Dear P—
When a gift arrives for the Margrave, so will your means of escape. If you can, send word through Fonso’s cousin that day. After dark, make your way to the rathskeller so I can meet you. I’ll be waiting. Always.
—B
An escape? A gift? And I have to get past my guards? They are all much larger than me and seem possessed of very little humor or goodwill. Years of working in the old Margrave’s employ has long beat that out of any I’ve encountered. I don’t even know their names.
I suck in the first breath of hope I’ve had in days. Can I really leave? I hate to think what might happen if I fail.
I burn the note in the candle’s flame and bury the ashes at the feet of one of the gingko trees planted in the conservatory. I huddle against its trunk, watching the stars blink their eyes at me in never-ending astonishment through the glass-domed roof.
I am torn at the prospect of rescue. The thought of leaving Prima unfinished and abandoning the saboteur carves painful grooves of worry in my soul. I can’t leave them behind, pawns for the Margrave to play against Tavia. I’m grateful for the gesture, but my Makers don’t understand the real danger I’m in. If I don’t stay and complete the spell, I’ll miss my best chance to realize the removal of my curse, like the old tree woman said.
Not to mention that leaving before the blue moon’s spell is uttered will surely awaken the sleeping dragon of Laszlo’s rage. If escaping Wolfspire Hall doesn’t kill me, he will gladly finish the job.
CHAPTER 23
“WHY ISN’T SHE FINISHED YET?” LASZLO SNAPS, KNEADING the back of his neck with one hand while pacing erratically alongside my worktable.
It is only the fifteenth day of my work in the gallery, and yet it feels like my fifteenth year. The Margrave grows noticeably impatient, and ever more anxious. His appearance is normally impeccable, every stitch perfectly tailored and pressed. But today he wears a jacket deeply lined with furrows and the same vest he had on yesterday, flecked with crumbs. Very unlike him. I wonder if he’s been sleeping, noting the deepening bluish shadows under his eyes, the pale skin stretched more tightly across his high cheekbones.
“I ordered the saboteur from you and she was completed in fifteen days’ time.” A cough escapes him at the end of this angry observation, a rasping growl. Sometimes I wonder at the return of his insipid cough, despite his insistence that he is hale and stronger than ever. What if the spells he’s been using to animate the saboteur and soldiers are exacting a price from him already, just as the blue moon will?
Putting those thoughts aside, I steel myself for another tirade. “My lord,” I remind him wearily, looking up from where I am fitting Prima’s forearm and connecting the joints together with pins, “this marionette is not the saboteur.”
I gesture to the assassin’s cage, where she’s hung for days, and balk; she’s gone. I didn’t even hear her leave. She must have gone in the night. That doesn’t bode well.
“If your bride is to be as regal as a princess,” I continue, trying not to think about the absent saboteur, “and if you wish her to be perfect, perfection takes time. We still have another ten days before the blue moon shows its face.”
He paces like a hungry bear emerging from its den. “Precisely. Only ten days, and she is nowhere near complete!”
He is right about that. Prima is shaping up beautifully, but her face still needs to be refined and painted, her hair needs to be stitched on and she is missing her hands. There is still much to be done to turn the raw materials into something truly royal and noble-looking. I spend each day working on her and now, thanks to Bran’s note, anticipating the arrival of the gift that is supposed to bring me a chance at freedom. Freedom I’m not sure I’m ready for. In the meantime, I’m still plotting ways to give Prima what she needs to be complete.
“Is she to have a name, the princess?” I ask.
“Of course she is to have a name. She cannot be a Margravina without a name, a proper name.”
“Have you named her then? Because, if you haven’t, I have a suggestion.”
“You have a suggestion?” he says, the word dripping sarcastically off his lips. “Let’s hear it, by all means.”
“I noticed in one of your books, one from the library you left on the worktable, that the word ‘first’ was listed in the language of the old masters as prima.”
It’s true; I saw it just yesterday, in black ink on paper. The meaning of her name caused a glow at my very core, making me feel certain I was born to sculpt her, that she was destined to be made. That she isn’t just a creature conceived in Laszlo von Eidle’s reclusive mind.
“I thought it might be a fitting name for her, for she will be the first of her kind. The first Margravina of her kind,” I clarify.
Laszlo gives me a dirty look. “Prima sounds like something one would name a cat. The princess shall be named Ulrika Desdemonia, after my great-grandmother.”
I cringe, thinking his choice sounds more like the name of a deadly pox than a princess. The noble families do have their own strange way about names.
“Perhaps,” I suggest lightly, “once she awakens, she might choose her own name?”
The Margrave rolls his eyes.
“Then, in keeping with your desire to have only the best for her, I was wondering if … no, I don’t suppose we could,” I murmur, holding the stumps of her arms, which end in rounded joints at the wrist.
“Spit it out, Pirouette, we’ve no time to waste on your inane wonderings!”
“I’ve thought of a new way to build very
