilling through the narrow opening.
“That’s as far as it seems to open,” Alexander said. “The contraption must be ancient. It’s a miracle it still works. But we can squeeze through. I’ve done it before.”
Something was pulling at Delphine, some impulse deep within her. Alexander’s words about the Threaded being real . . . She needed no encouragement to head inside. She pressed herself against the opening, squeezing her head through, whiskers brushing against the walls, then the rest of her, careful not to snag the lace of her apron against the rough stone walls.
On the other side, the narrow entranceway widened into a perfectly round room. She realized she was inside one of the decorative sconce towers that hung on the outside of the human castle’s spires. Windows ran nearly floor to ceiling along the opposite side of the room, but she didn’t even notice the view—what she noticed were the tapestries.
With colors still glowing softly after so many years, beautifully sewn hangings lined the walls, bringing to life scene after scene of the Threaded—mice sewing flower petals together, embroidering runes onto snail saddles, stitching incredible and elaborate garments that sparkled like glittering stars.
Then Delphine saw what they were holding. She gasped.
The world seemed to stop as she stared at the long silver needles that the mice in the tapestries were using. She thought about her mother’s tale of her Finding: how the air had always shimmered in one special spot on the little doorstep. How one day, the shimmer was gone and a baby had appeared in its place. How that baby had come with nothing except a strange needle. Tarnished, blackened, looking like a piece of scrap metal, and unlike any needle the Desjardins mice had ever seen. As large as a human needle. Delphine’s only legacy.
Now Delphine gazed at a dozen massive silver needles, clutched in the paws of the twelve magical Threaded mice of lore—just like hers. Their needles were gleaming, new, but they were unmistakably the same as the one that hung on her wall.
Delphine felt the blood rush out of her head, and dizziness overtook her just as Alexander entered the room behind her. He ran to her side, barely managing to catch her as she fell. Tingles ricocheted through her body at his touch, and she struggled to sit up.
“I’m all right,” she managed to squeak. She couldn’t stop staring at the tapestries.
Alexander followed her gaze. “I told you the Threaded were real,” he said. “This proves it, doesn’t—?”
She turned her eyes to his, her gaze burning. “Alexander.” The words tumbled out of her, unthinking. “I—I have one of those needles.”
Rien ran down the hallways, not knowing where he was going, just that he had to get away. Tears streamed from his eyes and he blinked them back angrily. If only he could find a place to hide, just for a few hours, until the other servants forgot about taunting him and went back to their jobs. He hadn’t asked to be the littlest rat in the kitchens, just like he hadn’t asked to be the runt of his litter.
The
stone hallways that crisscrossed under the vast fortress were nearly always empty. He kept running, turning this way and that, until he was certain he had lost his pursuers. Then he let himself slow to a walk. He rubbed his face with a dirty sleeve, whiskers damp with tears.
He hated them. No, he didn’t hate them. He refused to hate them. It wasn’t their fault that they were so cruel, all those he worked with in the kitchens. He saw how they were bullied in turn by those above them. If he were ever in charge someday, he would be kind to everyone, no matter who they were or where they had come from.
Rien turned a corner and ran right into a young mouse who had been coming from the opposite direction, her snout in a book. They both jumped in surprise at seeing someone else there, and the book fell from her grasp.
“Sorry!” He grabbed it off the floor and pushed it back into her paws. Then he noticed how she was dressed. She was clearly one of the mice from upstairs. He blushed so deeply that his ears turned red. He had never been permitted to speak to one of the upstairs mice before. He was nothing more than a lowly, twig-thin rat in threadbare clothes, still just a child, barely old enough to be put to work.
She took the book from him. “Thank you.” He realized she could only have been a few years older than he was. “I would have been in trouble if it got damaged,” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to borrow it, you see.”
“Why are you down here?” he asked, suddenly wary. Had one of the kitchen staff sent her to drag him back for punishment?
“I have a habit of sneaking down here when all of my lessons and practice become too much,” she said. She spoke softly but clearly, enunciating every syllable. It was music to his ears, unlike the coarse tones in the kitchen.
He looked back down at her paws. “What is that?”
She turned it so that he could see the painted birch-bark spine. “The Tale of Arachne and Rhapso. I’d rather read this than study, you see.”
“Oh.”
“Have you read it?”
He looked down. “Read? Well, I . . . no . . . I don’t, I mean, I can’t . . .”
Understanding dawned in her eyes. “Oh! Would you like me to show you how?” she asked.
He hesitated, unsure if this was a trick. “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” he said finally.
She glanced up and down the empty hallway. “Nobody needs to know.”
He looked at her, unsure how to respond.
She smiled. “I don’t want to go back upstairs anyway. Come on.”
He followed the mouse to a little archway he hadn’t even noticed before. Inside was a long, padded bench, hidden from view, next to a narrow window that let in the daylight. She seated herself on the bench and gestured for him to join her.
At first, she showed him the words in the book, turning the onion-skin pages one by one to point out the various letters and how they were used together. But soon they were joking and laughing, the book forgotten.
The mouse sighed happily. “I wish every day could be like this one. I’d rather stay down here with you. They’re all so boring up there. Sometimes my lessons are fun, but I wish I could just have a friend to play games with. I never get to play any games.”
“We could be friends,” Rien blurted. He immediately shrank back, horror spreading across his face. How could he have proposed such a thing to an upstairs mouse?
But she smiled back, her eyes luminous and lovely. “I’d like that.”
All the way back to the chateau, Delphine could think of
nothing but the needle hanging above her bed. Her heart was in her throat as the cart jostled over byways and around winding bends until it finally came to a stop in front of Château Desjardins. Then she climbed down and hurried inside, fabrics from the castle storeroom piled high in her arms. What was her old needle doing in tapestries that had been created—and then abandoned—so many years ago? Was it a clue about where she had come from? She didn’t see how that could be the case, and yet the coincidence was too impossible to ignore.
Rushing inside, she dropped all the fabric on the parlor table in an untidy heap. She had to see her needle right away. As soon as she was in her cozy, crooked bedroom, she snatched it down from the wall. Yes, it seemed similar to the ones in the tapestries, with those strange, swirling symbols carved into its surface just like the others. She ran her paw along the cold length of the needle as she had done so many times before.
I could head back to the castle right now, she thought. Compare it to the tapestries. Just to be sure. She even bent to slip her shoes back on, but then stopped herself. Maman would want to know she’d returned safely. And, of course, there was the little matter of having just one week to create the finest gown she’d ever made.
With a sigh, Delphine carefully placed the needle back on its hooks in the wall. She could take it with her when she returned to the castle to deliver the dress. Somehow she would manage to wait.
Delphine quickly found that her daily duties plus the added task of the princess’s gown left little time to dwell on the needle and tapestries.
Every morning, she sat on her stool in the château sewing line, stitching away on sensible garments for the residents, while in her mind’s eye she planned out the intricate details she would embroider onto the princess’s gown.
“Head in the clouds again, Delphine?” the older mice asked good-naturedly. They were used to her fancies. And Delphine merely smiled back at them.
Then there were the rest of her chores. During the Monday sweeping of mouse hallways, corridors, and stoops, she used the time to do the math in her head for the number of tail’s-lengths of lace she would need around each layer of the petticoats. On Tuesday afternoon, when everyone helped wrangle the ladybugs as the garden was being strung with new netting, she stood lost in thought, mesh stretched across both paws, picturing how to create just the right flounces. Nursery duty, on the other hand, took every ounce of her attention and energy to put the pinkie mice to bed.
After dinner each night, her mother kissed her on the forehead between the ears. “Let me know if you need anything,” she’d say, and then Delphine would hasten down the corridors toward her workshop. Finding she wasn’t satisfied with just the materials from the castle, Delphine dug through all the scraps of fabrics she’d been hoarding since she first started watching Cinderella make garments. Some of the silver-colored pieces were especially perfect, and Delphine laid those aside.
For hours upon hours, she sewed by the light of the candle ends. In the parlor below, Cinderella labored over her stepsisters’ gowns, as well as her own, for the human ball. Whenever Delphine felt she couldn’t sew another stitch, she would look down at Cinderella sewing away industriously, and find the strength to go on.
After a while, it seemed as if Delphine had flounced more flounces than had ever existed in the history of gowns, embroidered more buttonholes than could possibly fit onto a single garment. Still, she kept on as each day dwindled like the wick on a candle end.
Maman stopped by in the evenings with a tray of piping-hot caraway-seed cookies or freshly roasted parsnip slices. She would implore Delphine to take a break and have a bite to eat, which she would do for a few moments. But then Delphine returned to the task at hand, sewing and sewing away.
Thursday dawned clear and sunny—the perfect laundry day. Work paused as all the mice of the château took the opportunity to do their washing. Delphine and her mother hung up their damp, now-clean garments on the clothesline they had stretched across one of Cinderella’s window ledges. Far in the distance, the castle stood proud on its hilltop, gleaming in the morning sun. Delphine set each split-twig clothespin carefully as she went, her mind getting a chance to return to the needle.
“Maman,” she finally began. She had spoken to her mother hundreds of times about the story of her Finding. But somehow, this time it seemed different. More urgent. She took a deep breath. “You remember when you found me?”
Her mother chuckled. “The happiest moment of my life.�
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“You always say that,” Delphine replied with a little smile. “But didn’t you ever wonder who left me there?”
Her mother looked solemnly at her over the clothesline. “Of course.”
“Do you think it was my birth mother and father?” said Delphine in a small voice. One of the many, many questions that had plagued her ever since she could remember.
“There’s no way to know,” replied Maman. “But whoever it was, I’m sure they loved you, and it broke their hearts to leave you behind.”
Delphine turned away, gazing out over the rolling French countryside. The castle was a sparkling cut-crystal vase, the turrets and flags looking for all the world like bunches of flowers leaping over the vase’s edge. The sun glittered off the river as it curved its way through the fields and pastures. The world seemed so beautiful, so at peace. Delphine wished she could feel the same. The restlessness she had always felt was now growing in leaps and bounds. It was as if the tapestries of the Threaded had sparked a flame inside her.
She struggled to find the words. “I just wish I knew, once and for all.” She stopped, fearing she sounded unappreciative of everything that her mother had done for her.
But Maman stepped close to her, wiping her paws on her apron and then placing her arms around Delphine. She cradled their heads together as she had done when Delphine was very young. “I understand,” she said. “Chérie, I’ve always known you would want these answers.”
A little breeze came around the corner of the tower and fluttered the clothes on the line, pulling at a petticoat. It threatened to spring free of its twig clothespins.
Delphine ran to repin it more thoroughly. “How would I even know where to begin?”
“Well,” said her mother, rejoining Delphine, “you just need one place to start. When you unravel a line of stitching, what do you do?”
Delphine paused. “Pull out the stitches one by one?”