7. Lissy
LISSY
Ysolde's final fitting comes on a day when all four sisters crowd inside my little dress shop, and Torgan takes his spot by the window, newspaper in hand.
By now the scene is almost familiar – their bickering, the gossip passed between them, with Torgan taking the brunt of their verbal jabs.
But if they are going to keep coming for three other dresses plus consultations and fittings and everything else, then I need to be sure to make the final fitting as special as it needs to be.
“Hold on,” I say, holding up a hand for Ysolde to see. “No peeking.”
“You’re acting like this is a special occasion,” she says, laughing a little nervously, but I can see that she’s holding her breath in anticipation.
“It is.”
I draw the curtains closed, awkwardly going around Torgan to get to the curtain closest to him.
And then, with a flourish and making sure all four sisters see, I light a candle, throwing the shop into a soft glow.
It's an extravagance — Grammy would chew my ear off about the price of beeswax before sundown — but there's a rule I hold to in this shop, and the rule is this: no bride sees herself in a final fitting by bad light.
This dress deserves candlelight. This bride deserves it more.
"Oh," says Ysolde, from the dais, when the candlelight catches her silhouette. “Oh.”
I grin.
She stands in the finished dress — leather and silk mixing like armor and water — and the candlelight catches every special detail. For a moment all four of her sisters are actually silent.
"Duran is going to weep," Brynna says finally.
"Duran is going to faint," Saskia says. "Do minotaurs faint? We should have a plan," she adds conspiratorially.
"He faints, you catch him," Mirelle says. "You're the one who's always saying you never catch things at weddings."
“I’ll leave the bouquet catching to you then,” Saskia says with a wink.
I move around Ysolde with my clips, mostly for the ritual of it. There's nothing left to take in. The dress is done, and we all know it.
The next time she wears it, it's real.
I hum while I work. It’s something I’ve picked up over the years. Grammy hums, so I hum a ditty from Lyra’s repertoire, even though I don’t remember the full lyrics.
Then the back of my neck prickles.
I glance up, past Ysolde's elbow, to the corner by the window, where the too-small chair holds its usual too-large occupant.
Torgan isn't reading.
The newspaper is there — folded on his knee like a prop — but he isn't reading it now. He's just… watching. Not the dress, which would make sense. Not his sisters either, which would make more.
No, he’s looking at me.
It should feel like being appraised, but it doesn’t.
Princeton Voss looked at my shop for thirty seconds and I wanted a bath. Under Torgan’s attention, my face goes hot.
I flush deep red, and I hope the candlelight camouflages it enough.
"Torgan," Saskia calls over. "Settle something. Brynna says you cried at Ysolde's name-day feast when she was given her first sword and you won’t cry at her wedding. I say you don't have tear ducts. Who's right?"
A grunt. Not even an annoyed grunt.
Saskia blinks at him. She looks at Brynna. Brynna looks at Mirelle, who then looks up at Ysolde. An entire conversation passes between the four of them.
"He's been like this all week," Mirelle stage-whispers to me, hopping up to sit on my cutting table, which I have given up hope of ever stopping her from doing. "Won't fight back. It's weird.” She frowns. “Yesterday I called him an overgrown cave troll at breakfast and he just passed me the honey."
"Maybe he's ill," Ysolde says.
"Maybe he's dying," Saskia says, with too much of a smile on her face.
"You know, I can hear you, right?" Torgan folds up the newspaper he is not reading.
"Then fight back," Saskia says. "It's no fun if you don't—"
The bell over my door doesn't jingle so much as it clangs, and a man walks into my shop like he owns it.
Which, it turns out, is nearly the claim he's here to make.
He's human, well-fed and dressed too warmly for the summer season. He doesn't remove his hat, and he doesn't look at the bride on the dais — actually, he doesn't look at any of the four orc noblewomen here.
He looks at me, checks something on a folded paper in his gloved hands, and says, "Lisette Sunfell?"
I clear my throat, trying to gather my thoughts enough to confront this man. "This is a private fitting," I say. "The shop's closed until—"
"Won't take a minute." He steps forward. "I represent the new holder of this property's obligations. There's the matter of arrears — three months' back rent owed to the new owner.”
“New owner?” I ask, alarmed. “But—"
“I'm instructed to collect, or to discuss terms of vacancy." He produces a second paper with a little flourish. "You'll want to review the figures."
The shop goes very quiet.
And I — I simply freeze.
It's absurd.
I know it's absurd even while it's happening. There is no new owner. There are no arrears. There is no possibility of arrears.
But there's a paper, and a man in a fine purple coat holding it out for me, and some old cellar-level part of me — the part that grew up counting coppers at this same cutting table with Grammy, the part of me that still counts coppers around this same cutting table as an adult with the threat of tariffs hanging over my head — that believes every word and figure I see on the paper.
My mouth opens and nothing comes out.
Immediately, the world turns watery, and it takes me too long to realize that tears are threatening to fall.
And then Torgan stands. The collector finally looks away from the paper.
Torgan doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. He simply comes to stand beside me —not between me and the man, just beside me, close enough that this beady-eyed man’s gaze leaves the paper and travels up and up.
The man's smile dies.
And the three seconds that buys me is enough time to collect myself.
Or maybe it’s because I’ve found some strength from the orc lord beside me. I’m not sure, but whatever it is, I stop hearing the word vacancy and start actually looking at the paper in my hand — the seal is a smear of wax with no signet. The clerk’s handwriting is too tidy.
This is a forgery.
"There is no new owner," I hear myself say.
The man blinks. "Madam, the transfer—"
"There's been no transfer." When I speak, I sound like Grammy, confident and take-no-bullshit.
"I know that for a fact, because my grandmother owns this building.
And she has for the past fifty years. And if she sold it, I promise you that all of Starling Vale would have heard the argument.
" I hold the paper back out to him. "So either your employer has bought a building from someone who doesn't own one — or this paper is a lie.
Either option is grounds for me alerting the city watch. "
He doesn't take the paper. His eyes flick to Torgan — who has not moved and has done nothing except exist — and then back to me, recalculating.
"Perhaps," he says, "there's been a clerical—"
"Perhaps there has." I walk past him and open my own door. The bell gives a polite little jingle, wildly out of scale with the moment. "You can tell whoever sent you that the landlord's answer hasn't changed. She burned the last card. I'd hate for her to burn more false claims."
For a heartbeat he looks at me, as if considering his next move.
He chooses the door. Wisely, and without saying good-bye.
It shuts behind him. The bell settles.
Torgan stands looking through the window for a long moment — noting which way the man goes, I realize — and then he goes back to his corner, folds himself into the too-small chair, and picks up his newspaper.
As if the last minute hadn’t happened.
Meanwhile, everyone else in the shop exhales.
"What," says Saskia, delighted, "was that?"
"That," says Mirelle, hopping down off my cutting table to squeeze my arm, "was our dressmaker eating a man alive. Lissy! You've been holding out on us."
"Your grandmother sounds like my kind of woman," Brynna says.
"She burned his card," Saskia says. "Whose card? What card? I need every detail of this feud immediately."
My hands have decided, independently of me, to make tea. It's what they do.
And by the time the cups are out I've mostly stopped shaking — because I am shaking, now that it's over, now that the door is shut — and the sisters have mostly swept Ysolde back up into wedding talk, seating and flowers and —
And I carry a cup to the corner.
Torgan looks at the tea. Then at me. Four fittings, and he has refused this cup four times.
"You didn't say a word," I say, quietly so his sisters don’t hear me. "But thank you. Truly."
Nothing. He goes back to his newspaper.
"I froze," I add. I don't know why I'm confessing it. "When he said vacancy. I knew he was lying — I knew it the whole time — and I just. Stood there."
"For three seconds,” he says to the newspaper. "Fear gets in front of what you know. It's the same in the front line of battle." A page turns. "You let yourself feel the fear, assess the situation with your senses heightened, and then you make your move."
It might be the most words he has ever said directly to me. I stand there holding the tea he isn't taking.
"Human frippery," I hear myself say.
The newspaper lowers one inch, and he raises an eyebrow up at me. "What?"
"That's what you called all this. Last fitting.
" I nod at the dais, at Ysolde glowing in candlelight while her sisters argue about table settings.
"And I've been sitting on my reply for two weeks, because you're a client's brother and I need this commission.
But I've just thrown a man out of my own shop, so I guess I'm feeling brave.
" I set the tea on the windowsill beside him, since his hands won't have it.
"Can I tell you what all this frippery is for? "
The newspaper lowers. He turns one palm toward me and gestures.
Go on.
So I tell him. Quietly, under his sisters' noise, I tell him about the leather bodice cut like ceremonial armor and the shoulders that are built, not draped.
I tell him about a bride who stands a head over her groom and loves him desperately and almost didn't ask him for courtship, because she was afraid he would decline.
I tell him the boning of the dress won't let her slouch, because she deserves to stand tall on her wedding day.
That on the solstice she will stand at her whole height in front of every person who ever made her feel too large, and it will look like confidence and it will become confidence.
Because that is how it works. That is how it has always worked.
That is what I sell.
Confidence to start a new happily ever after.
"The silk and leather," I finish, "is just what it's made of."
Torgan is silent for a long time. On the dais, Ysolde laughs at something Mirelle said — full, unguarded, at her whole height already, here, in my shop.
"She’s always been conscious of her height," he says.
I blink. "What?"
"We have a cousin. Brakka. He was always such an asshole, teasing all of us, but especially Ysolde for her height.
She always wanted to be small." He's not looking at me anymore; he's looking at Ysolde.
"At my grandfather's fiftieth war feast, she left before the dancing.
Said she had a headache. I walked her to the door myself, and I never—" The jaw sets.
"I never figured out how to give her that confidence back.
" He turns back to me. Candlelight does something to orc eyes I hadn't known — banks them, like coals. "You saw it in her consultation."
"I see it in every second bride who walks through that door. It's the job. The measuring tape is just—" I shrug. "What it's made of."
And then — I watch it happen — he reaches over and picks up the tea.
He doesn't drink it. But he holds it, the cup like a thimble in that enormous hand, steam curling up between us, and he gives me a single nod.
"Lissy!" Ysolde calls. "Come settle this — Saskia says orc custom demands she be allowed a sword on the dais—"
"A ceremonial sword—"
"—no swords in the shop," I call back, already turning, already smiling. "There's silk everywhere, are you mad—"
The fitting winds down the way the good ones do — slowly, with nobody wanting to be first to leave. Ysolde changes back into her traveling clothes, and the dress goes onto its form.
It is done. Done. Ready for its wedding.
And there's a moment where Ysolde stands in front of it with her hand pressed flat over her mouth that I will keep with the other things in my memory with the other things I can't throw away.
At the door, they pour out like water over rapids — swatches, laughter, Saskia reminding Ysolde of the sword ruling — and I say, without thinking about it first: "Thank you, Torgan."
Not Lord Oakenshade. It's out before I can dress it properly. His name, plain, in my mouth, in front of everyone.
Torgan pauses in my doorway — filling it — and grunts.
I'm fluent enough now to translate this one. You're welcome.
Then they're gone, a head above the crowd, and my shop is quiet.
After all the color and chaos of the fitting, I am alone with a cup of tea gone cold on the windowsill.
It’s empty.
He drank it after all. Somewhere between him telling me about Brakka and going out the door.
"It means nothing," I tell the shop.
The shop, I know, doesn’t believe me. I’m not sure I do either.