I stop before the saboteur.
Whatever magic he summoned to send her on her deadly missions is snuffed out. She rests limply in the cage, though I swear when I graze her arm, admiring my own handiwork, I feel a pulse flutter, a quickening within her wooden frame.
“Will we ever be free from here?” I whisper.
A hollow sound threads up my fingers, the barest strand of a voice. “Find courage, and you will find your freedom.”
Courage. Freedom. Let’s hope I live long enough to once again be in possession of both.
Laszlo reviewed all of his sketches with me first thing this morning; there are detailed descriptions of what he envisions his bride looking like, complete with measurements. From the stack of them, he’s been working on them for quite some time. I envision him in his library, sketching away at his conception of a perfect woman. The drawings are a boy’s fancy, what callow youth imagines a perfect bride to be: a sort of hollow, obedient, too-obvious beauty. I take them politely, tucking them away among my tools and nodding agreeably the whole time he animatedly describes how he desires her chin to curve and how daintily her waist should tuck in. And how she should be free from strings. He doesn’t want her mobility facing any impediments. It requires all my fortitude to keep my true thoughts to myself.
At the worktable, I spread out the pieces of raw wood I harvested specifically to build Laszlo’s princess. The Margrave’s guards hauled them up for me, after following me home from the forest. I am pleased to see the clear flesh shining from beneath the bark I’ve stripped for her head and torso is so fine it nearly glows. I focus on it a long time, the way I always do when I begin a piece, asking the wood to tell me how to shape it, how much to keep, how much to take away. I must sit with it for a while, become acquainted.
When the lines of a woman’s face emerge along the creamy grain of the halsa, I pick up my chisel. It is time. The blue moon waits for no one.
The days meld one into the other from the moment I make the first notch into the wood. Within five days, I have a rough body laid out on the table, and piece by piece I set about shaping her legs and feet, her neck and torso. I begin calling her Prima, naming her after the first puppet my father made for me. There’s something about the pattern of this wood that reminds me of her; I hope I can do my father’s miniature justice in full scale.
Missing Bran despite everything that’s happened, and worried for my makers, I throw myself into the labor of construction. The work reaches a feverish pitch I’ve never attained before, my hands moving of their own accord in rhythm with my carving knife, hammer, and saw. I try as much as possible to ignore Laszlo when he appears at odd hours to cast an eye to my progress.
I hate being watched while I work. Some days it’s as if I have a gnat, an insufferable royal gnat, constantly buzzing about my face, making insidious comments. When he makes a suggestion or offers an observation, I make an admirable effort to hold my tongue, or so I think. At night, when I lie down to rest for a few bleak hours, I worry that I may not make it to the blue moon with my sanity, or my bitten tongue, intact.
The more time I spend in his presence, the more Laszlo reminds me of an overgrown child, not unlike his small puppet. He is a man overseeing an entire territory with a Margrave’s part to play, yet he seems to know very little about how the world outside his stone walls works. Having long outgrown his tutors, he seems starved for company beyond his library of books and his collector’s gallery. He would never admit this ineptitude and loneliness to me, but I suspect it explains why he hangs about incessantly, inspecting my tools and questioning my process.
That and his need to converse with his marionettes. I’ve woken more than once to the sounds of his hushed conversations in the gallery. In lieu of real companions, he seems to have built his own small guild of wooden friends to confide in. I cannot judge him too harshly for this, however, since I too talk to the marionettes more than most.
On the morning of the sixth day, as I’m carving the princess’s face, carefully sculpting a high brow with long, subtle strokes, Laszlo drones on beside me about the unique appearance of the light of a gibbous moon. A thought strikes me hard, like the felling of a tree.
“My lord?” I interrupt his prattle.
“What?” he snaps, annoyed I’ve dared intrude upon his line of thought.
“Isn’t it so that I should use only the best materials as I build your princess?”
“Yes, yes, we’ve already gone over that.” He waves his hand, once again appearing to find me inordinately slow-witted.
“Well, as I am about to begin her eyes, I believe no common carved eyes will do, not the sort I might create for any other marionette. We should requisition glass eyes
