The goat settled on a pillow in the corner, and began to eat the stuffing.
The Color Master rolled her shoulders a few times, and when the shoes were dry, she laid her hands upon them. She lifted them up, to the sunlight. She picked up a rock, next to the shoe, and looked at the rock, in the light, next to the shoe. She circled both, inside different light rays. Then she went to the palette area and took out a handful of blue dust. We have about 150 metal bins of this dust, in a range of colors. The bins stand side by side, running the perimeter of the studio. They are narrow, so we can fit a whole lot of colors, and if someone brings in a new color, we hammer down a new bin and slide it into the spectrum, wherever it fits. One tailor found an amazing deep burgundy off in the driest part of the forest, on a series of leaves; I located, once, a type of dirt that was a deeper brown than sand but not like rich mud, over by the reddish iron deposits near the lake. Someone else found a new blue, in a dried-out pansy flower, and another in the feathers of a dead bird. We have instructions to hunt for color everywhere, at all times. The Color Master toured the room, and then took that handful of blue dust (and always, when I watch, I am thrilled — blue? How does she know, blue? It was a darkish blue, too, seemingly far too dark for shoes this light, unless he wanted wet rock shoes) and she rubbed the dust into the shoe. Back to the bins and then she got a black, a dusty black, and then some sage green. All rubbed into the gray shoe. While she worked everyone stood around, quiet. We dropped our usual drudgery and chit-chat.
The Color Master worked swiftly, but she added, usually, something on the level of forty colors, so the process, even quickly, took more than two hours. She added a color here, a color there, sometimes at the size of salt particles, and the gray in the shoe shifted and shaded under her hands. She would reach a level and ask for sealant and Esther would step forward and the CM would coat the shoe to seal in the colors and then return to the sunlight, holding a shoe up, with the rock in her other hand. This went on for about four rounds. I swear, I could start to feel the original mountain’s presence, in the room, the great heavy lumbering voice of it.
When she was done, the pair was so gray, so rock-like, you could hardly believe they were made of leather at all. They looked as if they had been sheared straight from the craggy mountainside.
Done, she said.
We circled her, bowing our heads.
Beautiful, I said.
Another triumph, murmured Sandy, next to me, who cannot color-mix to save her life.
The Color Master swept her gaze around the room, and her eyes rested on each of us, searching, slowly, until they finally settled on me. Me?
Will you walk me home? she said, in a deep voice, while Esther tied an invoice to the foot of a pigeon and then threw it out the window in the direction of the dukedom.
I would be honored, I said. I took her arm. The goat, full of pillow, tripped along behind us.
I am a quiet sort, except for the paying of compliments, and I didn’t know if I should ask her anything on the walk. As far as I knew, she didn’t usually ask for an escort home at all. Mainly I just looked at all the stones and rocks on the path, and for the first time saw that blue hint, and the blackness, and the shades of green, and that faint edge of purple if the light hit just so. She seemed relieved that I wasn’t asking questions, so much so that it occurred to me that that was probably why she’d asked me to walk her home in the first place.
At her door, she fixed her eyes on me: gray, steady, aging at the corners. She was almost twice my age, but had always had a sexiness I’d admired. A way of holding her body that let you know there was a body there, but that it was private, that stuff happened on it, in it, to it, but it was stuff I would never see. It made me sad, seeing that, while also knowing about her husband who had gone off to the war years ago, and had never returned, and how it was difficult for her to have people over because of her brother with the bad back, and how long ago she had fled her own town for a reason she never spoke of, plus she had a thick cough and her own money issues, which seemed so unfair when she should’ve been living in the palace, as far as I was concerned.
Listen, she said. She held me in her gaze.
Yes?
There’s a big request coming in, she said. I’ve heard rumors. Big. Huge.
What is it? I said.
I don’t know yet. But start preparing. You’ll have to take over. I will die soon, she said.
Excuse me?
Soon, she said. I can feel it, brewing. Death. It’s not dark, nor is it white. It’s almost a blue-purple, she said. Her eyes went past me, to the sky.
I will do my best, she said. I will do a fair bit of prep. But start preparing your color skills, Missy.
She lowered her brow, and her look was stern.
My name is Patty, I said.
She laughed.
How do you know? I said. Do you mean it? Are you ill?
No, she said. Yes. I mean it. I’m asking for your help, she said. And when I die, it will be your job to finish.
But I’m not very good, I said. Like at all. You can’t die. You should ask Esther, or Hans—
You, she said, and with a little curt nod, she went into her house, and shut the door.
The Duke’s son loved his shoes so much he sent us a drawing, by the court illustrator, of him, in them, floating, it appeared, on a pile of rocks. I love them, he said, in swirly handwriting, I love them, I love them! And then he added a small cash bonus, including horse rides, and a feast at the dukedom. We all attended, in all our finery, and it was a great time. It was the last time I saw the Color Master dancing, in her pearl-gray gown, and I knew it was the last, even as I watched it, her hair swirling out as she glided through the group. The Duke kept tapping his toe on the side, holding the Duchess’s hand, her free one grasping a handbag the perfect pink of a rose, so vivid and fresh it seemed to carry over a sweet scent, even across the ballroom.
Two weeks later, almost everyone was away when the King’s courtier came riding over with the request: a dress the color of the moon. The Color Master was not feeling well, and had asked not to be disturbed; Esther’s father was ill, so she was off taking care of him; Hans’s wife was giving birth to twins, so he was off with her; the two others ahead of me had caught whooping cough, and someone else was on a travel trip to find a new shade of orange. So the request, written on a scroll, went to me, the apprentice. Just as the Color Master had hoped.
I unrolled the scroll and read it quietly by the window.
A dress the color of the moon?
It was impossible.
First of all, the moon is not a color. It is a reflection of a color. Second, it is not even the reflection of a color. It is the reflection of what appears to be a color, but is really in fact a bunch of bursting hydrogen atoms, far far away. Third, the moon shines. A dress cannot shine like the moon, unless the dress is also reflecting something, and reflective materials are generally tacky-looking, or too industrial. Our only options were silk and cotton and leather. The moon? It is white, it is silver, it is silver-white, it is not an easy color to dye. A dress the color of the moon? The whole thing made me irritable.
But this was not a small order. This was, after all, the King’s daughter. The Princess. And, since the Queen had died a few months before, of pneumonia, this was now a dress for the most important woman in the kingdom.
I paced several times around the studio, and I went against policy and tried knocking on the door of the Color Master’s cabin, but she called out, in a strong voice, from a window, Just do it! Are you okay? I asked, and she said, Come back once you’ve started!
I walked back, kicking twigs and acorns.
I ate a few oranges off the tree out back, until I felt a little better.
Since I was in charge, due to the pecking-order issue, I gathered together everyone who was left in the studio, and asked for a seminar on reflection, to reflect upon reflection. In particular for Cheryl, who really used the seminars well. Those of us who were there gathered in a circle in the side room, and we talked about mirrors, and still water, and wells, and feeling understood, and opals, and then we did a creative writing exercise about our first memory of the moon, and how it affected us, and the moment when we realized it followed us (Sandy had a charming story about going on a walk as a child and trying to lose it but not being able to), and then we wrote haiku. Mine was this: Moon, you silver thing/Floating in the sky like that/Make me a dress. Please.
After a few tears over Edwin’s story of realizing his father in the army was seeing the same moon he saw,
