“I hope you at least asked permission,” Lyriel gasped.
I laughed. “Aeldryc said he wanted to replace those curtains anyway.”
“As we discussed the other day, Pippin has a talent for textile work,” Aeldryc said behind me. His voice was careful, gentle, the way it got when he was doing something thoughtful and didn’t want me to make a big deal of it. “He would make an excellent apprentice, and he needs something to do while I’m on assignment. He will need to have a guard with him at all times, but otherwise, he’d be at your disposal. So, if you are needing—”
“Yes,” Lyriel said, before he finished. “Yes, absolutely yes. Can he start now? Can he start right now?”
I turned to look at Aeldryc. He had planned this in advance? For me?
He was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching the two of us with an expression that I was going to catalogue and treasure: a faint, real smile.
“You’re leaving me here,” I said.
“I must ride for Clovermere within the hour. I have no need for the distraction of you squirming in my lap, claiming an inability to ride a horse, which I still find difficult to believe.”
“It’s possible! Why do you keep acting like it’s strange?”
“I’ve met gargoyles who can’t ride,” Lyriel said. “Perhaps Pip is like them? Except he can’t fly.”
Aeldryc scoffed. “Anyway, you will be comfortable here. Lyriel is—” He paused, selecting words with the care of a diplomat. “—enthusiastic. I will send one of the guards up to make sure you do not escape.”
“Escape? Why would I leave the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen?” I gasped, spinning around.
Aeldryc crossed the room to me, cupped my face and pressed a kiss to my forehead. It was tender and brief, the kind of kiss that promised he’d be back as soon as he could.
“Be good,” he murmured against my hair.
“When have I ever been bad?”
“Do I need to make you a list?” Another kiss, this time on the lips. Then he dropped his lips to my ear. “And you will not have our special kind of fun without me.”
“Even masturbation?” I blinked. “I mean, does that count? I’d be thinking of you the whole time.”
“Pippin,” he huffed. Outside, the ten-o’clock bell tolled and he groaned. “I must be off. You will behave.”
I waved him off, already turning back to Lyriel, who was pulling bolts of fabric off the shelf while we said our goodbyes. I could sense a kindred spirit from a mile away.
“Tell me what you know about sewing,” she said, beaming at me.
“So where I’m from, everything is mechanical. The machines go really fast, but it’s also really rigid. Like, the stitch is the stitch. You can change the length and the tension, but you can’t make it do anything a lockstitch doesn’t do.”
Behind Lyriel, a few workers bustled past, and Lyriel jumped up. “I shall introduce you around!”
Marta, the head cutter, was a sturdy human woman in her forties who gave me a single, efficient nod before returning to her work. Near the hearth, a younger woman with dye-stained hands waved from a steaming copper vat that smelled of blackberries; she introduced herself as Nessa. And in the corner, a troll the size of a refrigerator hand-stitched a cloak lining with impossibly delicate stitches. His name, Lyriel supplied, wasGrukk, a master of men’s tailoring. He had very large hands for a tailor, and a flower tattoo on his arm.
“You have no magic at all?” Lyriel frowned.
“No magic at all. Just hands and tools and ingenuity, I guess.”
“And you learned without a master? Without an apprenticeship?”
“I learned from YouTube. Which is like—well, I have no idea how to explain YouTube. Um, a sort of classroom, but you watch classes that have already happened, recorded at an earlier time.”
Lyriel looked delighted. “That sounds like magic!”
“We call it technology.”
“You love to sew?”
