“The makers are still here,” she continues. “Tavia will stand, though Margraves may come and go. What was it that Gep would say, when he was frustrated at not finding enough good wood in a season, or when a marionette didn’t turn out the way he’d envisioned?”
I can barely say the words aloud, but I eke them out anyways, knowing she wants me to humor her. “A maker will always prevail.”
“Yes. We will find a way to prevail. But that will be a task best suited to tomorrow. Tonight you must rest.”
“’Night, Nanette.”
She falls silent again, until uttering her final thoughts. “I will miss the puppetmaster more than I can say. He always knew just what to say to keep me going when I was in a slump. He always knew when I was struggling to make something and not getting it quite right.”
He did. He could see it in their eyes, just as he could always see it in mine. “A maker will always prevail,” he would entreat them, as if the words made it so. When Gephardt Leiter spoke them, you believed it did.
My mind refuses to be quieted by the fact that it’s night. I hear the muffled shuffling of Bran next door, tinkering with his clocks, but I don’t dare risk opening the cupboard to see him with Nan here. The cupboard is still a secret, between Bran and me. Sometimes the secrets we keep, like the lumpy bundle of splinters hidden beneath my pillow, are what holds us together when we feel broken.
Sleep doesn’t come tip-toeing in until hours later.
The next day I find myself facing the prospect of running Curio entirely on my own. After Nan departs for her studio, needing to tend her kiln, I tidy my father’s room, change his bedding, sweep the floor, and keep the rest of his things just as he left them. Thanks to Gita, our small kitchen is already sparkling. I trudge downstairs to the workshop, and am immediately plunged into reverence at the way the morning light filters through the windows in glittering, dust-mote swirled rays of gold. It’s as beautiful as light through a stained-glass visage in a church.
Unfortunately, the daylight also illuminates the fact that I have let things get a bit out of hand down here in the last weeks. With my father in the Keep, and then ill at home, it was all I could do to finish the wooden soldiers and the saboteur. I’d no time for keeping things in order.
So instead of unlocking the shop and pulling back our curtains, as I would normally do in a morning, I keep the front door closed. And I begin to clean. I gather up all the tools I’ve left scattered about. I sharpen all our blades and chisels, enjoying the repetitive song of metal rasping against whetstone. I catalogue all our paints and lacquers, stacking them neatly in rainbow rows the chromatist herself would surely be proud of.
I spend hours brushing away sawdust and wood chips from the work tables and floor. When I have filled a huge coal-bin’s worth of scraps, I slam the lid, satisfied I have enough to burn in the stove to keep me going for a few weeks. Every surface is paint splattered and worn, notched and nicked many times over, but it’s cleared of the old dust and ready to be put to use again.
Like any great maker, my father did not have just one piece on his mind at a time. When orders from the Margrave started coming in, he had to suspend the other projects he was working on; it’s over these that I linger, remembering. One is an elaborate wooden box, which looks like a traditional jewelry case for valuables on the outside but opens to reveal that the only way to get to the contents is to solve a series of intricate puzzles. As each puzzle is deciphered, a new layer or drawer springs away, revealing the next puzzle and so on, until finally you reach the heart of it: a small nested compartment where a lady might slip a necklace or a gentleman some treasured coins.
I never had Papa’s mind for creating puzzles or games, so I dust the box and set it to the side. Perhaps Bran, with his inclination for fitting cogs and gears together, will enjoy taking up the challenge someday.
There are several marionettes still in process, sketches of half-done faces in Papa’s broad hand that I carefully lay upon a shelf. Maybe someday I will pick up where he left off, and finish the characters he’d only just begun to flesh out.
By the time I finish putting the workshop back in order, the sun is low in the sky, and I look around, feeling satisfied at having cared for the place that has given me so much. But my heart can’t ignore the sense that something is missing. Someone. Papa was as much a part of Curio as the very walls, the beams holding us all up and keeping us together.
Later that night, I curl up in my father’s room and contemplate the moon from his window. My gaze falls on the high scaffolding reinforcing the town hall’s tower; light flickers from inside the clock tower. Emmitt, the only other person I know who has just lost a father. How awful that my father died the same day as the Margrave, nearly at the same hour. Death comes in threes, the old saying goes. Who else is death lying in wait for, I wonder?
Perhaps Emmitt wouldn’t mind some company.
CHAPTER 13
FINDING MY WAY TO THE RATHAUS ISN’T DIFFICULT, EVEN IN the dark, for I know
