25. Lissy #2
The exact same thing she said about Mirelle and why she can’t remove the effects of the potion from Mirelle.
Noemi puts one finger beside the book. "This is something else. Generations deep. Fed by belief. Wound through a family line. If I set a counter-working against it, it would lash out against every Sunfell woman alive."
Her gaze comes to me.
"It would fight through you, Lissy. And it would win."
My hands have gone cold.
"Whoever made this used the strongest binding there is, and it isn't hate.
" Noemi swallows. "I know this craft. I've—" She stops, catches herself.
Whatever lives behind that sentence, she folds it away.
For one moment, my friend of twenty years looks like a house with one room locked from the inside.
"It's grief-craft," she says finally. "Someone made this out of a broken heart. "
Grammy sits down.
"Not only to punish your family," Noemi continues. "Grief-craft binds the caster too. You seal your own wound into the binding so it never closes, and then it won't let anyone else's wounds close either."
She looks at the bowed seamstress on the page.
"Somewhere back in your line, somebody loved a Sunfell woman and lost her. Or was left by one. Or watched her choose someone else. I can't read which. But whoever wrote this story put themselves inside it."
Her fingers curl against the table.
"This is what happens when love doesn't finish cleanly. It doesn't disappear. It rots where it was buried and poisons whatever grows above it."
My legs decide I'm sitting before the rest of me agrees. All my life, I've argued with the fable staring down at me from the mantel. Superstition. A dead woman's warning. A story with only the power I gave it.
And it was real.
Real enough for Noemi to feel from across the room.
Every night Grammy read it to me. I worked the oak leaf and needle into many of my creations. Every wedding where I stood at the edge and told myself, Not for you, Lisette.
I fed it.
We all did.
Generations of Sunfell women reciting our own chains like a bedtime prayer.
My throat closes. “Is there a way to… stop feeding it?” I have no other words for it.
"I don't know," Noemi says gently.
I look at her.
"That's the honest answer. Grief-craft is strongest at making its own curse: fear, retreat, and the choice not to try." She taps the edge of the page, careful not to touch the ink.
Grammy has stood through all of this with her arms folded and her face closed like a shop after dark. Now she pulls out the chair across from me and sits heavily. She reaches across the table and takes both my hands.
"His name was Aldric," she says.
I startle. I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to hear this. "Grammy—"
"You'll sit and hear it, because I should have told you long ago."
Her thumbs press over my knuckles.
"He was a journeyman glazier. He set the chapel windows the spring I turned twenty-four. He asked me to walk out with him every Sunday, and I wanted to say yes so badly I practiced it into my pillow."
Her eyes stay dry.
Her voice doesn't.
"And every Sunday, I told him no. My mother read me that book, same as hers read it to her. I did what frightened girls do. Better a whole heart alone than a broken one caught wanting."
She looks down at our hands.
"He set his last window in June and moved on with the guild. I married your grandfather two years later."
Something must cross my face, because she pinches my knuckle, a wry smile on her face.
“Don’t you make that face. I loved your grandfather. We had six good years, and I’d take every one again. Those years gave me your mother, and she gave me you.”
Grammy's grip tightens.
"But I never stopped wondering. When I lost your grandfather, I went mad with grief.
I fled because it felt as though the curse would never leave me.
I lost my world. That's what the book took from me.
Not Aldric. The knowing. It left me the wondering, and wondering doesn't die. It only gets quieter."
She looks at the book lying open beneath the lamp.
"I taught you the warning." Her mouth shakes once. "I thought I was keeping you safe. I was only keeping you fed to it."
Noemi has gone still and small in her chair, one hand pressed flat against her chest.
She's somewhere else.
Some locked room of her own.
"I told him it was the curse," I say.
Grammy frowns. "Told who?"
"Torgan." His name hurts to say. "Last night, on his own steps. He kept one terrible thing from me for months. I kept back the question I was afraid to ask. When it all came apart, I stood there and told him maybe the curse was real. Maybe this was what it looked like when it came."
My eyes burn.
"And I left him standing there."
The tears come.
I cover my face and stop trying to hold them back.
"And the worst part is, I wasn't lying. It wasn't an excuse. Some part of me was relieved."
Grammy's face crumples.
"The story walked up and offered to carry all of it for me: his lie, my cowardice, Mirelle, everything. And I handed it over."
I can barely get the next words out.
"Because if it's the curse, then it isn't us. Nothing was ever mine to fix."
"Oh, my girl."
Grammy comes around the table and gathers me against her.
I cry into her shoulder like I'm eight years old. She smells like woodsmoke and beeswax, and her hand moves in slow circles over my back.
"That's what it's for," she says into my hair. "That's the working. It doesn't break hearts. It collects them."
She pulls away enough to take my face in both hands.
"It waits until you're most afraid and offers to hold your love somewhere safe. Then it never gives anything back." Her rough thumbs wipe my cheeks. "Look at me. I’m seventy-eight years old and I had one good night at an orc wedding, and do you know what I learned?"
"What?" I say through my tears.
"The book was on that mantel the whole time, and it couldn't reach me in that forest because I wasn't reading it." A smile pulls at her mouth. "I was dancing."
I laugh, remembering Grammy the morning after her night with Torgan’s grandfather, and I sob at the same time, which is an ugly thing, but Grammy has seen me with chickenpox. We are past dignity at this point.
"It's a story, Lissy," she says. "A real one. Older than all of us and hungrier. But it's still a story, and stories only rule the people who keep reading them."
"Noemi said it can't be broken."
"I said I can't break it," Noemi says quietly. She has come back from wherever she went. Her eyes are red-rimmed but steady. “Counter-craft can’t. That’s not the same thing.”
“Then can we burn the book?” I ask hopefully.
“No.” Noemi’s answer comes immediately. “The book is the anchor, but the working already lives in every Sunfell woman who knows the story. Burning the binding could drive it deeper into the family line.”
My stomach twists. “So what do we do with it?”
“Close it. Seal it. Stop reading it, telling it, and teaching it to another girl.” She looks down at the illustrations on the page. “We starve it.”
She looks at the book, then at me.
“It eats belief. Generations of it.” Her mouth tilts, not quite a smile. “But I’ve never met a spell that could force a woman to keep believing something after she’d truly decided to stop.”
The three of us look at the open book. In the illustration, the seamstress bows her head the way she has my entire life.
For the first time in thirty-two years, I don’t see a warning.
I see a woman who turned her own wound into a story and handed it down to us.
No.
This is what happened to her.
It doesn’t have to happen to me.
Somewhere, Caden is fighting magic to get back to his true love. And somewhere else, on the steps where I left him, is a male I told I didn't know if I could love.
There is a difference, and I am suddenly furious at myself for pretending there isn't.
"Grammy," I say. "I need paper. And the good pen."
She's already moving toward the dresser.
"Kettle first. Nobody writes to a man on an empty pot." Grammy sets the kettle on the stove with sudden authority.
Outside, the rain finally comes, soft against the thatch.
Noemi closes the book and binds it with cord from her satchel. She’ll take it to the spell shop and hide it somewhere I won’t be able to find before morning.
I sit between Noemi and Grammy while the kettle begins to steam.
Then I begin my letter in the only place I can.
Torgan—
The curse is real. Noemi found the working inside the book tonight.
I don't care.
When the Vosses are finished. We have our own story to write. Together.
And as for the Vosses, it’s all one scheme. We have enough to put them behind bars.
—L
I don’t know when or how I’m going to give it to him. Maybe I’ll see him next and the letter is obsolete. But writing it down makes me believe it. If my life is fueled by belief and written words on the page, then I had to write that myself.
I finish by adding in the summary of our findings that we came up with together tonight.
It will be another four-hour ride to Oakenshade Hall tomorrow.
I fold the letter and set it on top of Brynna’s summary.
At dawn, I take both to Oakenshade Hall.