It’s taken years of patient study to become a puppetmaster’s apprentice, to learn how to work with wood to produce the pieces I see in my mind’s eye. But putting on a show with marionettes, that comes as easy as breathing. I can almost feel myself slipping through the wooden controls, sliding down the strings into the armature. Voices bubble up out of their faces and, just like that, a story is born.
“Masters and mistresses, girls and boys, I offer for your amusement a tale that is sure to charm and delight. A story that will make you laugh and weep. A myth that will stir your very soul—”
“Oh, get on with it, ya laggard!” harps a man’s voice from beyond the curtain. “Before we’re all as old and gray as Wolfspire’s stones!”
I pause and grin. Without fail, there’s a heckler in every crowd.
While my audience cheers, I quickly draw the curtains closed. It’s important to never let them see the mess of props I must set to rights before the next show. “Hide the hands behind the strings,” as my father would say.
According to the sound of coins filling the wagon ledge, my tale hit its mark. When I reach out to gather them up, I can’t ignore small pairs of hungry eyes tracking my penny francs like slices of hot bread. I motion to two hollow-looking faces to join me at the back of the wagon and tuck a few coins into each open palm. Squealing, the children run, slipping away into the crowd. The stand of maple trees at the edge of the marktplatz murmurs approvingly, their gold-tinged leaves rattling like treasure in a tinker’s coat.
As I’m resetting the stage and carefully adjusting my puppets, four sharp taps sound at the wagon door.
“Pirouette? It’s me.”
Bran’s voice makes my pulse pick up. I unlatch the door, surprised to see his brown eyes flitting anxiously across the marktplatz. Instead of greeting me, he climbs right inside the wagon and snaps the door shut behind him. Though it’s only built for one puppeteer, there’s room enough for us both to crouch in the warm, dim interior if we squeeze together closely. I don’t mind.
“You had quite an audience going there, Piro.”
“Indeed.” I smile, shaking the bag of coins.
Bran’s handsome face is not smiling. “They’re still out there.”
“The little beggars?”
“No. The duke and his guards,” he says pointedly. “And that big man who’s always shadowing the Margrave—the one who does all his dirty work.” He leans in, talking low. “I made a delivery and saw you had the whole square enraptured, including the duke. Von Eidle had such a strange look on his face. Like a man seeing the sun for the first time. I don’t like it.”
“The duke is here?”
That’s one downside of puppeteering; I can’t see the audience while I perform. I’ve only ever seen the Margrave’s son, Duke Laszlo von Eidle, from afar. I glimpsed him once riding in the carriage procession beside his father, a pale shadow of a boy in a man’s body. As a child, the duke was sickly, never going anywhere without a nurse and a rasping cough. Some sort of lung-wasting disease, they said, the same that killed his mother. The Margrave kept his son confined on their castle estate, bringing in tutors and the best doctors while keeping the rest of Tavia at bay. Though that was years ago, he’s still widely assumed to be too delicate to rub shoulders with commoners. The duke is rarely seen beyond Wolfspire Hall’s gates, let alone watching marionette shows at the marktplatz.
“I wasn’t doing anything wrong, Bran! Father is so busy and I must buy more paint—” I whisper. “The wooden soldiers for the Margrave are bleeding us dry.”
“I know, Piro.”
A tight, stubborn shame spreads across my face, which was so triumphant just moments ago. “It was just a theatrical.”
“I know,” Bran says sympathetically. “But you need to take care, Piro. Especially if you’re going to tell stories like that last one,” he adds, eyebrows raised.
It’s true that my new story could easily be interpreted as satire; a selfish king’s rage turns him into a wolf, and in the end the wolf is struck down by the peasant girl’s well-aimed arrow. The crowd loved it.
Bran pets the wolf’s shaggy gray head from atop a pile of marionettes. “It’s not as if the wolf didn’t deserve his end. It was a masterful tale.” He smirks. “But you know as well as I, the wrong ears listening …”
“I’ll be careful,” I promise, pulling the wolf from his grasp.
Shaken, I peer through the small space between the top of the stage and the curtain. If I tilt my head at just the right angle, I have a narrow view of the crowd. I make out a familiar dark shape across the square: Baldrik, the Margrave’s steward, hovering around the duke like a crow on a carcass. The duke, a fair-haired man with a red crest on his jacket, surveys the sights from in front of a posse of guards. He strolls the square, looking like a nobleman who knows his place: far above the rest of us. When his gaze turns to my wagon and its audience, though he can’t possibly see me, his eyes lock onto it with a strange air of possession. My stomach twists at the unwelcome sight.
“The Margrave still keeping you hard at it?” Bran prods me with an elbow.
“Still working on a new order,” I mumble, watching the duke’s men strut about. “Lately, it’s always wooden soldiers. More and more soldiers. Papa wears his fingers to the bone from dawn to dusk. Sometimes I think if I have to crack open another pot of von Eidle red, I’m going to scream.”
A line of worry stitches itself above Bran’s nose. It only serves to make his face more distracting.
“It’s business, Bran. What else can
