Once I secure the hair to her scalp and glue the cap in place, I play coiffeur and trim the ends, winding it high on her head and using the tailor’s handy little sewing kit to stitch tiny pearls into the coils.
I spend hours with my sanding tools, smoothing and refining the features of her face and preparing the surface for paint all while thinking of Bran in the belly of the Keep far below, and my friends struggling in the village.
When I’m left alone for a few hours each night and should be sleeping, I continue work on the secret compartment I’ve built in place of Prima’s heart. I carve it just deep enough and round enough, to fit the watch Bran made for me, the one thing from him that I brought to Wolfspire Hall. Tucking the blue velvet ribbon around the edges, I rub my thumb over the “P” embellishing the case. My breath catches at the scrolling pattern of leaves and flowers engraved on the case. The tailor wove the same pattern into Prima’s dress, in golden threads.
I smile at the match, knowing it’s fate at work. Nestling the watch in its new refuge, I carefully replace the wooden panel I made to conceal it. It isn’t quite as clever as my father’s puzzle boxes and their false layers, but it will do. When I finish gluing the panel into place I sand the surface yet again, until the faint echoes of my handiwork disappear seamlessly into the wood’s grain.
I feel satisfied, placing my ear to her chest, content that the faint ticking will continue until the blue moon or some other force bids it to stop. Thanks to Bran, she will have a steadfast heart. And from Tiffin and Nan, hands with the strength of iron. From Fonso, eyes that will see things as they truly are. From the tailor, a gown to set off her beauty and conceal whatever she might wish to keep hidden.
And from me?
“Well,” I whisper, as I pick up a brush to add some final touches of color to her lips and cheeks, “I give you the gift of being just as you are meant to be. Yours is not the face that Laszlo sketched, nor is it one that I merely dreamed up. Yours is the face I saw in the wood. You are what was already there, growing at its core, unfolding in its heart. You and I, I’ve learned, can’t be anything other than what we are. It’s both a blessing and a curse, this ancestry of wood.”
Prima’s subtle voice coming from the wood is always eager. “Soon,” she hums under my fingers. “My time is soon.”
The nearly full moon strides high above the dome of the conservatory, casting a pewter luster through the windows. Tomorrow it will undergo a transformation of its own, becoming blue and brazen. Laszlo’s marionettes light up in its beams, even the saboteur resting in her corner. The air fills with many voices, a series of desperate cries; I cannot normally hear a marionette’s voice unless it’s one I’ve made, but for a moment I hear them all.
“Wake me!”
“No, me!”
“I am more deserving than she!”
“I am the oldest of us all—I should be the next to live!”
I close my eyes against the onslaught, knowing they watch us, me and Prima and the saboteur, with greedy gazes and longing stares. The Margrave has already chosen among them who will live and who shall remain forever asleep, dreaming in wood. I don’t even want to think about what some of them would be like, coming to life instead of Prima. The black witch, the gruesome clown. It would be a nightmare.
“Will you really awaken?” I whisper to the princess. “Or is this all just a hearth tale? One where the exhausted puppetmaster finally meets her untimely end?”
“Soon.”
Spent, I lay my head down at the worktable. My father’s words resound in my mind, in tandem with the muffled ticking of the princess’s new heart: A maker will always prevail. A maker will always prevail. A maker will always prevail.…
I fear its truth and my failure in equal measure.
CHAPTER 27
THE DAWN OF THE BLUE MOON IS A STRANGE ONE. I WAKE TO one of Laszlo’s heavy stares. He has joined me in the gallery, dressed in what I assume is his wedding finery: a jacket of cream, layered over a white shirt and fitted trousers, everything awash in reams of gold braid. He perfectly matches his princess, except for the dark slash of crimson across his chest. It doesn’t escape my notice that he’s added many of his father’s own adornments and medals to the sash.
“Today is the day,” he says brightly, while I rub the sleep from my eyes. “Nil volentibus arduum, apprentice,” he reminds me. “Nothing is impossible and the moon is almost ready, I can feel it!”
“She is ready, at least,” I say tiredly, motioning to where the princess lies complete on the table.
For I’ve done it.
No—we have done it. The makers and I, combining our skills and strength, have constructed the most beautiful, lifelike figurine our part of the world has ever known. I am sure of it. Her eyes glow green and her skin is smooth and soft to the touch. Her hands wait, open, ready to be grasped. Her lean, muscled arms and legs rest now, but they can, I imagine, wield a sword or ride a horse with ease.
“She is everything I imagined,” Laszlo says softly. “Everything a Margrave should have.”
I clear my throat to disguise the sarcastic laugh that threatens. She’s nothing like the creature he imagined and sketched for me, and yet somehow he is too blind to see it, too blind to remember. Perhaps it’s because I conveniently lost those sketches. Or maybe the power within the wood convinced him all on its own, I don’t know.
“The wedding banns have already been called. My marriage to
