10. Lissy
LISSY
"Is Torgan not coming in?" I ask, nodding toward the window.
Through the glass, I catch the back of him halfway down the street. His shoulders are up around his ears like it's raining.
It isn't raining.
"He says he has errands." Brynna sets three books on my cutting table and unwinds her scarf. "In Starling Vale. Where he knows no one and has no business. Errands."
"Well," I say, making my voice do absolutely nothing interesting. "Errands are important."
I do not look at the chair by the window where Torgan sat through all of Ysolde's fittings. I certainly do not think about how I expected to see him there today, pretending to read his newspaper.
Brynna looks at me.
I busy myself with the teapot.
She is here alone for her consultation, at her request. I have secrets with this that I want to keep, she'd told her sisters. To my surprise, Ysolde, Saskia, and Mirelle respected that.
Sisters must know when a secret is serious.
It's been nine days since the wedding. Nine days since I danced with Torgan. Nine days since his face closed and he walked away from me.
He hasn't spoken to me since.
I keep telling myself it means nothing, but now he won't even come through my door. Isn't that an answer all by itself?
It was just a dance.
"So," I say brightly, sitting across from Brynna. "Let's continue the consultation we started at the wedding. A dress with writing in it?"
Brynna opens the first book, and something in her changes.
She talks with her hands. I never knew that about her. She has brought a book of pressed-flower plates, a Valeforth grammar book older than my shop, and a slim volume of poetry with so many ribbons tucked between the pages that it has nearly doubled in size. The spine is cracked and soft from use.
Well-loved.
"This one." She opens the poetry book to a blue ribbon. "Evander read it to me before I'd told him my family name. He didn't know I was anyone. He read it because we reached for the same shelf."
Her thumb hovers over the page without touching it.
"I want the first line here." She touches her collarbone. "Where a necklace would sit. Small enough that from three steps away, it looks like a vine."
"And from one step away?"
"From one step away, it's ours."
I have been making wedding dresses for eleven years. I know every kind of bride. The ones who want armor. The ones who want disguise. The ones who want their mother to finally say the thing she has never said.
I have never had a bride ask me to sew a library into her gown.
I pick up my pencil.
We work for two hours, and it is the easiest consultation of my life. She wants a line from Evander's first letter running along the inside of the hem. She wants the archive's catalog number for the shelf where they met embroidered into one cuff.
"It's a very good number," she says solemnly.
I have to put my pencil down.
"Marginalia," I say when the first sketch is done. "That's what this dress is. Notes in the margins of a book only two people have read."
Brynna goes still.
"Write that down," she says. "I want to say it to Evander at the wedding."
I laugh and turn back to the sketch. The lines of text climbing the bodice need an anchor at the shoulder. Something for them to grow from.
My hand does what it always does.
I draw an oak leaf crossed by a needle, with thread winding around them.
Brynna stops talking.
"Where did you learn that?"
I look down at the page. "Learn what? It's a filler motif. I use it everywhere. It's on half the dresses in this shop. It's probably on the curtains."
"Lissy." She turns the sketchbook toward herself, careful with the page. "That's the Oak and the Needle."
My stomach tightens.
"Well... yes. It's an oak and a needle. It's a dressmaker's mark. The tree is for growing, and the needle is for creating."
She shakes her head slowly. Not to disagree. She looks stunned.
"I did my archive work on regional versions of old tales," she says.
Her voice has gone quick and precise. "There is a fable called The Fable of the Oak and the Needle.
The older manuscript copies have this exact symbol on the binding.
The leaf, the needle, the thread. I've only seen it twice, and you just drew it without thinking. "
The kettle begins to sing behind me.
I don't move.
"It's a story," I say. "A seamstress and a lord. It ends badly."
"You know it?"
"I could recite it in my sleep." My back has gone cold, and I don't know why. "My grandmother read it to me. Every Sunfell dress carries..."
I stop.
Grammy's stitch. The single strand of pink silk hidden in every hem. For luck.
Why have I never put the stitch and the story together before?
Brynna watches me without rushing me.
"Tell me how your version ends," she says. "The one you were raised on."
The kettle keeps singing. I take it off the heat because my hands need something to do.
Then I tell her.
The seamstress and the lord fall in love. They marry and have a child, but their families tear them apart. The lord dies young at the hand of a trusted friend and is buried with a blanket the seamstress made for him. The seamstress gives up her dreams, and their child is raised by her grandmother.
I finish with the words Grammy always used.
"And so the story repeats. Wanting is the needle, and the world is the oak. The needle that sews against the grain will break. That is the seamstress's curse. She will make dresses for other women, but she will never have a happy ending of her own."
My mouth is dry.
My life follows the story too closely for it to be a coincidence. My father was a lord. His family disowned him for loving my mother, and one of his friends killed him in a duel. Then my mother disappeared, and Grammy raised me.
Grammy lived her own version before that. So did her mother.
How many times does a story have to happen before it becomes a curse?
I can't let it happen to me.
Brynna is quiet for a long moment.
"That matches the newer archive copy," she says at last. "There are two in the royal collection, and they don't agree. The newer one is perhaps a century old. It ends the way yours does. The older one was damaged in a fire, and the last pages are missing."
She taps the oak leaf once.
"But the middle is different, Lissy. Longer. It doesn't read like a warning against wanting more. There's a term we use for texts like that. A warning that ate its own story."
"I don't know what that means."
"It means someone changed what the story was for."
She sits back. "Does your family have an old copy?"
There it is.
"My grandmother has one," I say. "It sits on her mantel, and it doesn't leave her mantel. I'm sorry. It's hers. It isn't mine to lend out."
Brynna studies me. I expect her to push, but she doesn't.
Somehow, that makes me feel worse.
"Then I'll say only one more thing." She gathers her books and winds her scarf around her neck. "The archive catalog lists where each copy was collected, generations ago."
She pauses at the door.
"Both came from Starling Vale."
The bell jingles, and she's gone.
Fuck. Did I just offend a client?
I stand alone with my sketchbook open on the cutting table. A wedding dress full of poetry. An oak leaf and needle at the shoulder. A symbol I have drawn thousands of times without knowing it belonged to anything beyond my family.
I close the book and put the kettle back on.
What else am I supposed to do?
"You've got a face on," Lyra says before the tavern door has even shut behind me.
"I do not have a face on. That's Grammy's line. You're not allowed to steal it."
"She lends it out." Lyra hooks a chair from my usual table with her boot and signals toward the taps. "Sit. Bella!" she shouts as the door opens. "Come here. Lissy's got a face on!"
"Oh dear." Arabella has a plate of cookies with her. She sets it on the table, sits beside Lyra, and joins her in staring at me with friendly ruthlessness.
"It's nothing," I say. "It was a good day, actually. The best consultation of my life. Brynna Oakenshade wants poetry hidden in her wedding dress. I get to sew a library."
"And?" Lyra asks.
"And what?"
"You look like you saw a ghost. What walked through your shop besides poetry?"
I take a cookie and bite into it. Honey and walnuts.
Divine.
Bless Arabella.
"Do either of you know the fable of the Oak and the Needle? Did your families tell it when you were children?"
"The sad one about the seamstress?" Lyra snorts into her stein. "My gran told it. Know your place. Love your lot. Don't go wanting what isn't yours."
She drinks.
"Then I married Aragos."
"My mother wouldn't tell it," Arabella says, licking honey from her thumb. "My gran tried once, and Mother told her to stop. Said it wasn't a story for children. They had a proper shouting match over it. Why?"
Both copies came from Starling Vale.
"A client mentioned it," I say. "That's all."
They let me keep the lie.
Lyra refills my cup and steers us toward gossip. The new dock inspector. Mr. Dapplebeam's ongoing feud with a pigeon. Whether Noemi will ever admit she's sweet on the bookbinder.
I laugh where I'm supposed to.
I don't mention the orc lord who wouldn't come through my door. I don't mention that his sister recognized a mark I've drawn my whole life.
On the walk home, I stop outside my shop window.
A display dress stands on the form inside. It was a spring commission, but now I use it to show my work. At the shoulder seam, the embroidery begins with an oak leaf, a needle, and thread winding them together.
It's on half the dresses in my shop.
I learned to draw at Grammy's hearth, under a mantel with one book on it. I've been marking my work with that story since before I could read.
Wanting is the needle, and the world is the oak. The needle that sews against the grain will break.
Every Sunfell woman who believed otherwise is pressed inside that book like a flower.
But why do people press flowers?
To keep them.
I let myself into the shop and put the kettle on.
I don't look at the dress again.
Not tonight.