by Lisa DeSelm
A sharp pain suddenly pierces my nose, leaving me gasping. Bran steps back, eyes wide in alarm. There’s no avoiding the huge, barbed fragment of wood rising from my nose. It rears like a sword tip in Bran’s awe-struck face.
I shriek in horror, clapping my hands over my nose.
“You know better,” scolds the linden tree.
“Piro?” Bran asks, my name suddenly seeming small and shameful, coming from the perfect mouth on his beautiful face. “What’s that?”
I promptly whirl and start to run. I’m fast, especially when terrified. Prying the splinter from my nose, I hide it deep in a pocket, hating myself all the while, shamed at having yet more proof of my weakness. Pressing my apron to my face to stop the bleeding, I pray for the ground to open and swallow me whole.
When Bran catches up with me back at the wagon, I am nauseous and dangerously close to losing my breakfast. Blood pours from the wound—just to spite me, I am sure. Masked in my soaking apron, I bury my face in Burl’s warm mane.
“Piro, please!” Bran pleads, staying a safe distance back. “Tell me what happened! Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not all right,” I growl.
I can’t do this. I can’t explain. Not yet. Not ever.
My brain burns with humiliated fury, trying desperately to think of a way to escape the moment. If I lie, I will have more splinters to explain. If I tell the truth, I’m not only endangering Bran, I risk losing him as well. Surely, once he knows …
“Tell me, Piro. What is it?” He takes a few steps closer.
Burl swishes his tail, nickering softly, prodding Bran to keep going.
Traitor.
“What’s hurting you? What was that?”
I bite my lip so hard now I’m bleeding in two places.
“Don’t come any closer!” I shriek, pressing my face further into my horse for cover.
“Fine,” says Bran, who I see from a quick glance stops at Burl’s flank, his hands up in surrender. “I won’t. Just tell me, Piro. Did I hurt you? Was it a splinter? Can I help?”
“No,” I snarl, knowing that, at least in answer to his last question, is the truth. There is nothing Bran can do to make this better. I must suffer the humiliation of this curse alone.
Retreating into silence, I ignore his pleas for explanation and begin loading the wagon to return home, turning my face away from him at every opportunity. Tears stream freely, seeping with the blood from my nose. I am quite certain I’m the most hideous creature to ever walk the forest floor.
I let Bran take the reins on the drive home, since I can tell he’s desperate to do something to help me. I urge Burl along with the crop, eager to put this whole incident behind us. Not intending to be rushed, Burl takes his time, slowly plodding the winding path back to the village. Some days I believe that horse truly loves me, and others that his sole ambition is to make my life more difficult.
My fingers twitch, drumming restlessly on my knees or swiping at my throbbing nose until Bran reaches over to capture one of my hands in his. A rush of heat spreads from his fingers to mine, and for a second, I allow it. Who knows how long I have to savor the simple joy of his touch? I find myself trying to grip tightly to every small delight, afraid such things aren’t meant for someone like me—someone who erupts in splinters at the slightest slip of her tongue.
Just as we’re about to leave the darkest part of the wood, something among the trees catches my eye. A sharp intake of breath pierces my lungs.
“What is it, Piro?” Bran stops the wagon, looking worried.
Shaking my head to clear my vision, I stare at the spaces between the trees.
“Thought I saw someone,” I stammer. “Never mind.”
Bran drives on, uncertainty painting his face. I can’t help but glance back again. I feel something, someone, there still, watching me. I can’t explain that I saw her—the shape of a little old woman step from the bark of a tree, like a snake shedding its skin. She’d smiled at me, I am sure of it. The hair on the nape of my neck prickles. I force myself to look away.
If there is a little old woman watching me now, a tree-woman who knows the secrets of wood and blue moons, then surely she knows who I am. Who I really am, and what I am made of. Against my will, the tight circle drawn around my past widens even more.
CHAPTER 9
“TIFFIN, YOU DOLT, YOU’VE KNOCKED OVER THE GLUE!” NAN shrieks as a fresh wave of glue pours down her skirt. “Again!”
“Sorry!” Tiffin bleats, hurriedly trying to wipe up the mess.
“You might be a wizard with metal, but in here you’re a mess,” quips Fonso.
It’s true. The makers—all who can be spared from their normal occupations and beds—are cluttering up the back workshop of Curio, where they joined me to frantically assemble the final order of soldiers due to the Margrave. I tried to shoo them out hours ago, but my protests were soundly ignored. It’s now well past midnight. My deadline looms tomorrow and my father awaits.
A row of three freshly pressed soldier’s uniforms also wait on the worktable. Bran and Benito completed them days ago. Two soldiers are constructed and just need their faces to be painted on. The final man is in a near-completed state of assembly. Tiffin was gluing leg joints, with Nan’s help, when the latest glue eruption occurred.
“Here, Nan,” I say, tossing her a rag and a fresh apron to wear home over the glue. “Tiffin, you’ll need to go wash your hands with some solvent unless you want to be permanently attached to Nan’s skirts.” The smithy’s brown eyes widen. Fonso glowers at him.
“In fact, why don’t you go home, all of you. Sleep. At least some of us should. I’ll finish up here. I’m almost done. I couldn’t have made it this far without you.”
“I’ll stay,” Bran says firmly, though the shadows under his eyes mirror those etched beneath my own. “The rest of you go. It won’t take us long.”
Nan slips the clean apron on over her sticky dress and then presses me close in a tight hug. “Now, I’ll have you know we’re only going because it seems that the three of us only succeed at making more work for you. But the end is in sight,” she says, pulling back to reassure me with her dark eyes. Wisps of hair straggle around her face, but her braid looks as smooth as it did when she first plaited it, many hours ago. “We’ll all be waiting to hear the news tomorrow. You’ll tell us when Gep is back home?” I nod and squeeze back.
“Say, Piro, what happened to your nose, there?” Tiffin asks the indelicate question I’ve been trying to avoid all night as he wipes the worst of the glue from his hands. “Slip of the chisel?”
“Your father won’t hardly recognize you with that shiner!” Fonso jokes.
“Shut up, you two,” Nan says, saving me by wiping her messy hands broadly on Fonso’s nice shirt, as punishment for the teasing. “Out! Let’s go! Piro doesn’t need your bad manners on top of our fine ‘help’ this evening!”
“Sorry, Piro. Be sure to send word if you need any help getting him home,” Tiffin says.
“Thanks, Tiff.” I smile.
Fonso steps up next and puts a massive hand on my shoulder. “We’ll get him back, Piro. Or the next thing I blow will be a glass knife that will gut the ol’ Margrave like a spring pig.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“A metal blade would be much more effective,” Tiffin mumbles under his breath.
“Oh, yeah? Shall we find out?” says Fonso, shoving Tiffin through the door. Nan brings up the rear, rolling her eyes in sympathy to me as they troop out.
I wipe my hands on my own filthy apron and survey the work left.
“I’ll dress them, you paint them,” Bran offers briskly, holding up a pair of starched uniform pants. They’re too big for his lean frame, but fit perfectly against the bulky wood bodies of the soldiers. Since my injury in the wood, Bran has been short with me, a little distant. It’s his way of trying not to pry or push me. I know he’s also hurt I refused to explain what happened.
&nb
sp; “Right,” I say, rubbing my aching neck. Days of bending over a worktable have permanently wrenched a sharp crick along my shoulders. My hands are sore, my nails streaked with paint, my fingertips rough and raw from sandpaper.
Bran wrestles the soldiers into their uniforms while I clamp the final soldier’s legs into place and begin faces. We work side by side with quiet determination, the kind that only courses through your veins in the final hours of an act of desperation.
The next thing I know, the old grandfather clock in the workshop strikes four times, its tinny gong startling me awake from where I’d fallen asleep facedown at my workbench. Bran apparently threw a blanket over my shoulders to ward off the early morning chill. Weak light from a solitary lantern in Burl’s stable seeps through the back window.
Standing at attention against my father’s big worktable are three wooden soldiers, fully dressed and staring vacantly. Bran snores quietly from his stool on the other side of me, his dark head buried in his arms.
Wearily, I stand and brush dust from a stiff uniform collar. These soldiers are about to join ranks with dozens of others to spend their lives as … what? An attraction in the house of a madman? A monument to his absurdity? They hardly even speak to me, these soldiers I’ve made, not as the other marionettes do. Mostly I sense from them a perplexing emptiness.
“You did it, Pirouette,” Bran says softly from behind me.
Straightening the tie on the jacket of the soldier, I let out a deep breath.
“I’m not done yet. Not until I have my father by the hand and can walk him out of that hole and into the daylight.”
“Right then,” Bran says, squeezing my shoulder. “Let’s bring the puppetmaster home.”
When the morning sun splays its first rays across Wolfspire Hall’s gates, I am there with Bran. The Margrave’s final soldiers are piled in the back of the wagon like the spoils of an undertaker. I wait with my hands impatiently tugging on Burl’s reins, staring at the crux of the gate, willing it to open, to allow me in, to let my father out.
When finally it does, I knock a guard over in my rush to nudge Burl through.
“Sorry!” I call back, not feeling sorry at all. “Urgent delivery for the Margrave!”
I draw the wagon around the lower side of the courtyard, to the delivery entrance, where the willows lining the drive quiver like old women letting down their hair.
“Hurry, hurry!” they call to me.
Pulling Burl to a halt, I hand Bran the reins and leap down from the wagon seat. I explain my errand to the man at the door and wait breathlessly while he alerts the steward. Eagerly, I unload each soldier with Bran’s help and prop them up against the door frame. In the daylight, tipped back against the wall, they look like a trio of nighttime carousers who’ve found themselves a bit drunk and lost. I am glad to be rid of them.
After a long wait, the guard at the door summons me in with a grunt. Bran starts to follow, only to be stopped by the guard’s hand.
“I’ll be all right,” I find myself saying, reassuringly. “Shouldn’t take long.”
I turn from Bran’s expectant face and follow the guard down a wide hallway. Brightly lit sconces cast a golden halo on the dull, gray stone permeating Wolfspire Hall. I have the horrible note Baldrik Engleborden left behind in Curio a few days ago still folded in my pocket, and I look forward to ripping it up in his face and marching out the door with my father on my arm. But we walk too far a distance for the steward’s office, which is where I expected to end up.
“Where is the steward?” I ask the guard as he hustles me up a long and winding set of stairs. “When will he bring my father?”
“The steward is waiting,” he grunts.
“Where? Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
“My debt has been paid, the Margrave has what he needs and I was promised that my father would be returned to me. My wagon is waiting below,” I say emphatically, emerging at the top of the stairs.
“Well, the Margrave is waiting up here. I’ll let you determine which is of more importance, Madame Apprentice,” a now-familiar voice intones dryly from above. “A waiting wagon or the waiting Margrave.”
I reach the top of the stairs, stunned to find myself in a great hall. Portraits of esteemed men hang in dismal silence, and a richly woven carpet—in the von Eidle family crest’s blood-red hue, of course—stretches out beneath my feet. The steward raises unwieldy eyebrows at me.
“The Margrave?” I say, feeling confused. “But I did it! I completed the order. His wooden soldiers are downstairs. Surely our debt is paid—”
“The Margrave wishes to see you,” Baldrik says, firmly putting a hand on my shoulder and directing me toward a set of grand doors with guards positioned on either side. I realize with a shudder that their blank faces look eerily similar to the wooden ones I’ve just spent my days and nights painting.
Before I can protest, the elegantly paneled doors open in tandem. I am ushered into a vast stateroom, where my footsteps are immediately swallowed by thick carpets. The sheer opulence of the room unnerves me. Everything is gold-plated, marble-carved, and polished to a sheen. I can scarcely look around without blinking at the brightness. Elaborate tapestries line the walls, depicting scenes of great battles, brutal hunts, and twisting gardens spreading from one to another. An assemblage of what I assume is the Margrave’s household—courtiers, financiers, and advisors—sits behind narrow desks lining the sides of the room. And at the center, in tandem like a sun with its lagging moon, sit the Margrave and his second son.
It’s too late for fear. I am already here, standing before the rulers of Tavia, very aware of the poor figure I must present. From the tops of my paint-splattered clogs to my coarse hands and disheveled hair, I know I must look every inch the rough, harried Tavian maker that I am. The gouged skin on my nose is healing, but certainly doesn’t add to my appearance.
Because I cannot change the way I look, I use the moment of silence given to me while the von Eidles look me over to do the same to them. I may never get the chance to inspect them so closely again. The Margrave sits upon a high-backed chair, an ostentatious piece that must rival the king’s throne in Elinbruk. Dressed from head to toe in a crisp, black suit broken across the chest by a wide sash of von Eidle red, his feet hardly touch the floor. The sash, emblazoned with numerous tiny medals and baubles, jingles whenever he shifts in his seat. I choke on a giggle at the thought that perhaps his advisors make him wear it, like bells on a cat, to tell when his nobleness approacheth.
He surveys me with a disinterested air, as though my presence is just another trifle in a parade of novelties he’s long grown tired of. His anemic face is too narrow for his short, stubby body, though the bushy eyebrows and trimmed white beard lend him an appearance of greatness I already know is untrue. Any man who would throw my father into Wolfspire Keep, force himself on Anke, and keep his love from Emmitt is far from greatness.
My close inspection of Tavia’s young duke leaves me rather startled. In complexion, he takes after his mother—the Margravina long dead, whose portrait hangs in memoriam in the hallway. White-golden hair slopes in a perfect wave down to his ears. While Laszlo is quite pale, matching his pallid reputation, his eyes are a piercing blue, his nose straight, and his jaw firm. He reminds me of a statue I glimpsed in the outer gardens of Wolfspire Hall—a man with a face hewn from stone instead of wood.
The corners of the duke’s full mouth turn up ever so slightly as I stare at him, as if we are sharing a secret between us, though we’ve never met. He’s rather beautiful—for a man—and I suspect he fully knows it. His uniform matches his father’s, except his red sash is quietly missing accoutrements. How could it have any when at twenty he’s barely been allowed off his own estate grounds? Laszlo has never seen a battle, much less commanded a regiment; he’s probably never raised a sword with anything but gloved hands.
The Margrave speaks first. “Well, Baldrik,” he says, directing his question to the
steward who remains behind me, “has the puppetmaster not another assistant? A boy, perhaps, or an apprentice?”
Rage sputters inside me like a flame licking at a candlewick.
“I am the puppetmaster’s apprentice,” I speak up, nearly biting my tongue with the way the words come slicing out. “Pirouette Leiter, My Lord von Eidle,” I say with a flourish and a ragged curtsy. “I come in my father’s stead.”
The Margrave stares at me, visibly concluding I am something sour, a worm in a mealy piece of apple.
“A pity for the puppetmaster,” he remarks, leaning forward in his chair, medals tinkling against his chest, “that you were not born a boy.” He looks lovingly at Laszlo. “A son is the greatest longing of every man.”
Laszlo smiles at him beatifically. I suppress a longing to slap his marble cheeks.
You already had a son before that one came along, one for whom you dangle your affections about like rancid meat above a starving dog.
Instead, I manage to squeak out, “What is it that you require of me, my lord Margrave? Our final order has been delivered to you. Surely my father and I might be on our way, unless there is something else I can do to be of service?”
The old Margrave looks to his son, as if to say, “Go ahead. You need to practice ordering makers about.”
Laszlo turns the full light of his alabaster face to me. “We have another order to place with the puppetmaster.”
“That would be … splendid, my lord … but as you know, the puppetmaster is currently unwell in the Keep. I must insist that he come home, where he might recover, before we could take on another order of the magnitude of your father’s toy—er, wooden soldiers.”
“Oh, you are mistaken. Those soldiers are all mine,” Laszlo says, glowing. “And I have need of more, don’t I, Father?” He beams at the Margrave, whose fleshy bags under his eyes wag in accordance with the nodding of his head. “Indeed, you must take the puppetmaster home and get him well. Though to my way of thinking, as his apprentice,” he says, his icy blue eyes raking me up and down curiously, “you should be able to handle this next request.”