8. Lissy
LISSY
"You're allowed to simply attend a thing, you know."
"The bride is wearing three weeks of my life, Grammy.
" I force the clasp of my bag shut that holds the needle case, three different weights of thread, spare boning, a vial of Noemi's stain-lifter, silk patches matched to the exact color of the train, beeswax, and clips and pins.
The bag closes on the third try. "If a cousin steps on the train, I am not going to be standing there holding a canapé. "
"Mm." Grammy doesn't look up from her chair by the hearth. Her needle keeps moving through the hoop in her lap, in and out. "And the thread scissors? The little ones?"
I open my mouth to say of course I packed the little scissors, and then I close it.
I did not pack the little scissors.
She holds them out to me without looking.
"Fifty years of weddings," she says, as I take them. "You learn what walks away and what gets left behind. Are you ready?"
I nod. Ysolde's dress is boxed up like treasured gems on their way to a museum or a dignitary's collection. I pick it up as Grammy sets down her hoop.
She doesn't hurry. She never hurries with this part, and I watch her, amazed, like I did as a child.
She folds the tissue back like turning down a bed.
Her deft fingers find the inside of the hem, and she threads a needle with a single strand of pale pink silk.
She completes one stitch, so small that no one will ever find it who doesn't know to look.
She's done it to every piece that has left our shop since before the shop was mine — since before I was born, if the stories are true.
"For luck," she says, same as always. "Every Sunfell dress carries one."
"Even for orcs?"
"Especially for orcs," she says as she folds the tissue back over the silk as though tucking in a child.
I busy myself with the box lid so she won't see my expression.
Because this is the part of every wedding that gets me — not the ceremony, not the flowers, I'm ironclad through all of that. It's this. Ysolde is going to stand up in front of everyone she loves and begin the rest of her life, and this stitch will be in the hem of it.
And no one will ever know, and it is the closest thing my family has to a blessing.
And on the mantel above Grammy's head, where it has sat my entire life, the book watches me.
I don't mean to look at it. I never mean to look at it. It's just a book — but it’s not just a book.
The Fable of the Oak and the Needle. The Sunfell story. The reason, depending on how much of it you believe, that Grammy buried her husband and son-in-law, lost her daughter, and then raised me.
The reason that I’ll always be the dressmaker and never the bride.
Weddings are what I help to make. They will never be what I get – I promised myself that. And every Sunfell woman who ever thought otherwise is in that book, one way or another, pressed like flowers, beautiful and heartbreaking.
"Lissy."
I startle. Grammy is watching me. Her needle has stopped.
"Your cart is waiting," she says.
"I know,” I say, hoisting my satchel up on one shoulder, and tucking the box under my arm. “I'm going."
"Eat at the feast. Don't work the whole night."
I laugh dryly. "I'm going to work the whole night."
"I know." She takes my free hand in both of hers. Her hands are the safest place I have ever known. "Lissy. Whatever else that family is — however loud, however large — a wedding is a wedding. Let it be a happy thing. Don't stand at the edge of it and worry the whole night."
"What else should I be doing?"
Grammy looks at me a long moment. "Go on," she says, and she kisses my knuckle. “Be proud.”
"You're not dancing."
I nearly choke on my canape.
I've been at Oakenshade Hall for seven hours, and in all that time, Torgan Oakenshade has said exactly five words to me (welcome to the Hall, dressmaker).
Now he is standing at my shoulder at the edge of the wedding festivities with two glasses of champagne in his hands.
"I'm — no," I manage. "I'm not."
He hands me one of the glasses. Doesn't look at me, but he keeps his eyes on the dance floor.
On the floor of the great hall, the dancing is at a full roar.
Orc dancing, I have learned tonight, is what happens when a battle and a party crash into a wondrous cacophony of cheering, hands clapping, and boots stomping. It is glorious and terrifying, and there is no version of it that ends with me untrampled.
Probably why I’ve been hiding here on the fringes for the better part of an hour.
I down the champagne to give me something to do with my time.
It has been — I don't have the word for what this day has been.
I'd braced myself for a fortress, war banners and maybe a skull or two on spikes.
Instead the gates stood open with garlands wound through the hinges, and strung between the watchtowers — where the war banners must live the rest of the year — hung line after line of dried summer flowers. Ysolde insisted, Brynna told me.
Then the dressing, in the tower room, went exactly like every bridal dressing I've ever attended — Ysolde wringing her hands, everyone with opinions about hair, her mother Lady Ishara crying and denying it and crying again — right up until the moment Ysolde turned from the mirror in the finished gown.
Instead of the awed silence I have seen at every other wedding, everyone in the room stamped.
From their grandmother to Mirelle, one boot each against the stone, a single crack of thunder in a tower room.
And Ysolde looked at herself and straightened up.
"Well," she said, thick. "All right, then. Let’s have a wedding."
I understood perhaps a third of the ceremony and cried through the rest. Vows in orcish, which rumbled the walls. Vows in the minotaur language, which tolled like bells. At one point bride and groom each laid a blade against the other's open palm and did not cut each other.
“That's the vow,” Brynna murmured beside me, “the laying of your hand along an edge and trusting your partner, and your partner trusting that you don’t need a blood oath.”
Then the feast.
I learned that there is no seating plan at an orc wedding, only seating conquest. It is an insult of the highest order to let a guest's plate sit empty, and I ate an entire pheasant by myself. And my goblet was never empty.
All of which is to say: I am several cups and one pheasant into the strangest, warmest night of my life.
And Torgan Oakenshade has just appeared beside me with a cup and an observation.
"Your family dances like a cavalry charge," I tell him, bringing my mind back to the dancing. "I don't know the steps, and I'd be trampled. It would ruin the party."
Then he says something that catches me entirely off guard.
"I know the human ones."
I look up at him. "The human what?"
"Steps. Court dances." His jaw does the thing it does. "I was taught it as a young orc. It seemed like something you should know is available."
It seemed like something you should know is available. I will take that sentence home and keep it in the drawer. But for now, all I can do is laugh. Something at the corner of his mouth surrenders half an inch, which for him is a cheek-to-cheek grin.
"My lord," I say, "are you asking me to dance?"
"I'm informing you of your options."
"Ask me, then."
And the music turns over — right then, into something with an actual melody line. Torgan sets down his cup. Turns to me, and holds out his hand.
"Dance with me," he says. And then, a beat late, gravel dragged over the word: "Please."
Despite myself, I take his hand.
So we dance.
And he's good at it. Of course he's good at it.
He leads the way he does everything — no wasted motion, no showing off — and within eight bars I realize he's doing something else, too.
He's shortening his steps to match mine.
Turning me away from the crowded side of the floor before I notice it. Making me look like I know this dance.
But I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.
One of his hands swallows mine entirely. The other sits at my back, holding me as gently as he held the teacup at the last fitting. Gently. Like I’m something that matters.
I'm fairly sure no one has ever handled me like something breakable. I'm the one who fixes something breakable.
The melody skips— and I'm the one who missteps, my boot landing squarely on top of his.
He doesn't stumble. He doesn't even slow. He just turns my mistake into a little lift-and-set. My feet leave the floor and find it again on the right count.
So smooth that anyone watching would think we'd rehearsed it.
"Sorry—" I'm flushing. "I stepped on you."
"You'd have to try harder than that."
"You're covering for me."
"I'm leading," he says. "It's the same thing."
And I laugh — I can't help it —and I get brave. "All right, my lord. If you're so good at covering. There's an orc step, the little quick one — I saw Saskia doing it. Teach me."
He looks at me a moment. Then he adjusts his grip, says "on the skip," and when the tune skips again he pulls me through it with him, and it works.
Now I'm laughing and he is fighting a laugh and losing, tusks and all. We are trading steps in the middle of his sister's wedding, my cold hands in his warm ones, and we’re laughing.
This is what dancing should be.
"There," I say, breathless, looking up at him. "Now we're dancing."
He looks down at me, smiling.
Then the smile disappears. His hands leave me between one bar and the next.
The music is still playing. His hands are gone from me between one bar and the next.
"Thank you for the dance," Torgan says — to a point above my head, in the voice of a man concluding a trade negotiation. "You should — the cups. There will be a toast soon."
"Torgan—"
But he’s already moving through the crowd, and everyone steps aside.
I stand alone in the middle of the dance floor with my heart hammering.
The music turns over. Dancers wheel past me, and I get myself to the edge of the floor before anyone can sweep me into a line, because suddenly I cannot bear to be flung and caught by people who mean it.
I find a bench against the wall. I sit, and I do the thing Grammy told me not to do.
I worry myself into a spiral.
Was it the one dance? One misstep?
I saw it. How he shut himself off.
And under all of it, somewhere out there is a woman he loves enough to spend twenty gold pieces protecting her from her own heart. That is still the only story I've ever managed to make of that vial. And a man does not flee a dance floor like the floor is burning unless—
Something lands in my lap.
Not lands — climbs. A girl of perhaps five, green as spring grass, one tusk barely through, wearing what was this morning surely a very fine dress, hauls herself up my skirts like they’re a ladder, and looks up at me with wide, bright eyes.
"You're the dressmaker," she says.
"I — yes." My worries scatter like startled birds. "I am."
"You made Cousin Ysolde beautiful."
The whole hall goes a little watery, but I manage not to cry. "She was always beautiful, sweetheart. I just made the dress agree with her."
She considers this with the gravity of a judge. Whatever verdict she reaches, it apparently entitles her to settle deeper against me.
"I'm Mima," she says. "When I get married, I will have a dress with wolves on it."
I raise an eyebrow "Wolves?"
"Embroidered wolves. Running ones. All around the bottom, so when I dance, they run." She yawns enormously, tusk and all. "You'll make it. You make all our dresses now. Everyone said."
Everyone said.
I open my mouth to explain that there are other dressmakers – better ones – and the fact that her wedding is presumably twenty years away—
She's asleep, completely boneless, her fist still closed around my hand like I’d leave her.
I sit very still.
And the worries — the dance, the shutter, the woman I've invented to explain a vial — don't leave, exactly. But for a moment, I can believe they’re gone. Across the hall, through the smoke and the singing, I catch Lady Ishara watching me over the rim of her cup.
She raises the cup an inch in a salute.
I don't know what I've just passed. But I know I've passed something.
"Welcome to the family," says a voice beside me. Brynna slides onto the bench beside me. “Mima decides who she wants to stay with, then falls asleep wherever she likes.”
“She’s adorable,” I say honestly.
Brynna nods. “I saw you dancing with Torgan, by the way.” She says it like she’s talking about the weather. Like she doesn’t have a lot of interest in it. “Don’t worry about him. He does that.”
"Does what?" I say. Too fast.
“Runs when he feels like he’s getting too close to something he cares about.”
“It has to be hard for him,” I find myself saying, and it sounds far away, like someone else is saying the words. “Because he cares about you and your sisters so much.”
Brynna chuckles lightly and shakes her head. Then she pulls out a small leather notebook from her sleeve — flips past pages of tiny precise handwriting, and lays it open in front of me.
Embroidery patterns. Vines and letters intertwined — lines of text becoming stems, stems becoming words again, whole sentences flowering up a bodice seam.
I stroke the page, marveling at the designs. “Brynna, I never knew you could draw.”
She nods. "Time for my consultation," she says.
"I want a dress with writing in it. Evander and I met in the royal archives — I want our books stitched into the gown where only the two of us know to find them.
Everyone says you're the one who can do it.
" She pauses. "Sorry to jump on you at the wedding, but I wanted to reach you before Saskia does, because her dress is going to be armored, and I refuse to inherit a consultation schedule organized around load-bearing embroidery—"
"I ALSO NEED TO BOOK," Saskia bellows, from somewhere in the crowd. Luckily, Mima does not even stir.
"Me too." Mirelle materializes on my other side, holding a plate of wedding cake. "When it's my turn. You'll make mine too, Lissy. Promise it."
The three sisters look at me as the first Oakenshade wedding winds down.
By the fire, the bride herself has fallen asleep on her new husband's shoulder — still in her armor of leather and silk — and Grammy's stitch is in the hem of it, invisible, blessing her union. Apparently, I make all their dresses now. Even Mima’s.
“I promise,” I say.