No matter. After all, the Margrave requested that the soldiers appear real. None of us escape becoming real without a few scars.
CHAPTER 3
“PIROUETTE! WAIT UP!” AN EAGER VOICE RISES ABOVE the din of wagon wheels on the cobblestones.
Just near home, Bran catches up to me. I can’t help but smile at the sight of him. His face can scarcely be seen, buried beneath a mountainous armload of fabric. He grins at me sideways from behind the rich-hued bolts piled in his arms.
“I see it was another good day for the theatrical arts,” he says, referencing the pots of fresh paint swinging in my arms after another market day.
“I don’t think you can see anything of the sort, mostly because I don’t see how you can see anything at all.” I snort, watching as Bran’s shins meet an apple seller’s crate. He stumbles but catches himself, managing to keep hold of the bundle in his arms. As the tailor’s son and chief delivery boy of The Golden Needle, Bran Soren could almost navigate the village sight unseen. Almost.
“You coming to the next Guild meeting?”
I nod as we stop below a sign with CURIO etched in winding black script.
“Planning on it.”
Bran’s grin crinkles the corners of his eyes. “Save you a seat?”
“Same as always.”
“Always.” He winks conspiratorially and steps backwards into The Golden Needle without looking, the door swinging open to the tinkle of bells and a happy shriek from one of his younger sisters.
“Bran’s back, Papa!”
The Golden Needle nestles next to Curio in a long, leaning row of workshops that house their owners in narrow second floor quarters. The tailor, Benito Soren, moved in just two years ago, when I turned sixteen. He and his wife Gita opened The Golden Needle in the sunny space next door and suddenly a whole batch of Sorens, eight in total, overflowed like bunting from every window and door. This included Bran, the oldest, whose tiny attic room shares a wall with mine.
I made the discovery one day when I opened my little cupboard beneath the rafters and saw strange objects mingling with my own. Inside lay a wooden box with a “B” carved upon the lid, a worn measuring tape used for learning the tailor’s trade, and oddities like shiny rocks rubbed smooth, a bird’s egg, a pocket watch whose face had been rearranged, an assortment of tiny tools and a bag of coins. A note, hastily scrawled on a scrap of receipt, read, “I see that this is a safe place for secrets. I’ll keep mine with yours, if you don’t mind. - Bran Soren”
I did mind—and I told the new boy next door as much when I reached in and poked through what I previously thought was the back of the cupboard. It swung open to the foreign space of his room. He was crouched directly on the other side, as though he’d been waiting for me to open the door.
“I do mind, you know,” I insisted, trying to dampen my curiosity at being afforded a window into a stranger’s room. It was the very mirror of mine, with a sloping ceiling and a small window resting above wooden slat floors. His bed was draped in a soft gray spread and I could see a pair of smart leather boots tipped over in its shadow.
“Why?” asked the boy from the other side of the cupboard shelves.
“Because this cupboard is mine,” I said defensively.
“It seems to me that it is ours. It opens for both of us. Seems like we should share it,” he said confidently. “It is a cupboard with two doors.”
I bristled. “I was here first.”
“But not really,” he replied in a steady voice that made me want to linger in front of the cupboard, though I initially contemplated slamming it shut in his face. “Someone else was here long before us. Haven’t you ever wondered who they were?”
“They?”
“The person who built the cupboard. Or persons. Clearly they built it like this for a reason. I wonder if it was an old spinster, shut up in the attic, kept hidden by a vicious master to spin golden threads. Perhaps this cupboard was her only means of sending secret messages to the outside world, through the lonely housewife who took pity on her from next door.”
“What?” I said, taken aback.
“Or maybe it was built by a pirate, retired here after a life on the sea, a man now sadly bed-bound, his body ravaged by drink and overwork. He would give away his gold to his many illegitimate children next door, coin by coin, administered daily through the cupboard so that he might never have to touch them and thereby acknowledge all that he had squandered and lost.”
I stared at the boy through the cupboard, mesmerized by his words and enthralling dreaminess. I had never imagined that my cupboard had other lives before me. Or that it would open a door to another world: Bran’s world.
From that night on, I couldn’t close the cupboard door on him. After agreeing upon a secret knock to signal to one another, we began a series of hushed conversations through the cupboard. We would talk about our work, our lessons, or the mundane trifles of our day, sometimes traipsing into the more uncertain territory of the past and our dreams for the future. Despite our closeness, Bran didn’t know—and must never know—the truth about me. No one could.
Tonight, the cupboard is open while I lie on the floor, my head upon my pillow, bare feet tucked up against the wall where it slopes steeply into the roof. All I can see of
