by Lisa DeSelm
“Are you ready? Do you know the words to say? You’d better. You still haven’t told them to me,” he sulks.
“I do know the words, my lord, I have them in my memory from childhood. But I must warn you that it isn’t as simple as saying a spell. The person making the cut and spilling their own blood will lose some of their life in exchange.”
Laszlo nods, taking that in stride. “It seems a fair trade, exchanging some life for another.”
“Perhaps, but it is unknown how much life you might lose. Take my father, for instance. He was still a young man; he could have lived many years yet had he not made me. It could be that awakening your bride takes from you days, even years. Or it may take something else from you, something like your sight or your hearing. It’s impossible to know.”
He tightens his jaw, scoffing. “Don’t lecture me on how I might spend my own life, apprentice. I am the Margrave of Tavia, and if I think it worthwhile to create a mate, a bride, made just so, even if it takes years from me, I consider that time well-spent. Surely it won’t require much blood as noble as mine to awaken her.”
“Perhaps I could be the one to make the cut, on myself, to spare you the sacrifice, my lord?” I offer, remembering the old tree woman’s words: “The heart of the maker will determine the course of the marionette.”
Even though I constructed her, if Laszlo’s blood gives her that last bit of power needed to take her from wooden to human, I can’t say what will happen. I cannot account for the state of his heart. Especially when the state of my own frightens me.
But this is my one chance to be rid of my splinters forever. I’ve come this far. I cannot let the Margrave get in the way. I must think of something.
“Certainly not,” Laszlo spits. “I will be the one to make the cut and use my own blood. We can’t have your non-noble blood tainting hers. Now, shouldn’t the rest of them watch?”
“Who, my lord?” I ask. I thought he didn’t want an audience.
“The rest of my marionettes, the best ones. It’s only fitting!” he says, leaping up to rush back into the gallery. “Surely they will be jealous, won’t they?”
I watch, feeling mildly ill as he brings out about twenty marionettes of all shapes, sizes, and characters to hang on the plants and from the nearby branches of the conservatory’s grove of trees. The newly scorched whipping boy is placed in a prominent position near the princess’s pyre. Laszlo forced me to reattach his broken arm with wire as part of my penance.
“Well? Aren’t you going to go get her?”
“Who, my lord?”
“The saboteur,” he says with a knowing grin. “She should be able to see, too.”
Licking dry lips, I proceed into the gallery, where the saboteur’s been returned to her rack. She is lifeless.
“I don’t think I’m ready for this,” I mutter under my breath, tugging the cage, feeling it creak and roll beneath my hands.
I wheel the saboteur into the courtyard of the conservatory and place her at the edge of the viewing circle, among the others the Margrave has strung up in the trees.
And so we wait, the Margrave, the puppets, and I, for the moon to reach the crest of its travels. At its pinnacle, I sense it immediately, a crackle in the air, the shock of stocking feet against a rug, the flare of a knife against flint. The air is full of ripeness, laden with the sense that the mere spark of a single word might set everything around us ablaze.
The first blue moon I’ve seen with human eyes hangs heavy and burdensome in the sky, straining to stay put. The ring of color reminds me of a blade thrust into Tiffin’s forge, a white-hot molten blue. A strange aura bathes the waiting audience in the conservatory in a silvery wash, suspending us all beneath a cresting wave of moonlight.
It is time.
Laszlo knows it, too. Before his audience of many painted eyes, he retrieves a small, pearl-handled knife from the pocket of his wedding clothes.
“Say the words, Pirouette.”
“You must make the cut and paint your blood over where her heart will be,” I instruct, my own heart racing, knowing his fingers will land right where I planted Bran’s watch.
He nods, readying the knife to draw across his palm.
“Bitter moon—” I begin.
“My lord!” a voice interrupts.
“I told you I wasn’t to be disrupted!” Laszlo shrieks.
“The new prisoner, the tailor’s son, has escaped the Keep. Word just came from the Keep’s watch. We thought you should know.” The guard waits anxiously at the door to the conservatory. “You’d said to keep an eye on that one.”
Laszlo’s icy eyes narrow. He immediately turns to me.
“Do you have anything to do with this?” he erupts. “Now is not the time! We don’t have time! I can’t wait another seven years for a blue moon. Did you help him escape to distract me from waking my bride?” He jabs his knife at my face, eyes glazed in fury, his jaw twitching.
“You don’t want me to awaken her, do you? You all want me to be alone forever! You’re just like my father, never letting me have anyone for my very own. I’ve had no one, do you understand? For years he kept me shut up here. Like a caged beast. Alone. So tell me,” he spits, pressing the blade tip against my throat to punctuate each word. “Did you do this?”
A familiar storm rises within me, the thundercloud of truth and lies rumbling in my chest. I don’t even think twice. The lie passes hot and easy off my lips.
“No.”
He examines me warily. I say it again.
“No, my lord, I don’t know what you’re talking about. If the tailor’s son escaped, it was thanks to his own wits and a sad lack of security in your prison.”
I wait on pins and needles for the familiar pricking, the thrust of a splinter breaking ground through my skin. It doesn’t come, at least not until Laszlo has cursed me soundly and dismissed the anxious guard. Then, just as my pulse begins to slow, a sliver of wood the size of his knife blade rips its way out through my neck, and neither my cry of pain nor the splinter escape Laszlo’s notice.
“I knew it!” he says, both furious and triumphant, pointing at the splinter. “You are exactly what I thought you were. Wooden to the core. This proves it! Was it your lying lips that prompted that? Ha!” He begins to laugh, gleefully. “It’s better than I imagined! Inside you are just the same as they are!” he says, gesturing to our wooden audience. “You truly are a girl made of nothing, and you are a liar of the worst sort!”
“And what sort is that?” I ask, yanking the splinter from my neck. The pain is stifling, a burn that takes my breath away. I grip the splinter between my fingers, registering the feel of the sharpest end against my thumb. For the first time in my human life, I’m grateful for my strange curse. Of all my splinters, this one may prove worthy of a greater purpose.
“The sort whose own lies destroy them. This will be your end, apprentice. Now that I have proof of what you truly are, we must find a place to keep you on display. Perhaps in the gallery, hanging with the others? After this, I can’t have you running about, creating more like yourself. My bride must be the only one.”
Blood pulses from my neck, hot and angry.
“Now,” he says, dragging me by the collar to where the princess waits under the blue moon, “I don’t care where that worthless tailor’s son is, or what grand plan you’ve constructed to thwart me, you will speak those words and awaken my bride, or something much sharper than a splinter shall pierce your throat. Begin,” he growls.
With a voice that scarcely sounds like my own, I slowly speak aloud the words my father taught me, the words of the old tree woman from many blue moons before my time.
“Bitter moon and solemn blue,
blood of earth and sap and dew,
wake a second life anew.”
While I say the words, Laszlo makes a great show of slicing the skin of his hand, reaching out with two fingers to sloppily paint a bright smudge across the princess’s heart.
But with
blood already on my hands, I get there quicker.
I smear crimson across her bust before he can reach her. I cringe at the stain spreading on her exquisite gown, but it can’t be helped. Laszlo shrieks, horrified. I wait, pressing those same fingers back against my neck to stop the bleeding. I wait for the magic to unravel. For him to try and take my head off with his knife. For something, anything to happen.
The Margrave yowls at me in panic and we both look frantically to the sky. The moon is still blue as ever, waiting expectantly among the stars. Nothing stirs.
“It didn’t work because it’s your disgusting blood!” he sneers, furiously smearing his own on top of mine. “Say the words again!” Laszlo commands. Once again, I repeat the precious words, though each one tastes more bitter on my tongue.
Still, nothing. The princess lies on her bed of boughs, appearing the same: lovely and wooden.
The Margrave glares at me with a vehemence I’ve not yet seen. No longer am I just a tool for his use. I am clearly his enemy.
“This is all your fault! You’ve destroyed everything, you wooden wench, and you did it on purpose! I will take every pitiful tool you own and have you tortured with them in the Keep. We’ll see if you can outlast your father down there! Will a puppet girl fare better than a puppetmaster? Maybe that will be too slow. I should have a burn pile made ready for you!”
He grabs me, shaking me by the shoulders so hard that my teeth catch on my tongue. His knife nicks my arm as I strain and struggle to maneuver the hand clutching my deadly splinter closer to his throat. Entangled in a mad, twisted embrace, we hear a new voice, strong and musical, interject into the fray.
“Do you dare to dishonor the blue moon?”
CHAPTER 28
WE STOP, INSTINCTIVELY OBEYING THE VOICE. LIKE A warrior queen raised from the dead, the princess’s bloodied dress and high-coiled hair quickly betray her identity. Prima’s back is ramrod-straight, her curving chin proud, her skin the same creamy color of raw halsa. Her eyes flash green in the moon’s light, like moss aflame. Something about her makes me feel the way I did around the old tree woman—not fearful, but not exactly at ease, either. This is an untamed, wild creature. Still unstained by her own humanity. Unless you count her dress.
Laszlo’s mouth drops open and for once, words fail him. The three of us are locked in a triangle of wonderment, staring until it becomes apparent that one of us should say something. That one of us, of course, is the Margrave.
“My darling! You’re finally here,” he croons, hastily dropping the pearl-handled knife with which he had been threatening me. He approaches the princess as if she’d just arrived for tea, taking her hand. She stiffens, unused to human touch.
“I’ve been waiting for you. Waiting so long.”
He kneels at her feet and proceeds to kiss her hand. She regards him with the same disdain one might show an unwelcome stray dog off the street; she looks to me, bewildered. I feel an instant kinship with her.
I remember what it was like in those first few moments, the strangeness of the sounds, the feel of skin stretching across my bones, the endless beating of my own heart. The sheer overwhelming sensations of a human body are a lot to comprehend.
But if I’ve built her well, with her many secret strengths, and if some of my blood courses through her veins, she will soon find her words and speak them.
“Why are you fighting?” she asks him simply. Her words come out slow, even. “Why do you hurt her and dishonor the moon?”
Laszlo gets to his feet, waving me off. “Nothing for you to be concerned about, Ulrika dear—that is to be your name, you know, and what a grand one it is! Named after my great-grandmother, on my mother’s side. She was a legendary beauty, though already no one in all of Tavia can hold a candle to you.” He turns around and sneers at me for good measure.
“Now, let’s come in to the gallery so we can have the church cleric summoned. We are to be wed at once!” As Laszlo prattles on, he blocks my view of her, trying to drag her toward the gallery door, intending for me to give them some privacy. Now that he has what he wants, he wants me out of the way.
But I can’t stop staring at her, nor does she stop trying to peer around him to see me.
I sense that she recognizes me, recognizes that I am somehow a part of her, just like the saboteur. But if Laszlo takes her away, I might never get the chance to speak to her. She will need someone to explain everything; I long to tell her things Papa was never able to tell me.
She is having none of this manhandling by a stranger, however. She pulls back from Laszlo’s greedy grip, and I hear the Margrave’s breath intake sharply as she wraps a hand like a vise around his forearm, digging her patrician fingers deep into the cuff of his wedding jacket. With pride, I note how he immediately crumples in pain. Nan and Tiffin’s gifts at work.
“I don’t know you, yet you speak to me as if I belong to you,” she says, dragging out the word “belong,” further entrenching her fingers in the flesh of his arm. “I am new to this world, to this way of being, but I find that very strange. I belong only to the wood, to earth and dew and moonlight. To the wind singing through the trees. If you ever earn my favor, perhaps, someday, I could belong with you. But to you—no, I do not belong to you.”
With that, she releases him, and I exhale a long breath of relief. She is everything I hoped for. Prima begins to traipse around the conservatory, examining the plants and talking to the trees like they are old friends.
I want to go to her, but Laszlo has wedged himself between us, whining and pacing like a rat in a trap.
“You did this!” He turns on me. “You did this on purpose! You’ve made her hate me! How dare you spoil the one beautiful, good thing I would have for myself! The one thing I needed to be real! You’ve ruined everything!” He’s sweating and runs his fingers through his fair hair, which becomes streaked pink from the blood still seeping from the cut on his hand. “My father always said, ‘If you want something done well, do it yourself.’ Well, that old fool never let me do anything and look how it’s turned out!”
Laszlo rails against his father and my treasonous hide, all while yelling for the guards to send in the cleric posthaste. The blue moon remains, though it’s slowly fading. The magic will soon be lost.
But it worked. Prima is alive and real in a way she has never been before.
I take advantage of the Margrave’s preoccupation with my vulgar origins and shuffle over to step on his forgotten knife. The princess’s eyes flash from across the courtyard, lighting up with awareness. I bend down, ostensibly to adjust my shoe and neatly pocket the blade. Now armed with both my splinter and the knife, I know I must find a way to end this.
I will not doom Prima and the saboteur to a life here, tangled up in the strings of the Margrave. If I can somehow convince Prima to help me carry the saboteur and make a run for it, maybe we can find Bran.
Vincenzo the cleric, who I remember from Papa’s funeral, arrives looking like he spent the day taste-testing Wolfspire Chapel’s communal wines. His face registers surprise at the sight of the new Margrave’s intended, leaning against and fondly talking to a gnarled tree growing through the conservatory floor. I inch closer, hoping I won’t scare her into climbing its branches. I’m not sure we’d get her down without a fight.
“Come, my darling,” Laszlo says to the princess, his voice like tightly strung wire. “It is time for you to assume your rightful place at my side,” he coaxes. “Come and stand with me, and I will make you a Margravina, a lady of the dew and the moonlight, whatever breed of lady you wish. As my bride, you will be free to do as you please.”
“You are already free to do as you please,” I pipe up.
Anger pulses on Laszlo’s face. Prima regards him warily and doesn’t move from the tree.
“She’s just jealous of you, of your beauty and your position, my Margravina. Disregard her. She’s nothing but a common apprentice. You are royalty. Come and stand here with me, and let us talk awhile. Or, i
f you prefer, you needn’t speak at all. You must be tired from your … journey. We can let the cleric here do all the talking for us, isn’t that right, man?”
Vincenzo nods, holding up the lantern he brought with him, looking utterly mystified by the beautiful woman in the bloody dress who won’t let go of the tree.
Prima looks from Laszlo to me, and finally speaks after a long silence. “I will stand near you, but only if she is at my side,” she says, pointing to me.
Laszlo smiles through gritted teeth, “Of course, my darling, whatever you wish. The puppetmaster can be a witness to our joy.” He hurls another warning glare my way. If Laszlo’s looks could kill, I’d have been dead days ago. Too bad for him I’m still breathing.
And so is Prima. She walks deliberately toward me, and reaches forward to clasp one of my hands in her own. I feel the reassuring pressure of her fingers, gripping mine like our lives depend on it. She is even more astonishing up close. Her skin is warm and clear, her eyes bright. Her face is a sea of expressions, shifting from wonder to confusion to revulsion and back again. I don’t know how to explain the awe I feel, seeing someone who is like me, in the flesh, but someone already so much more magnificent than I will ever be. Someone I helped bring into being.
Laszlo is just pleased to have his bride in the vicinity of the cleric. He approaches cautiously; I don’t doubt that his arm is deeply bruised where she seized it. Before the cleric starts to intone the standard wedding fare, the princess’s hand quickly releases mine and plunders my apron pocket, quick as an accomplished thief.
I panic. The Margrave’s knife will be all too visible in her hand, for she has no sleeves. But my fears are allayed when from the corner of my eye, I watch as her hand is swallowed up by the deep folds of Tailor Soren’s exquisite dress. The skirts are so voluminous; it seems she’s discovered a secret sewn-in pocket that I missed.