17. Lissy
LISSY
"If you cry on the silk, I'm charging you for it."
"I'm not crying," Grammy says. She dabs her eyes with her handkerchief. "It's the lantern smoke."
"The lanterns aren't lit yet."
"Then it's the anticipation of smoke. Hold still, girl. Your collar's crooked."
We stand at the edge of a forest clearing an hour before sunset, and Grammy reaches up and fixes my collar the way she has fixed it for thirty years. I let her, because tonight I need my hands steady, and my grandmother's fussing steadies them.
It took me two weeks to talk her into coming. I don't travel, she said. I have the shop, she said, though she hasn't kept the shop in a decade. What she meant was, I haven't been to a wedding since your parents got married, and we both knew it.
Then Saskia solved it the way Saskia solves everything. She showed up at Grammy's blue door on Thistle Lane with an armful of forest lilies and told her that the woman who taught Lissy Sunfell to sew was on the family list, and family attends a wedding.
"She's a battering ram, that one," Grammy said afterward, pleased.
Now she stands beside me in her good gray dress, her silver thimble hanging from its chain, watching dryads hang the last of the lanterns. Her hand keeps drifting up to touch the thimble, like she's grounding herself in what she's seeing.
The dryads have been building the wedding venue for three days.
Dozens of lanterns hang in the birch trees, unlit and waiting.
The clearing is carpeted with swept moss and ringed by trees.
There is no dais and no aisle. Just a wide circle of bare ground in the center, raked flat and smooth as a fencing floor.
It's exactly what I imagined for Saskia's wedding.
"Explain this blade nonsense to me again," Grammy says.
"It's not nonsense, Grammy," I chide, and she rolls her eyes. "They fight their vows. Full speed, real blades. The vow is that they never touch each other."
"Hmph." She watches two dryads light one of the lanterns. "In my day, you just promised to put up with each other and then did the dishes for fifty years."
"In your day? You're human, Grammy. This is different."
"But still," she insists.
"You'll like it. I promise."
"I'll like seeing your dress move. The rest is an experience." She takes my arm. "Now walk me in before all the good seats go to orcs who will block us."
The clearing fills as the sun sinks, turning everything gold.
Orcs file in on one side, and dryads come in on the other.
Family and friends who aren't on either side settle wherever they please.
Half of them climb onto low branches and dangle their bare feet, so the wedding has an audience above as well as around the happy couple.
Kenna arrives with three granddaughters in a row like ducklings and crushes me in a hug that rearranges my spine.
"My girls," she announces proudly, presenting them. "Tell her."
"We want the dress," all three say in unison.
"After the wedding," Kenna says. "But soon." She waggles a finger at me. "You promised."
"Of course, but—"
"You promised," Kenna repeats, and moves off to claim a row of chairs.
Saskia's father, Lord Garran, finds me next. He doesn't say much. He never says much at his daughters' weddings. But he takes my hand in both of his, which are the size of dinner plates, and holds it for a moment.
"Three daughters," he says. "Three dresses. Each one—" He works his jaw. "My wife will tell you what I mean."
"He means they were perfect," Lady Ishara says, arriving at his elbow, "and that he cried at every wedding so far, and that he's about to walk away before he does it again."
"I'm going to check the mead," Lord Garran says, and walks away.
Ishara watches him go with a bemused smile. Then she turns to me with a long look, the one that goes through me and takes stock of my worth. But it's different tonight. Warmer at the edges, like I've finally reached the point where she trusts me.
"He counted wrong, you know," she says. "He said three daughters. He has four." She touches my arm, brief and light. "The fourth dress will be the important one. I suspect you already know that."
She follows her husband toward the mead before I can answer, which is fortunate, because I don't have one.
Then Torgan's grandfather, a mountain of an orc with scars and white braids who terrified me from across the hall at Ysolde's wedding, walks straight over to us. He plants himself beside Grammy and looks down at her from his full height.
"You're the grandmother."
"You're the grandfather," Grammy says, entirely unimpressed, one hand still on my arm.
"You taught her"—he indicates me—"how to sew like this."
She squares her shoulders proudly. "I did."
"Good." He studies her a moment longer. "You'll sit with me. I have mead older than your granddaughter and nobody worth talking to."
Grammy laughs. Is she... flirting? This night promises to be strange indeed.
"Are you asking or informing?"
"Informing. I'm too old to ask."
"Finally," Grammy says, releasing my arm, "an honest man."
She walks off with him, and that's the last I see of either of them for quite some time.
Torgan finds me just as I'm about to sit down. He's in his formal blacks with the oak worked into the collar. He drapes his coat over the rack beside the feast tables with everyone else's, because the fires are already going and the night air is humid.
"You're staring," he says.
"You're worth staring at. That's not my fault." I take his arm. Openly, in front of everyone, and something in my chest sits easier than it has in weeks. "Come on. Your sister's about to fight her husband-to-be."
The ceremony has no procession. The drums simply start, low and distant from somewhere in the trees. The crowd draws back from the circle, and Saskia and Mikka walk in from opposite sides.
I’ve spent five weeks building that dress, and I still catch my breath.
She's a vision in silver and white beneath the lanterns.
The embroidery catches the light in lines down her shoulders and sides.
Battle lines. The split skirt hangs like a court gown, giving away nothing.
Her hair is braided severely back with white ribbon.
She looks like a bride, and she looks like a weapon at the same time.
She looks exactly like what she asked me for, and my eyes sting.
Mikka has deep green, bark-brown skin and moss-dark hair. He carries a spear in both hands, and he watches Saskia cross the circle like she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
I should be used to that look by now.
I'm not.
An old dryad steps to the circle's edge. She's small and gnarled as a root, and when she speaks, it's in a language that sounds like wind whispering through leaves, long and unhurried. The dryads in the branches answer her in kind.
Then she changes to the common language.
"Two warriors stand before you. They have chosen not to speak their promise, for words are easily given. They will show it instead. Watch closely. The vow is in what doesn't happen."
She raises her hand.
"I could hurt you," Saskia says across the circle, drawing her blade, "and I never will."
"I could hurt you," Mikka says, leveling his spear, "and I never will."
The drums stop.
They fly at each other.
I've watched Saskia kick a mock-up skirt into shape a hundred times in my shop, and none of it prepared me for this. She moves like the dress was always part of her. The skirt opens, flares, and follows half a beat behind like silver wings.
Mikka's spear comes in low and fast and misses, because while he could drive it home at any moment, he doesn't.
That makes it more terrifying, not less.
Their weapons clash and sing. The whole crowd seems to hold its breath as we watch them move.
Mikka tries to drive her back across the circle, but she refuses to give ground. She turns his reach against him, and the third pass ends with her blade parting the air where his braid was a heartbeat before.
Someone's child asks, very clearly, "Are they fighting or dancing?"
Their mother answers, "Yes."
Nobody laughs. Everyone is watching too closely.
Faster. Pass after pass. Her hem flares through a turning kick, the weighted panels swinging exactly as built, exactly as rehearsed on my dais. His spear passes beneath it through the space her leg has already left.
They're grinning at each other now. Both of them, openly, like this is a secret they've kept for two years and finally get to tell in front of everyone they love.
Beside me, Torgan watches with his jaw tight and his eyes bright.
"You never beat her?" I whisper.
He considers the question for a moment before shaking his head. "No."
"Not once? In your whole life?"
"Watch the wedding, Lissy."
"I'm just saying, it explains so much about—"
His hand finds mine and squeezes. I shut up, and we watch his sister fight the man she loves at full speed, promising with every miss.
Their last pass comes high and fast. His spear and her sword cross again and again as they close the distance between them. A hand's width. A finger's width. Then they stop so close they're sharing the same air.
Frozen. Blades crossed between them, chest to chest, breathing hard.
Not one thread of that dress is cut.
The old dryad lowers her hand.
"It is done," she says.
The clearing erupts.
Orcs stamp until the lanterns swing in the branches, while the dryads make a sound like an entire forest whispering in the wind.
Saskia and Mikka drop their weapons in the moss and kiss in the middle of the circle while their families lose their minds. Saskia's dress, the dress I made as armor disguised as decoration, catches the lantern light as he lifts her clean off the ground.
"It is done!" Mikka shouts again.
I am not crying. I tell myself it's the lantern smoke.
Grammy appears at my elbow and hands me her handkerchief without a word.
"All right," she says at last. "That was better than dishes."
The feast runs long and loud, and the dancing starts before the eating stops.
Orcs and dryads can agree on at least that much.