29. Lissy
LISSY
Itake Torgan's hand and lead him up the pink staircase. He has to duck at the landing.
He's never been up here. My rooms above the shop are small, with a sloped ceiling and the bed under the window where I've slept by myself since the shop became mine.
He fills the space immediately. Then he hunches his shoulders, trying not to.
I put my palm flat on his chest.
"Don't."
He freezes.
"Don't make yourself smaller in here."
His chest drops under my hand as he lets out a breath he may have been holding since the first day he sat in my corner chair with his knees around his ears.
Then his mouth is on mine.
We undress each other badly. His fingers are too large for my buttons and my hands shake on his belt, and we laugh into each other's mouths, and nothing about it resembles the slow ceremony of the pavilion.
This is better. We've lost a month. Neither of us has any patience left.
When the last of our clothes hits the floor, he lifts me with one arm and puts me on my own bed.
"In my defense," he says, looking down at it, "this bed was built for a very small human."
"It was built for me," I object.
"Exactly."
"Are you insulting me while naked in my room?"
"No."
"Terrible liar."
"I've been told."
I pull him down by the shoulders. "I missed you," I say. "I missed you while I was pinning hems. How pathetic is that? My own hands missed you."
"Mine too."
He touches me slowly, and there's nothing hesitant in it. He knows me now. I know him. When his mouth moves lower, my back lifts off the mattress and I stop trying to say anything clever at all.
Eventually I drag him back up. He settles between my thighs and pauses, because he always asks, and he asks especially now.
"Yes," I whisper. "Come home."
He pushes into me carefully. My body remembers him. The stretch still takes my breath, because some things don't turn ordinary just because they've turned familiar.
When his hips meet mine, we both stop. His forehead presses against mine.
"Lissy." My name comes out rough. "Whatever you want. However long. I'll—"
"You're home. With me."
His eyes close.
"Move."
He moves.
The bed complains immediately. So do I, for entirely different reasons.
A month of missing him refuses to stay slow. I wrap my legs around him and pull him closer and say his name into his shoulder while the light outside the window goes.
When I come, I don't cover my mouth. Why would I? This is my room above my shop, and he's my orc.
He follows with my name against my hair.
Afterward we lie tangled up in a bed that is indeed way too small for an orc. His heart slows under my ear. One hand moves through my ruined hair. Through the floorboards, the shop smells faintly of silk and beeswax.
"Your feet hang off the end," I say.
"Yes."
"By at least a foot."
"I've slept in siege camps."
"We need a bigger bed."
I hear the word after I've said it. So does he. We.
His hand goes still.
I lift my head and look at him. "We need a bigger bed," I say again. "Delivered here. To this address. Where you'll be."
"I still have duties at the Hall."
"I know."
"Some nights I'll have to stay there."
"Then stay there, and come back when you're done."
His hand stills in my hair. “Here?”
"Here."
He looks at me for so long that I start to wonder whether I've broken him. Then he smiles.
I don't count it. I'm going to see too many.
Mirelle marries Caden in the spring, in the meadow behind the Hall.
The day is so bright it looks suspicious.
The whole vale comes, and so do the orcs, the dryads, and one entire minotaur clan. June, Lyra, and Arabella arrive with three baskets of shortbread. Kenna brings her granddaughters in dresses I finished sixty days ago, because apparently I enjoy terror.
Caden waits at the head of the meadow in a plain, well-cut coat. Valeforth's reluctant heir has sawdust on one sleeve, probably from another box nobody asked him to make. On the table beside him stands a row of badly carved birds. Every one of them. Mirelle made him bring them.
Then Mirelle walks into the meadow wearing the masterpiece, and the whole crowd rises.
Ysolde's hand flies to the leather at the bodice. Brynna goes still when she sees her twilight thread. Saskia points at the silver and lets out a roar that startles three dryads out of a tree. Lady Ishara presses one hand to her chest. Lord Garran gives up entirely and cries in front of everyone.
Four daughters. Four dresses.
Mirelle walks with her chin high and tears running down her face, and every step of it is hers.
When she reaches Caden she doesn't wait for the officiant. She takes his face in both hands and whispers something only he gets to hear, and he laughs and starts crying too.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, they manage to get married.
I watch from the second row with Torgan's arm around me and Oakenshades filling every seat nearby. Nobody asks when it'll be our turn. The sisters have been warned, and Saskia has promised to fight anyone who brings it up, and I believe her.
Grammy finds me before the dancing starts.
She looks at my dress for a while without saying anything. There's no veil on it, no train, nothing bridal about it anywhere, and I made every stitch of it myself.
"You made that for you," she says.
"I did."
Her hand comes up and presses flat along my sleeve, the way she checks a seam.
"Good girl."
Then she goes off to find her orc.
At the dancing, Torgan pulls me up without asking. Some questions are settled.
"Four for four," he says.
He's quoting me. I said it to him in a clearing full of fireflies at Saskia's wedding, back when I still thought the worst thing between us was that he'd stopped dancing.
"Every sister," I say.
I look around the meadow. Mirelle is laughing in the masterpiece.
Caden is attempting an orc reel and failing at it with determination.
Grammy is out on the grass with Torgan's grandfather, who does not dance so much as stand still while she moves around him.
Seventy-eight years old, in the good gray dress, dancing.
Noemi is dancing with Arabella, and they both laugh together.
My friends are here. His family is here. My family too, apparently.
"And the dressmaker?" Torgan asks.
"The dressmaker got the better bargain."
"No wedding."
"No wedding."
He turns me under his arm.
"Just the rest of it," I say.
"All of it."
He kisses me in the middle of the reel while everyone stamps around us.
Later, upstairs at the Hall, I kick off my shoes and find one small stitch hidden inside the hem of my dress. Pale pink silk, so small nobody would find it who didn't know to look.
When did she do it? I never even saw her near the box.
Torgan asks what I'm looking at.
"Grammy's luck," I say. "In a dress that isn't bridal at all."
"Does it still work that way?"
"It does now."
Thank you for reading Four Weddings and a Fable.