12. Lissy
LISSY
"You're my marginalia," Brynna says, her voice barely above a whisper, and somehow the whole congregation hears her.
She's standing at the front of the library hall in the dress we built together. Cream silk. Twilight-blue thread. Poetry climbs the bodice seam where only three people in the room know how to read it: her, Evander, and, sort of, me.
She has stopped in the middle of her vows and is looking at her groom like he's the only person in the world.
"That's what you are," she tells Evander. "Notes in the margins of a book only we have read, and I intend to keep writing with you until the binding gives out."
Evander doesn't answer right away. He's a thin human scholar with ink on his fingers even today. He is nothing like Torgan, which may be exactly the point.
They're perfect for each other.
He swallows, never taking his eyes off his bride.
"I promise you now," he manages. "The binding between us will never give out."
There are only twenty guests. Twenty chairs in a hall of the royal archives that Evander somehow got permission to use.
Ancient shelves rise above us, and every reading lamp and candle stand has been arranged in a circle, placing the two of them in a pool of gold light with ten thousand books looking down.
After Ysolde's wedding, with two hundred orcs, warrior songs, and seating conquest, I braced for more of the same.
This is the exact opposite.
Evander reads his vows from a book. Not folded paper. A whole bound book.
It takes me until his third sentence to understand. He wrote it for her. An entire book because his vows wouldn't fit on one page.
He reads one page and closes it.
"The rest is yours to read later," he says. Then he looks almost embarrassed. "There's a table of contents."
Brynna gives one sharp, startled laugh, completely unlike her, and covers her mouth with both hands.
There is no stamping this time. When the vows are done, every orc in the room touches two fingers to their collarbone.
Where a necklace would sit.
They know. Brynna must have told them where to look and what it means. From three steps away, a vine. From one step away, theirs.
I make it through the ceremony. I make it through the toasts and the tiny supper at one long table. I make it through Saskia's speech, which opens with, "I have known Brynna since before she could read, which was the day after this bookworm was born."
I even make it through Evander's father, a small gray-haired bookbinder who stands and says, "I bound the book. He wouldn't tell me what it was for. Now I know," before sitting down again.
What I don't make it through is the dancing.
It is nothing like the last wedding. Tonight there is only a hired trio playing violins and a cleared space between the shelves. Couples sway in the lamplight. Brynna and Evander barely dance at all. They stand in the middle, talking.
Something in my chest twists.
They say there is someone for everyone. I don't know what that means when there's a curse on me.
And I slip out the side door before anyone can see what my face is doing.
Certainly not crying.
Right?
The garden of the archives is barely a garden. It is a courtyard off the archive hall with one lantern, a stone bench, and ivy climbing the walls.
It is cold enough that my breath clouds in front of me.
Perfect. No one follows people into cold, dark courtyards. They stay inside where there is a wedding and warmth.
I get four full breaths to myself.
"You left."
I don't jump. Somehow, I knew he was there.
Torgan stands in the doorway with lamplight behind him, holding my shawl. The one I left on my chair.
"I needed air," I say.
"It's freezing."
"Then I needed freezing air."
He crosses the courtyard and holds out the shawl. He lets me take it without our fingers touching, and I hate that I notice things like that about him now.
I notice everything about him now. Nine days of silence after the dance, then weeks of him back in his corner at the fittings, polite and absorbed in his newspaper.
"You've been avoiding me," I say.
He frowns. "I've been at every fitting."
"You've been at them the way that bench has been at them." I pull the shawl tight around me. "You watched Brynna's whole wedding from the sidelines. You watch everything from there. And the one time you stepped away to dance with me, you pulled back even farther afterward."
He is quiet for a moment. In the dark, I can't read him at all.
"You're angry," he says. Not defensive. Just certain.
"I'm not angry." I am, a little. "I just don't understand you. Every time you come close, you pull away harder."
I stop before I say something I can't take back.
"Why did you follow me out here?"
"You left," he says again, as if that is a complete answer.
When I keep looking at him, he crosses his arms. "You watch from the sidelines too. I've seen you. You stand at the edge and track everything all night. You never stop working. Tonight is the first time I've seen you leave."
I raise an eyebrow. "So you came to see why?"
"I came to see if you were all right."
The courtyard is very quiet. Somewhere behind the wall, muffled, the violin trio starts another tune.
"That's fair," I say at last. "About watching from the edge."
I sit on the cold bench because standing suddenly feels like work.
"It's easier there. You can love the whole thing from the edge, and none of it asks you for anything back."
"Yes," Torgan says.
Just that. But he says it like I've picked a lock.
Maybe it is the cold. Or the wedding. Or the book of vows with a table of contents.
Whatever it is, I ask him straight.
"What happened to you? And don't say nothing. I'm too tired for nothing."
He is silent long enough that I think I've pushed too far. His breath clouds between us.
"I was nineteen," he says. "Raiders came at the east wall in winter. My mother took an arrow before anyone raised the alarm. I was the one who found her in the snow."
He says it like a battle report, which is worse than if his voice shook.
"I froze. I stood there doing nothing while my mother bled.
" He turns the lantern side of his face toward me.
"She lived, but some of it stayed permanent.
I haven't sat easy in a room since. Any room.
I walk in and find the doors, the exits, the things that could go wrong, and I watch them.
Weddings are the worst. Everyone I love in one place.
It would be the perfect place for an ambush. "
I remember Lady Ishara's careful breathing and the way she favors one side.
I don't say I'm sorry. He would hate it, and it isn't what this moment needs.
"You froze," I say instead. "That's what you've built all this on? Torgan, you were nineteen."
He shakes his head. "You asked what happened. That's what happened. Your turn."
I blink. "My turn?"
The tune behind the wall changes.
I could give him something small. I have a dozen harmless truths sorted and ready, the way I keep spare buttons. My absent-mindedness. My fear about the shop. The customer I once pinned a dress to at the hip.
Safe truths.
But he gave me something else.
"I've never let myself want a wedding," I say.
It comes out plainer than I've ever said it to anyone. I have never said it to anyone. Not Lyra. Not Grammy.
Especially not Grammy.
Torgan goes still.
I thread my fingers together. "Not the marriage. The wedding. Any of it. I've made hundreds of wedding dresses, and I love them more than anything. But I stand at the edge of every wedding and pretend I don't want to step inside."
The story is right there. The curse. I step around it.
"Women in my family don't get them. We make them. That's the arrangement. It's a good arrangement. A fine one."
The courtyard goes watery, and I blink hard.
"But tonight, Evander read one page of a whole book he wrote for Brynna, and there is an entire story waiting for them. So I had to leave."
Silence. My face burns despite the cold.
"So there." I give him a little flourish with my hands. "The dressmaker doesn't let herself want the dress. Laugh whenever you like."
"I'm not going to laugh."
"You should. It's funny. It's the funniest thing about me."
"Lissy."
He is standing closer. I don't remember either of us moving, but the lantern is behind him now, and he is looking down at me the way he did during our dance. Before the mask came back. When he forgot every rule he has.
He is forgetting them now.
"You should want the dress," he says, low, as though the words cost him. "You should want the whole..."
He doesn't finish.
His hand comes up to my jaw, slow enough that I could step back. His palm is warm and rough, and it fits against my face like it was measured for me.
I put my hand flat against his chest.
Not to stop him.
To see whether his heart is doing the same thing as mine.
It is.
Then he leans down and kisses me.
The kiss is slow and careful, the way everything he does with me is careful. I rise onto my toes because I want more. He makes a small sound against my mouth, surprise or surrender, and his other hand finds my back.
For several seconds, I forget the cold entirely.
Inside, the violin trio plays for people who are married and brave.
Out here, a dressmaker kisses a lord, and no needle breaks, no shop burns, and the world does absolutely nothing to stop us.
When our lips part, neither of us goes far. His forehead rests against mine, which should be comical given his size and tusks.
Instead, it is the gentlest thing that has ever happened to me.
"That," I whisper, "was reckless of you, my lord."
"Yes." His thumb moves once along my jaw. "I'm told I'm difficult."
"I don't think so. I think you guard yourself because you guard everyone else."
He is quiet for a moment.
Then he slips his hand into mine.
"Come on. It's freezing, and they'll be missing the artist who made Brynna's beautiful dress."