PROLOGUE
I’VE NEVER HAD A MOTHER, BUT I’VE ALWAYS HAD THE TREES. I hear them still: the joy of the beech bursting with buds, the oak’s relief at shedding fall’s heavy fortune, the anticipation of winter’s slumber with rugged skins bared to the frost. Their voices rise and fall on every twist of the wind, comforting, yet stern when danger draws near.
Once, a widower walked among them, hunting for fresh wood. The puppetmaster liked to take his time, feeling the bark for smoothness, measuring width for usefulness. Assessing the health of each trunk, he only culled trees who had lived a good life already. He left behind those too young, or too warped by the strange forces of nature.
At night, as he was taking his rest in a small clearing, a woman appeared at the rim of his firelight. She was old, old beyond old—with skin more leather than flesh. Uncertain whether she was human or a force of nature itself, the puppetmaster invited her to share the warmth of his fire. She accepted wordlessly, her legs folding to the ground as spryly as a child’s. He offered her his supper, though he hadn’t much. At last, sated by the meal, the woman began to speak.
“You are a solitary man, Gephardt.”
“Yes, milady.”
She knew his name.
“Your heart longs for a companion, a treasure beyond what you can make for yourself.”
The old crone’s words pierced his heart. The puppetmaster was alone in the world, save for his creations. His parents were gone; his wife had died in childbirth years before, and the babe with her. He so longed for a companion, for a real family. That searing loneliness was his greatest pain.
“Listen well. Soon, the blue moon, the rarest of all moons, will be on the rise,” the woman prophesied, her voice skittery as a spider’s. “At its waxing, offer up one of your creations, and by the moonlight they will be given breath. Choose wisely who to awaken.
“First, make a cut; finger or hand will do. With a drop of your own blood, mark for the creature a new heart. By the moon’s power, the wood will become a living thing again, born of the earth and your blood. But to complete the change, you must say the words.”
“Words, milady?” Gephardt stuttered, shocked at these wild suggestions. Such spells were outlawed, forbidden generations ago. Once, men and women sought to raise power from the earth, to bring wooden carvings to life or to entreat a heartbeat from sculpted clay. That age ended when a royal conjurer’s disastrous spell enabled a king to achieve the opposite: he turned the living to wood. Thanks to his blistering temper, more than a few wooden wives, sons, and stewards were lost to the burn pile. His regime finished in ruin, followed by a ruling heralded far and wide against elemental spells.
In an attempt to safeguard the future of the monarchy, all books containing such magic spells were either sentenced to be kept under lock and key or flagrantly destroyed. The latter applied to those still living with magic words tucked within the pages of their memories. Anyone suspected of witchery or sorcery was hunted down and added to the smoking pyres aflame around the royal city. The old, elemental spells were lost, their legacy now mere whispered warnings from mothers’ lips. Or so the puppetmaster had thought.
“These are the blue moon’s words,” the woman rasped. “Take heed now, for there’s always a cost, and I’ll not repeat myself.
“Bitter moon and solemn blue,
blood of earth and sap and dew,
wake a second life anew.”
“Wait, please! What—”
She silenced him by snapping a twig-like finger to her lips. The woman stood and dusted her tattered skirts, which disintegrated toward her gnarled feet. Then she left, disappearing into the trunk of a broad oak.
Stunned, Gephardt doused his fire and made his way home. He feared he’d imagined the whole thing. Had his loneliness driven him to madness? If anyone had seen what he’d seen, or heard those words, they were in danger of being pitched straight into a burn pile. And if he were to go so far as to make a living creature using such magic? If discovered, the creature would be burned as an abomination.
Yet in the weeks that followed, he obeyed the old woman, scorned the law and made a girl: the daughter he and his wife had longed for. Selecting pieces of the finest linden, he forsook constructing anything else and worked tirelessly on her. He crafted her legs so that they would be sturdy but elegant, the shoulders even and strong. She emerged from the raw, a girl of about eleven years—the same as his own wee one, had she lived.
When it came to her face, the puppetmaster swore his chisel was guided by another hand, the tools already knowing the way to the features sleeping in the wood. The dark hair, the slope of her nose, the wide eyes; she was always there, he claimed, waiting to be set free.
When the rare blue moon rose, Gephardt remained sequestered at home, waiting for it to peak in power, fearful of returning to the forest to perform the rite in the open. He closed the shop early, bolting the doors and shuttering the windows. He paced wildly, wearing grooves in the planked floors. The marionette had been finished for two days. There was nothing else to do but look at her and hope, however outrageous and pitiful that seemed.
He’d asked the old tailor next door to sew him a dress. A new pair of shoes were fashioned by the cobbler. Such requests were not unusual; the puppetmaster often relied on his fellow artisans to complete his work with their finery.
When the moon peaked that fateful night, it was full and lavishly blue, the same shade as the cerulean in the puppetmaster’s paint pots. Its light was a living, ghostly thing. He waited until the rays illuminated his far workshop window—the only one he dared crack open.
He held the marionette gently, bathed in moonbeams, as he knelt on the floor. From his pocket he drew a small blade, a long-ago gift from his own father. With a whispered prayer and a deep slice across a scarred fingertip, he painted a heart in the place where a new one might grow.
Then, he uttered the old woman’s clandestine words, the marionette’s first lullaby. “Bitter moon and solemn blue …”
In a rush of joy and heartbreak, with a ripping breath that filled the marionette from the inside out, the wooden limbs became warm flesh. The cleverly fashioned joints on the arms and legs germinated from pins and wire to bones and sinew. A human heart hummed in the small chest. Gephardt’s blood spilled through newly strung veins, flooding the marionette’s cheeks and prodding her eyelids open. In wonderment, the puppetmaster and girl looked one another in the eyes for the first time.
In those first moments, I was, perhaps, still more wood than girl. It’s hard to say. Since a tree cannot move about, the only way for it to travel is to stand through time, the pages of its story pressed deeper inside with each passing year. I keep the memories of these first moments tightly pressed within. There are days when I wonder if you were to crack me open, could you still count my rings, each significant moment sealed in a new layer to protect it from the elements?
My father claims I attempted to stand, but my wobbly legs stumbled in a willowy twirl few dancers would have been graceful enough to manage. Like a leaf fluttering to the forest floor. Then came the puppetmaster’s hearty laugh and the words that never fail to bring a flood of those early memories rushing back.
“And so it was that I discovered your name: Pirouette.”