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.
“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
