25. Lissy
LISSY
Grammy opens her blue door before I even knock. She’s uncanny in that way, and I didn’t realize how much I need that part of her until now.
"You've been crying," is her assessment as I come in.
I sniffle, but fight the urge to let more tears fall. "I've been on a cart for four hours."
"Carts don't do that to eyes." She steps aside to let me in, takes one look at the driver hauling Brynna's ledger chest up the path, and sighs like she’s exhausted already. "And you've brought homework. Get it inside before it rains. The kettle's on."
The kettle is always on.
The cottage smells the way it has my whole life: woodsmoke, beeswax, and tea. The fable book sits on the mantel where it has sat my whole life, and I keep my back to it while we stack Brynna's chest along the wall.
“What are you going to do with that?” Grammy asks.
“That,” I say, digging in my coin purse, “is a group project that requires everyone to be here.”
“Everyone?” Grammy repeats.
I nod, grabbing my notes that I scribbled on the way back from Oakenshade Hall, each one addressed to my friends. I go out to the street and hail down a messenger boy, who takes my four coins and runs off to deliver my messages.
By noon, everyone has arrived.
Arabella comes first with a basket of shortbread.
“To help us think” she explains, before absently biting into one herself.
Lyra brings June's regrets and nine years of accounts for the tavern. They’re both ready for revelations, the tension of the uncertainty about Starling Vale hanging in the balance.
Noemi comes last, her shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders. But one step through the door, and she rigidly halts. Her eyes go straight over my shoulder to the mantel, and I follow her gaze to the book.
"Noemi?" I ask, turning back to her.
She seems to physically shake herself out of her pause.
"It's nothing." She unwinds her shawl slowly, still looking past me. "Your grandmother's cottage is older than I expected. That's all."
It is very clearly not all, but Grammy is pouring tea, and I have already survived one carriage full of women not telling me what they’re thinking in the past two days.
I can wait.
I clear the table and open Brynna’s ledger chest.
She has arranged everything inside like a librarian who believes disorder is a moral failing: dock manifests tied by year, summary sheets numbered in the upper corner, and one page of instructions written so firmly the nib nearly tore through the paper.
“’Sixty years of Merreach dock manifests,’” I read aloud. “’Ignore the first fifty-seven.’”
Arabella blinks. “She wrote that?”
“She underlined it twice.” I show her, and she chuckles shaking her head. “I guess three underlines was too much.”
For the next two hours, Grammy’s kitchen becomes a war council with shortbread on the side.
Individually, if you hadn’t been looking for it, you wouldn’t see the discrepancies right away.
The picture only becomes clear once you look at what Arabella, Noemi, and June have on their account.
Brynna’s summaries show the squeeze from the water side where orc cloth would be bought at half price under the Voss stamp, then sold at full price in Valeforth.
The difference disappears into fees that appear in no treaty and lead nowhere.
Arabella’s mill receipts show the same fingerprints on flour.
June’s accounts show her ale suppliers raising prices the same week the dock stamps began.
Lyra spreads the street’s lease letters down the table in date order.
I work through Brynna’s manifests beside them.
Letter, manifest, letter, manifest.
The pattern comes together beneath my hands.
“Wait.”
I pull Arabella’s notice closer and set it beside one of the shipping records.
The address is the same.
“The agent’s office that sent the letters,” I say. “Tanner’s Row.”
Lyra leans over my shoulder.
Arabella stops breaking apart her shortbread.
“The office is inside the Voss warehouse,” I say.
For a moment, nobody speaks.
“It was never two schemes,” Lyra says, the truth dawning on her. “They choke the supplies through the docks, frighten the shopkeepers, then buy the properties cheaply through an office that is really their own warehouse.”
“All through the same company,” Arabella says.
“From beginning to end,” I say
She looks down at the crumbs in front of her, both from shortbread and the crumbs of the truth that we’re looking through. “Can we prove who’s behind it?”
“Not yet.” I turn over Brynna’s final summary sheet. “She says the pattern is clear, but patterns don’t put anyone in shackles. There should be a private ledger somewhere connecting the warehouse directly to the family. Purchase records. Payments. The real accounting.”
“Men like this write everything down,” Lyra says. “It’s how they know they’re winning.”
We work until the windows turn dark from the sun setting outside.
By the end, the whole scheme lies mapped across Grammy’s table in tea-stained columns. Every shop, letter, supplier, and date flows back through one warehouse on Tanner’s Row.
I pack Brynna’s manifests back into their careful bundles while the others pull on their coats. They argue about who will tell June, which landlords should see the map, and whether Petra at the flower stall can be trusted not to panic.
"She'll panic," Arabella says.
"She'll panic usefully," Lyra replies.
It's Arabella who stops at the door, her shortbread basket empty. “For the first time since that letter came,” she says, looking around the room, "I'm angry. It's much better."
I stand in Grammy's blue doorway and watch Lyra and Arabella leave together, arm in arm, chattier and more hopeful than when we began nine hours earlier. When I turn around, Noemi hasn't moved from the table.
She's looking at the mantel again, that peculiar frown back on her face. "The book," she says. "May I see it?"
Grammy has been washing cups with her back to us, but at Noemi’s request, her hands stop in the basin. For a moment, the only sound in the cottage is water dripping from one cup.
Then she dries her hands on her apron, slowly, and turns around.
"You can feel it, can’t you?" Grammy asks.
Noemi nods. "I've felt it since I came through the door." Her voice is careful, the voice she uses with frightened customers and bottles that could turn dangerous in the wrong hands. "It's been looking at me all day."
My skin prickles at her words, but Noemi keeps her eyes on the mantel, looking like she’s seen a ghost.
"Mistress Sunfell –” she starts, but Grammy shakes her head.
“Please,” she says tiredly. “It’s Grammy. I haven’t wanted to be a Sunfell in years.”
Noemi takes my grandmother’s request in stride.
“That book is magicked. There’s old craft wound tightly through the binding.
I can feel it from here. I've spent nine hours telling myself it's a hedge-charm or a preservation working, but it’s neither of those, and I'd like to examine it properly.
" She glances at Grammy. "With your leave," she adds quietly.
I stand very still beside the door.
"Noemi, it's a book of fables. Grammy, tell her."
Grammy doesn't tell her. Instead, she walks to the mantel, pauses for a long moment, then takes down the book, and places it on the now-cleared table beneath the lamp. Then she steps back with her arms folded.
"My grandmother told me never to let a witch near it," she says. "Said she'd tell us something we didn't want to know."
Noemi's mouth tightens, but she doesn't look away from the book.
Grammy looks at me.
"I'm seventy-eight. I’ve spent years seeing my granddaughter tell herself that she doesn’t deserve love, and now I’m seeing it unfold before my eyes.” She sighs. “I'm done protecting myself from answers." She looks at Noemi. "Tell me what it is."
Noemi sits.
She doesn't open the book at first. She holds her palms over the cover the way she held one hand before Mirelle's face. She whispers a single word. The lamplight moves, but not as a flicker. It leans, like grass when wind passes over a hill.
Noemi lets out a slow breath.
"Open it to the story," she says. "The one that matters."
There’s no way that she knows that there is a particular story. I’ve never mentioned it to her. But she’s never been here to Grammy’s house before, either. So I open it for her, my hands knowing the page better than anyone's.
There.
The Oak and the Needle.
The woodcut of the seamstress with her bowed head beneath the tree. Words I could recite before I could read them.
Noemi reads the story once in silence. Then again, her fingers hovering above the lines. Her face changes as she goes. The hard concentration I know from watching her work gives way to recognition, and beneath it, dread.
"Lissy." She says my name without looking up. "This isn't a fable about a curse."
My stomach drops as I swallow the lump back in my throat.
"It is the curse," Noemi says, her voice soft, reverent.
The kettle begins to whistle behind us. Nobody moves toward it.
"The working is in the binding and the ink. It's wound through the words themselves. The story is the body of the spell." Noemi's fingers pull back from the page. "Every time it's read, every time it's told, every time a Sunfell girl learns it by heart, it renews."
She finally looks at me.
"You've been reading it because you believe it’s the story of your family. It’s a tradition, one that you find yourselves compelled to share and blame for your misfortunes. But by reading it, you’ve been feeding it for generations, giving power to it."
The kitchen goes silent.
Even the kettle seems to change its mind.
"Break it," Grammy says, her voice grim, determined. "You're licensed. You broke a tangle-charm on the Hendrick boy. Break this."
Noemi looks stricken. "I can't."
"Girl—"
"I can't." Noemi's eyes shine. Her voice gets quieter, which means every word lands harder. "This craft predates my license. It may predate my Codex. Emotional workings can't be layered.”