“Be warned, young one, be wary,” they trill.
Looking up through the glass-domed ceiling, Laszlo’s anxious eyes watch the sky. So far, the moon is just a pale, light-blue glass eye in the heavens. We must wait until it is directly overhead and shines with the bold silver-blue of the rarest of all moons.
“Shouldn’t be long now,” he says, pacing around the conservatory, tugging at a branch here, pulling a dead leaf from a plant there.
He’s forbade anyone but me to join him in the inner sanctum of the glass enclosure, but I know plenty of guards are posted just outside the gallery doors. I caught their curious glances earlier as they peered in. I wonder what they think of their Margrave and his strange obsession. He doesn’t want anyone else to see us use the blue moon’s spell; besides his fear of giving anyone else magical knowledge, if things go wrong, I understand I alone am to be blamed.
“Are you ready? Do you know the words to say? You’d better. You still haven’t told them to me,” he sulks.
“I do know the words, my lord, I have them in my memory from childhood. But I must warn you that it isn’t as simple as saying a spell. The person making the cut and spilling their own blood will lose some of their life in exchange.”
Laszlo nods, taking that in stride. “It seems a fair trade, exchanging some life for another.”
“Perhaps, but it is unknown how much life you might lose. Take my father, for instance. He was still a young man; he could have lived many years yet had he not made me. It could be that awakening your bride takes from you days, even years. Or it may take something else from you, something like your sight or your hearing. It’s impossible to know.”
He tightens his jaw, scoffing. “Don’t lecture me on how I might spend my own life, apprentice. I am the Margrave of Tavia, and if I think it worthwhile to create a mate, a bride, made just so, even if it takes years from me, I consider that time well-spent. Surely it won’t require much blood as noble as mine to awaken her.”
“Perhaps I could be the one to make the cut, on myself, to spare you the sacrifice, my lord?” I offer, remembering the old tree woman’s words: “The heart of the maker will determine the course of the marionette.”
Even though I constructed her, if Laszlo’s blood gives her that last bit of power needed to take her from wooden to human, I can’t say what will happen. I cannot account for the state of his heart. Especially when the state of my own frightens me.
But this is my one chance to be rid of my splinters forever. I’ve come this far. I cannot let the Margrave get in the way. I must think of something.
“Certainly not,” Laszlo spits. “I will be the one to make the cut and use my own blood. We can’t have your non-noble blood tainting hers. Now, shouldn’t the rest of them watch?”
“Who, my lord?” I ask. I thought he didn’t want an audience.
“The rest of my marionettes, the best ones. It’s only fitting!” he says, leaping up to rush back into the gallery. “Surely they will be jealous, won’t they?”
I watch, feeling mildly ill as he brings out about twenty marionettes of all shapes, sizes, and characters to hang on the plants and from the nearby branches of the conservatory’s grove of trees. The newly scorched whipping boy is placed in a prominent position near the princess’s pyre. Laszlo forced me to reattach his broken arm with wire as part of my penance.
“Well? Aren’t you going to go get her?”
“Who, my lord?”
“The saboteur,” he says with a knowing grin. “She should be able to see, too.”
Licking dry lips, I proceed into the gallery, where the saboteur’s been returned to her rack. She is lifeless.
“I don’t think I’m ready for this,” I mutter under my breath, tugging the cage, feeling it creak and roll beneath my hands.
I wheel the saboteur into the courtyard of the conservatory and place her at the edge of the viewing circle, among the others the Margrave has strung up in the trees.
And so we wait, the Margrave, the puppets, and I, for the moon to reach the crest of its travels. At its pinnacle, I sense it immediately, a crackle in the air, the shock of stocking feet against a rug, the flare of a knife against flint. The air is full of ripeness, laden with the sense that the mere spark of a single word might set everything around us ablaze.
The first blue moon I’ve seen with human eyes hangs heavy and burdensome in the sky, straining to stay put. The ring of color reminds me of a blade thrust into Tiffin’s forge, a white-hot molten blue. A strange aura bathes the waiting audience in the conservatory in a silvery wash, suspending us all beneath a cresting wave of moonlight.
It is time.
Laszlo knows it, too. Before his audience of many painted eyes, he retrieves a small, pearl-handled knife from the pocket of his wedding clothes.
“Say the words, Pirouette.”
“You must make the cut and paint your blood over where her heart will be,” I instruct, my own heart racing, knowing his fingers will land right where I planted Bran’s watch.
He nods, readying the knife to draw across his palm.
“Bitter moon—” I begin.
“My lord!” a voice interrupts.
“I told you I wasn’t to be disrupted!” Laszlo shrieks.
“The new prisoner, the tailor’s son, has escaped the Keep. Word just came from the Keep’s watch. We thought you should know.” The guard waits anxiously at the door to the conservatory. “You’d said to keep an eye on that one.”
Laszlo’s icy eyes narrow. He immediately turns to me.
“Do you have
