14. Torgan
TORGAN
"Hold still."
"I am holding still."
"You're doing forms, Saskia." For once, Lissy sounds irritated, and I like it. "Pick one. Statue or warrior. Not both."
"I'm testing the seams." Saskia growls at her. "What if Mikka comes in low on the third pass and the skirt doesn't open? Do you want me to trip at my own wedding?"
"I want you to stand still long enough for me to put in one pin." Lissy speaks around the pins in her mouth, kneeling at my sister's hem. "Then you can kick whatever you like."
I watch from my corner. I haven't brought the newspaper today. There's no point pretending anymore. Neither Lissy nor I acknowledges what happened in the storage room, but we're not denying it either.
No one has asked us the right question.
Saskia stands on the dais in the mock-up of her wedding dress. Even unfinished, even in plain cotton with chalk lines down the seams, I can see what Lissy is building. My sister looks like a bride. My sister looks like a weapon. No one has ever managed to make her look like both.
Lissy has.
Kenna, the master weaver I overheard talking about the tariffs at Ysolde's wedding, arrived an hour ago without warning.
That wedding already feels like it happened months ago.
Saskia suggested her when Lissy asked for silk that could survive a warrior bride.
Kenna didn't send an answer by courier. She packed her cart and rode two days to see the human who thinks she can sew armor into a dress.
Now she sits at the side table with Brynna, a pot of tea between them, watching Lissy work with her arms crossed.
Kenna doesn't give approval away cheaply.
She's been weaving for the clan since before Pa held the Hall, and she made her disapproval of a human sewing for us clear from the moment she arrived.
Mirelle came too, officially to help. She has helped with nothing.
She's claimed my old window seat with a pastry and Lissy's sketchbook, and every few minutes she turns it toward the dais with another question.
Would pearl thread hold on velvet? Could a train be detachable?
Is winter too late for an outdoor wedding?
She isn't planning Saskia's dress. Everyone in the room knows whose dress she's planning, and nobody teases her about it.
"When it's my turn," Mirelle says for the third time this hour, "I want slits in my dress like this."
Lissy, pins in her mouth and hands full of hem, smiles around them. "When it's your turn."
She sets the last pin, sits back on her heels, and nods. "Okay. Now kick."
Saskia kicks. The skirt opens along the split and follows her leg, the weighted hem swinging neatly back into place. Saskia freezes with her boot at head height, delighted.
"Again," Kenna says from the side table.
Saskia kicks again. Kenna gets up, takes the hem between her fingers, and works the fabric as if she's reading it. She studies the chalk lines where the embroidery will go, then looks at Lissy for a long moment.
Her disapproval gives way to respect.
"Who taught you?"
"My grandmother," Lissy says, as if she doesn't understand what she has done. "She ran this shop for fifty years."
"She teach you to put armor lines in a bodice?"
"No. That part I stole from listening to Saskia complain about dresses."
Kenna blinks, then barks a short laugh. "You'll come to my village when this is done. I have three granddaughters, and every one of them will want this dress, wedding or not." She waggles a finger at Lissy. "I'm not riding two days every time."
She returns to her tea. Lissy doesn't know it yet, but she just received a standing ovation from a master of her craft.
I should feel easy. The fitting is going well, and in three weeks I walk into a forest wedding with Lissy Sunfell on my arm. Out in the open. Like we agreed.
But I don't feel easy. I keep returning to the gallery and my conversation with Lord Voss.
Pa took the four percent out of the schedule.
That's the strange part. He went after the clerks the next morning with my numbers, and I expected a week of fighting.
Instead, the Duke's men folded by noon. The fee was reduced to two percent, matching the Mellicans.
All parties satisfied. Signatures next month.
The Duke gave it up without a fight. It cost him nothing.
Which means it was never about the money.
I've been turning that over for days. A man builds a fee designed to be missed, and when it's caught, he shrugs it off because it's a decoy. Or because it's one of many schemes, and he can afford to lose the one we found.
He buys at half, sells at full, and somewhere he calls it tariffs. Kenna's numbers at Ysolde's wedding were bigger than four percent. Much bigger. The dock fee was never the skim. The dock fee was the thing we were meant to find so we'd stop looking.
"You're brooding," Brynna says.
She's moved to the chair beside mine without me noticing, which nobody manages unless it's Saskia. That means I'm worse than brooding. On the dais, Lissy has Saskia's arms spread like wings and is chalking the shoulder line while Saskia complains about how long weddings take to plan.
"I'm sitting."
"You're doing the face Pa makes at the ledgers." She opens her notebook on her knee and doesn't look at me. "You've done it for three days. Since you came home from Valeforth."
I watch Lissy work. She's forgotten we're here. Kenna watches her too, and I can see the old weaver studying her skill and liking what she sees.
"Brynna. Do you still hold a reader's key to the royal archives from your thesis work?"
"For life. Why?"
"Do the archives keep trade records? Dock manifests, tariff schedules, shipping contracts. Old ones."
Brynna frowns. "They keep everything. Manifests from Merreach go back sixty years. Why?"
I shrug. "Curiosity."
"You've never been curious in your life. You ask questions when something's wrong." She turns and looks directly at me. She has Ma's eyes, and they bore into me. "Is something wrong?"
On the dais, Lissy laughs at something Saskia says. The sound carries across the shop and lands in the middle of my chest.
"I don't know yet," I tell Brynna. That much is true.
"The trade numbers with the Voss family don't sit right.
I found one bad fee, and they removed it too easily.
I want to see the manifests. What orc cloth ships through Merreach, what it sells for at Valeforth market, and where the difference goes. Quietly."
"Quietly," Brynna repeats. "You know I got married three weeks ago. Most brothers would ask their newly married sisters to embroider something."
"You hate embroidering."
"I do hate embroidering." She sighs and closes her eyes. "Give me a fortnight."
Across the shop, Kenna rises and starts unpacking the silk she brought.
Dull silver skeins, heavier than they look, made specifically for Saskia.
Lissy comes off the dais to meet her. She takes a skein in both hands, weighs it, and runs a thread across her thumbnail.
Her face opens when the material surprises her.
"It feels like metal," she says.
"It's meant to," Kenna replies. "You'll break needles on it."
"I'll break needles on it." Lissy grins. "Good."
Kenna looks at me across the shop. I don't know how much she remembers saying at the wedding or how much she noticed me listening. Her gaze moves from me to Lissy and back. Her mouth tightens.
"Lord Torgan," she says. "Walk an old woman to her cart."
Outside, the afternoon crowd pushes along the main street. Kenna's cart stands by the fountain, her pony eating from a feed bag. She doesn't climb in. She stands beside it and looks back at the shop window, where Lissy and Saskia are visible through the glass, arguing happily over the sketch.
"You heard me at the wedding," Kenna says quietly. "At the corner table. Don't waste my time denying it. I saw your boots."
I cross my arms and nod. "I heard you."
"And now you're asking your sister about manifests." She adjusts the feed bag, unhurried. "I'm sixty-one, my lord. Not stupid."
"Then tell me the rest. The Voss stamp on orc freight. When did it start?"
"Spring. All at once. Every dockmaster in the same week, like they'd had a meeting." She pats the pony's neck. "It's not just cloth, either. Ironhoof's people ship hides through Merreach. Same squeeze. Half price to Voss buyers or no berth."
"Have you told anyone? Formally? Your village head, the trade council?"
"Told them what? The fees are posted. The contracts are signed.
Nobody put a blade to my throat. They just closed every door but one and called it commerce.
" She looks up at me. "Your Pa's treaty will fix the tariff numbers, and it won't touch this because this doesn't live in the treaty.
It lives in the docks. You want to see it, look at the docks. "
She climbs into the cart and takes up the reins. Then she pauses and nods toward the shop window, where Lissy stands in plain view, smiling.
"That one's good for you," she says. "And your whole family thinks so. Don't muck it up."
"I don't intend to."
"Nobody intends to. You need to intend not to fuck it up."
She clicks her tongue at the pony and rolls into the traffic.
I stand on the street outside Lissy's shop, with my sisters and the woman I'm falling for inside, admiring armor disguised as decoration.
Two streets away, the docks keep their books.
And everyone using them is being squeezed for profit.