28. Lissy
LISSY
Mirelle comes back on a Tuesday, and I find out about it four hours late, which is how I find out about everything now.
Saskia's letter arrives by fast rider before noon. Four words, pressed hard enough to come through the back of the paper.
SHE'S BACK. IT'S BAD.
Noemi warned us what the end of the draught would look like. Everything it held back would arrive at once, all of it in one afternoon. A month of grief with nowhere else to go.
Knowing that in advance doesn't help. Why did I think it would?
Ysolde has written to me every few days all month, which is the only reason I know anything at all. Caden has been living at the Hall since the night Torgan brought him in off the road. He keeps to the east wing and takes his meals early so Mirelle won't have to sit across a table from him.
Every morning, he leaves something outside her door. A bird. A box. Once, something long and narrow that turned out to be a wooden spoon with a crooked handle. They are all terrible, and he leaves every one of them anyway.
And Mirelle, feeling nothing, thanks the maid and sets each one on her windowsill without looking at it.
I'm four hours away from all of it. I sew, and I wait for the rider, and I try not to wonder whether I'm still allowed to be part of that house.
Ysolde writes again two days after Saskia's four words and tells me the rest of it.
The door opened at breakfast with no warning at all.
Mirelle looked down at her bare hand where the ring used to be and made a sound Ysolde refuses to put on paper.
She cried for a day and a half while her sisters took turns holding her.
Then she found the draft of the letter she'd sent Caden, still on the hall table where Ysolde left it, three sentences crossed out and rewritten in her own hand.
She read the whole page and had to be put to bed.
On the second evening she asked whether the man in the courtyard was still there.
He was. Of course he was. Caden had been down there since dawn with a chair he carried out himself, because he told Torgan he would wait at the gate for a month, and being given a room instead didn't change the waiting part.
Mirelle wouldn't see him. Not yet.
But she stood at her window for an hour and watched him sit in the cold, and then she sent a maid down with a blanket. Caden wrapped himself in it and stayed until dark.
She has all the birds on her windowsill, Ysolde writes. This morning she put them in a straight line. Ma says that's how healing starts. You put the small things in order first.
A week later, my shop bell rings and Mirelle is standing in the doorway with four hours of road behind her.
She looks terrible.
Thank the gods.
Her cheeks are hollow, and her eyes are swollen and one hand grips the doorframe like she doesn't quite trust the floor.
But all of it is hers. The grief is hers.
So is the stubborn lift of her chin. Even the way she's trying to make me comfortable while she looks half-dead is so painfully, wonderfully Mirelle that I fight the urge to burst into tears.
Helpful.
"I'm told I canceled a dress," she says.
"Mirelle—"
"I'm told I stood in this shop and counted out coins." Her voice breaks. She shuts her eyes, waits, tries again. "I called it good fabric."
I move toward her and then stop. Does she want to be held? Does she want three feet of air and nobody touching her? How am I supposed to know after a month of watching her wear politeness like a coat?
She answers by crossing the distance herself.
I put my arms around her. She shakes once against me and then steps back before either of us can start crying properly.
"I remember all of it," she says. "That's the worst part. I was there. I watched myself do it and I couldn't make myself care."
Her fingers press together, hard.
"Ysolde says you kept working on the dress."
"I did."
"Even after I canceled it."
"You were under a spell. I'm not accepting business decisions made under magical duress."
A small sound escapes her. Not quite a laugh, but close enough that my chest aches.
I step aside so she can see it.
The masterpiece stands beneath the front windows. Ysolde's leather edges the bodice. Brynna's twilight thread runs down the seams. Saskia's silver lies across the shoulders in bright lines that look ready for a battle and hold nothing but light.
At the hem, where only another dressmaker would think to look, there's one line of pink thread.
I sewed it the night the crown sealed Tanner's Row. It felt stupid at the time. I did it anyway.
Mirelle crosses the shop slowly and touches the sleeve with two fingers.
"He's still down in the courtyard," she says.
"Every day?"
"Every day. He never comes up. He leaves something terrible outside my door in the morning, and then he sits in that chair until dark, and then he does it again." Her mouth trembles. "Brynna says he helped destroy his own family for me."
"He told the truth about them. That's a different thing."
"His father won't say his name."
"His father is an asshole."
That gets a real laugh out of her. Small and wet, but real.
She looks at the dress again.
"I loved him before any of this," she says softly. "Now I know what he did when loving me cost him everything, so there's more of him to love than there was, and I have no idea how to walk down to that gate and start over again. The last thing he has from me is three sentences and a returned ring."
"He kept the letter."
Her face tightens.
"He keeps it inside his coat, over his heart. He told Torgan he'd carry it until you gave him a better one."
Mirelle's face crumples completely. Then she wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand, because she is still Lady Ishara's daughter, and her chin comes up.
"Is my dress still ready?"
"It's been ready for weeks."
"Good." She takes a breath. "Don't change anything."
"I won't."
"I'm going home."
"Tonight?"
"As soon as the cart's ready." She turns for the door, then looks back at the dress. "I'm not ready to put it on yet."
"You don't have to be."
"But there will still be a wedding."
It isn't a question, so I don't treat it like one. "Then we'll schedule another fitting when you're ready."
"It may run long."
"They always do."
She nods once and walks out to the cart that will carry her back to the man in the courtyard.
Twenty minutes after Mirelle leaves, the bell rings again.
Ysolde, Brynna, and Saskia come in together. Of course they do. Oakenshade sisters travel in packs, even when they're apologizing.
Saskia is carrying a box from Arabella's. Brynna has her notebook under one arm. Ysolde has nothing at all, which means she intends to do the talking. "We owe you an apology," she says.
Saskia winces. "Straight to it, then."
Ysolde ignores her. "We were frightened and angry. Mirelle was standing in front of us, and she was gone, and you were the nearest person who knew anything, so we put all of it on you."
"I should have asked Torgan."
"Yes," Brynna says.
Ysolde looks at her.
"What?" Brynna says. "She should have."
"I know," I say. "I should have."
Brynna's grip tightens on the notebook. "But you did not owe us a private transaction you overheard before you knew any of us. Noemi explained that."
"Repeatedly," Saskia mutters.
"I called you dishonest," Brynna goes on. "That was inaccurate."
I wait.
Her nostrils flare. "And cruel."
I wait some more.
"I'm sorry, Lissy."
She looks like the words cost her a tooth, and that makes them mean more.
Ysolde steps forward. "I was cold to you because it was easier than admitting I didn't know how to help my sister. You came with us anyway. You helped us find who did it. I'm sorry too."
Saskia sets the pastry box down on my counter hard enough to make the tarts jump.
"I told you that you were one of us," she says. "Then the first time it hurt, I treated you like you weren't. I'm sorry. And you're still one of us. That part wasn't mine to take back."
My throat closes, and then she hugs me, and my ribs file an objection.
"Ribs," I wheeze.
"Still negotiable."
I laugh into her shoulder, and the laugh turns into a sob halfway out. Ysolde touches my back. Brynna stands close enough that her sleeve presses against mine.
Nothing is fixed. Mirelle still has a month of stolen grief behind her, and Torgan and I still have more truth between us than either of us knows what to do with.
But the shop feels full again.
Torgan comes on Sunday at closing.
I hear the bell, and I know it's him before I turn around. The shop goes smaller when he walks into it. Or maybe he makes every room he enters smaller. He's the size of a wardrobe and twice as difficult to move.
I take the pins out of my mouth.
He stands in the doorway in his plain brown coat. No formal blacks. No papers. No leather folder tucked under one arm.
His hands are empty.
Torgan Oakenshade arrives at every negotiation carrying evidence. Today he's brought only himself.
"The Voss matter is finished," he says.
"All of it?"
"All the parts anyone can finish. Princeton is bound over for trial. The Duke bought his way clear of shackles, but the crown has his books, and he'll be paying restitution for years."
"And Caden?"
"Princeton has been stripped from the succession. The lawyers say Caden is the heir now."
I blink. "Does he know?"
"He threatened to hide in Kenna's cottage until they changed their minds."
"Reasonable."
"He wants Mirelle and a room where nobody stops him ruining wood. Apparently Valeforth comes with both whether he likes it or not."
"I don't think he's very good at wood."
"He's getting better."
We look at each other.
Where are we supposed to start? The vial? The lie? The curse sealed up in Noemi's back room? I have no idea, and I've had a month to think about it.
Torgan does what he always does when a problem is too large. He walks straight at it.
"You told me to come when the Vosses were finished," he says. "I've had three days of Harek asking whether they're finished enough."
"That sounds like him."
"He offered to saddle my horse himself this morning."
"Very subtle."
"Lissy."
He crosses the shop and stops an arm's length away. I have to tip my head back to meet his eyes, and he makes no attempt at all to close the space between us. For once he's leaving that to me.
"Your letter," he says. "I've read it every day."
My throat tightens.
"The curse is real. You don't care." His voice comes out rough. "Tell me here."
So I do.
"The curse is real."
His eyes don't move off mine.
"Noemi found the working inside the book. She could feel it from across Grammy's kitchen. She says counter-craft can't break it, because it feeds on belief, and the Sunfell women have been feeding it for generations."
I swallow.
“Am I afraid of it? Yes,” I admit softly. “I’m not stupid.”
"Lissy—"
"No. Let me finish."
He closes his mouth.
"I spent thirty-two years listening to that story. Do you know how many things I didn't let myself want because of it? How many times I stood at the edge of somebody else's wedding and told myself that was the safer place to stand?"
My hands are shaking hard enough to make the paper on the counter crackle. I stop trying to hide it and let them.
"The curse is real, Torgan. It doesn't get to make another decision for me."
His breath leaves him.
"I love you." There. Plain enough. "I don't think I love you. I don't almost love you. I love you, and I'm still angry with you, and both of those are true at the same time."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
The answer comes immediately, with no defense and nothing clever attached to it.
Good.
"I choose you," I say. "Not because I think the book can't hurt us. Not because Noemi found a way around it. I choose you because I'm done setting down everything I want before somebody can take it away from me."
My voice cracks. I don't care.
"And if the curse wants my love, it can starve."
Torgan is quiet for a moment. Then he says, "Every male in the story was human."
I stare at him. "What?"
"You told me the story. Human lords, every time." He gestures at himself. "I have an objection."
A laugh bursts out of me before I can stop it, half laugh, half sob. "That's your argument?"
"It's a good argument."
"It's a terrible argument."
"The pattern matters. If anything, your case against the Voss shows that patterns matter a great deal."
I cross my arms and give him a sardonic look. "It's still a terrible argument."
"It made you laugh."
I step closer. He doesn't move until I do.
"We are not planning our lives around a loophole in a dead woman's spell," I tell him.
"No."
"And we are not avoiding a wedding because we're frightened."
"No."
"Good."
He looks down at me. "I don't want a wedding," he says.
I blink. "You don't?"
"I've attended three this year. Mirelle's will make four. I've had enough."
"That's fair."
"I don't need a ceremony to choose you."
My heart thumps against my ribs, hard enough to hurt.
"I want the shop," he says, quieter. "The Hall. My newspaper in your corner chair. Ordinary mornings. Arguments about curtains."
"You lost the curtain argument."
"I remember."
"Good."
"I'll come to your door every day, if you'll have me. Not because a curse expects anything of me. Not because our families do. Because I want to."
He lifts one hand and stops just short of touching me. I put my face into his palm, and his fingers close gently around my cheek.
"That's my whole offer," he says. "Me. Delivered daily."
"I accept the terms."
Over his shoulder, through the front window, Grammy is standing at the end of the lane with her silver thimble at her throat.
Torgan's grandfather is beside her, holding her shawl folded over one arm, four hours from his own hall for no reason he'd ever admit to out loud.
They appear to be discussing the weather, and they are doing it very badly.
I stop looking at them and kiss him.