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.
