"Do you want to go home first?"
"No."
She takes out the last pin and puts it carefully into a small tin. Then she looks up at me.
"Now?" I ask.
"Now."
28
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 makemecomfortable 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—"
