I want to meet his eyes. I want to see if he’s still there, the orc he let me glimpse that night.
Saskia looks back and forth between us like a woman watching a game.
She's going to say something about it. I can feel it like a storm coming in.
She holds off for now. Thank goodness.
She hauls her chair closer, plants her elbows on my desk, and looks at me with the intensity she probably uses when she’s aiming a bow.
"All right. Here's what I need. Ysolde had armor that looks like a dress. It's beautiful. It made me cry, and don't tell anyone that, because I'll deny it and then bite you." She jabs the desk with one finger. "I need the opposite. I need a dress that works like armor. Because at my wedding, I am not walking down an aisle. Mikka and I are doing the kettarri."
She says it like I should know what that means.
Instead, I look at her blankly, and she lets out an exasperated sigh.
"The kettarri," she repeats. "The blade-dance? The vow-spar?" She twists around. "Torgan, she doesn't know the kettarri."
"Most humans don't know the kettarri," he says behind the newspaper. They are the first words he has said, and Saskia and I both frown at him.
She whips back around to me. "It's only the single greatest thing two people can do at a wedding." Saskia is up out of the chair now, because this apparently cannot be explained sitting down. "It's old. It's older than traditional orc wedding vows. Two warriors who marry don't say their vows — anyone can say things, Lissy, but saying you love someone is nothing. No, instead, these warriors fight their vows.” She assumes a fencing en garde position, an imaginary saber in her hands. “It’s at full speed with real blades, in front of everyone." She moves forward and back, fighting that imaginary enemy. Her moves are practiced, perfect. "Every pass is a promise. He strikes at me, and I strike at him, and it goes faster and faster, and the whole point, the whole point, is that you never once touch each other. Two blades at full speed and not one scratch. That's the vow. Everyone watching can see it. I could hurt you and I never will."
The shop goes quiet. Even the newspaper has stopped rustling.
"That's why the blades at Ysolde's wedding," I say slowly. "Where they didn’t cut their palms as part of their vows."
"That's the small version, for couples who marry with words, not swords." Saskia waves it away. "Mikka and I are doing the real one. He's dryad, and he fights like a wraith, which is infuriating, because I've never beaten him." A grin cracks across her face, sudden and enormous. "I've never beaten him, Lissy. Do you know how long I looked for someone I couldn't beat?"
The newspaper rustles again, and I catch Torgan looking at her over the top of it. He doesn’t argue, which means Mikka must be every bit as good as she says.
I clear my throat. "Is that how you two?—"
"He arrested me!" She says it in a swoony way, like other brides say he proposed in the rose garden. "Two years ago, I was hunting a wounded boar over the border of his woods, which is technically not allowed, and this dryad dropped out of a tree andtells me I'm trespassing. So I told him what he could do with his tree, and he — " she sighs, " — he swept my legs, Lissy. No warning. Perfect form. I was on my back in the mud looking up at this smug green bastard and I thought, well. There he is."
"You thought that while he was arresting you?" I ask.
She nods. "I made him fight me three more times before I'd pay the fine." She drops back into the chair. "Anyway, we spar every week now. Married people need hobbies."
"Fighting is not a hobby," Torgan rumbles from his chair.
"Says the orc without any hobbies," she shoots back. “So.” She plants both hands flat on my desk. "The dress. Here's the problem. Orc wedding clothes are built for the kettarri — they're reinforced, split for kicks, all of it — but they look like what they are. Armor. And human dresses are beautiful, I've seen what you do, but I'd tear your silk to ribbons on the first pass." She looks at me, and underneath all that volume, just for a second, there's something I recognize — the same thing that was underneath Ysolde on the dais. Want for something that right now is just a dream for her. "I don't want to choose, Lissy. I want to be a bride and a blade. "
I'm already sketching.
I don't remember picking up the pencil. The shape comes out of my hand while she talks — a split skirt, but split high and doubled, so it reads as flowing panels at rest and opens clean for a kick. The bodice is ribbed with boning laid in like battle lines instead of fashion lines, with quilted silk over the ribs. The sleeves get pauldrons made out of gilded leather.
"What do you think about embroidery?" I ask, my pencil flying across the page.
She sits back. "It is too delicate..."
I shake my head. “Not if it’s done right. Look...” I spin the book around. "The embroidery is the army. Every line of stitching doubles the fabric it crosses. I lay the silk in the patternof your battle-forms — here, here, across the shoulder, down the leg. The dress doesn't have armor hidden in it. The decoration is the armor. The prettier it looks, the harder it works. Nobody watching knows. Everybody watching thinks the orc bride is wearing embroidered silk, and the orc bride is wearing armor fit for a knight."
Silence.
I look up. Saskia is staring at the sketch with her jaw actually open.
"And here," I hear myself say, turning the page and furiously sketching yet again, because apparently I'm not done, "the skirt panels — if I weight the hems with lead thread, which is a trick to make the fabric drape properly — they'll move with your forms. Every kick and turn, the whole skirt flares and follows, half a second behind you. Like?—"
"Like wings," Saskia finishes for me.
