by Peter Birk
am afraid I am falling in love with another,” he said.
I got flustered, nearly dropped my tea, and stammered something about being tired. He just looked at me, then nodded and wished me good night as I excused myself.
I tried hard to act like nothing had happened the next couple of days as we worked alongside one another, but it was hard to focus. Whenever he wasn’t around I kept finding myself thinking about him, and when he was next to me I tried very hard to ignore the thoughts that went racing through my head. He was incredibly patient, telling me not to worry when I ruined the next two prototypes. While his kindness was nice, it didn’t help.
Then one morning a grey-cloaked witch came into the workshop while I was fitting the body of the violin. It took me a moment to curtsy because I was busy tightening the joints and couldn’t stop or else the body would come apart. Rising from my curtsy, I glanced in her eyes, and knew from years of school that I was in trouble.
“You are the carpenter?” she asked. I nodded and looked down at the floor.
“Look at me,” she said curtly, and obediently I looked up at her. Her face was calm, placid. She was younger than I thought she would be, younger than Pierre-Louis, and she carried herself with such authority and power that I felt like a child in her presence. I thought she was beautiful.
“Do not act dumb,” she said. “I know you’re quite intelligent. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”
She walked around me, looking at the violin in its brace on the work table.
“I came to tell you two things.” She leaned over the body, looking at it closely. “I don’t care if you sleep with him. The gossip is that you already are,” she looked up at me, “but I don’t think so.”
She looked back down at the body. “I don’t care. Sleep with him. I hope you enjoy it more than I do, but that would not be wishing you very much.” She looked up and locked eyes with me. “At the very least, have the decorum to pretend you are having fun.”
I swallowed hard, realizing my mouth was suddenly dry. I could barely feel my hands. I didn’t know what to say. We looked at each other a moment, and then she turned to go.
“What,” I managed to choke out, “What was the other thing?”
She stopped at the door but didn’t turn around. “You are probably aware of this already, but there are those among the gossipers who see you as something of a talking dog.”
She then turned and looked at me, a sly grin on her face. “A mundane who can read,” they say. “How fantastic. Almost as if they believe that mundanes are too stupid to know how to read.”
The grin faded. “Too bad we both know that isn’t true.”
Then she left. I wandered around the work table, wringing my hands. Fear, anger and sheer excitement coursed through me, my thoughts racing and my limbs quivering. I went up onto the battlements, bummed a pipe and a pinch of smoke from a guard, and wandered up and down the wall, looking out onto the fog trickling through the hills thickly draped with tall evergreens.
After I’d calmed down, I went back down to the workshop. Pierre-Louis was bent over the body. “Sophie,” he said without looking up, “This looks marvelous.” I came up behind him, and put my hand on his back. He straightened up and looked at me. “Sophie?” he asked.
I leaned in and kissed him. I melted into him, lightning racing up my spine. The hairs on my arms stood on end. Magic, I thought.
After we became lovers, everything suddenly started flowing into place. The latest prototype produced a pleasant sound, which was new for us. I started to learn to play it, Pierre-Louis coaching me through reading the music. Our days were spent with music; our nights with each other.
Then one morning he came in, his face ashen. “Sophie,” he said. “You are to play the violin for the Gran Mater.”
I laughed. “I will, when I’ve learned how to do so.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “You’re to play for her now.”
I was to leave when the wagon train arrived tomorrow. We practiced all day, going over and over it, me playing the piece, him correcting me, over and over, through the night and into the next morning. Exhausted, I realized I had to pack, not just myself, but the violin.
With my bag over my shoulder and the violin wrapped in cloth like a child nestled against my chest, I approached the wagon train. Pierre-Louis walked next to me, giving me last minute advice.
“Remember, it ends softly,” he said.
I was tired, groggy. “I know,” I said.
“Sophie, this is important. You need to pay attention.”
“I know it’s important. I know that it ends softly.”
“Sophie, just because you learned to read a little doesn’t mean…” He trailed off as he looked at the horror spreading across my face.
“Doesn’t mean what?” I held up the violin towards him. “I made this. I learned how to play this.” I pulled it back to my chest, and stepped backwards away from him.
“Sophie, come here,” he snapped.
I glared at him, then spun on my heel and started walking towards the carriage.
“Sophie,” he barked. “Sophie, come back here this instant.”
I kept walking.
“Fine,” he said. “Go ahead. When you trip and fall walking in shoes too big for you and ruin it for both of us, when they send you back to that middle of nowhere village that bore you, just remember which one of us turned and walked away.”
“Which carriage?” I asked the wagon master. He looked over my shoulder at Pierre-Louis, looked at me, then nodded towards the carriage in the lead.
I opened the carriage door. Three mundanes in the carriage looked up and gave me a weary smile as they made room for me. The Grey Cloak sitting in the corner didn’t look up from his book, or move. I sighed and settled in as best I could, clutching the violin to my chest.
The wagon train sped through the night to Orleans, where we were unloaded and then placed on a different train which whisked through the early morning dawn to Holcomb. I was exhausted, but too nervous to sleep. On the edge of Holcomb, we were loaded into small carriages for the final ride to Manz and the Tower of Law. My tired eyes widened as I stepped off the wagon train and saw the black, twisted trees of the Wolfwood before me.
The carriage crept through the dark and tangled forest, the trees pressing close to our windows. I held the violin close to my chest, and placed all of my hope in the Light that we would make it to Manz safely.
I felt small and stupid as we pulled through the city gates. I’d never seen so many people before, bustling about and doing things I could only imagine. The canvas upon which I painted my world was being pulled in too many directions at once as I struggled to fit it all in, and I could feel the edges fray and start to tear.
We pulled into the courtyard of the Bastille. I stepped down from the carriage, looking up wide-eyed at the Tower of Law rising over the courtyard. Red-cloaked witches scuttled back and forth across the cobblestones. The girl I had once been had dreamed of becoming one of them, of coming to this Tower to practice magic for this Order. I looked down at the violin that I clutched to my chest and I started to shake. Who did I think I was, to be here?
“You are Sophie?” A voice asked behind me. I turned to see a slender, grey-haired witch, her red cloak lined with black and gold trim falling over her shoulders. I nodded. She smiled. “Welcome to the Tower of Law. My name is Rene. I’m here to take you to see the Gran Mater.”
“Now?” I asked. “I just got here.”
Rene nodded. “We saw you arrive. She sent me to fetch you right away.”
She led me through hallways packed with witches, mostly Red Cloaks but also witches from all of the Orders, bustling to and fro. The entire building felt alive with activity, humming like a hive. We climbed a lot of stairs through the Tower, and turned so many corners I lost all sense of whi
ch way we were headed.
We finally reached a door in the middle of a hallway and Rene let me into a small room, which in turn opened on a larger one. A fireplace dominated the far wall, and next to it, to the right, sat a long, low couch. A well-stuffed chair sat to the left, next to a desk covered in papers and books. Along the wall to the left of the desk, a row of tall windowed French doors let in the sunlight while leading out to a balcony.
And then she rose from the couch, and my heart rose in my throat when she did— Marie Chenault, the Gran Mater, her silver hair pulled up in a bun behind her head, her sharp piercing eyes locking onto mine. She stood and walked towards me with a fluid grace, smiling at me and extending her hand. I curtsied before her, and my knees buckled as I did. My only thought as I started to fall was for the violin, how sad for it to be crushed under my clumsy body after all this time, when I was caught by two strong hands under my shoulders.
“Rene,” said the Gran Mater, pulling me to my feet. “Pull a chair over here. She’s exhausted.”
The Gran Mater gently set me in the chair Rene pulled up behind us, and shushed me as I tried to apologize. “Let’s get some tea in you. It’ll chase out the chill autumn air.”
She was on her knees in front of me, looking at my face
