"You've ruined me for pinning hems in this room." Gods, my voice is hoarse.
"Good," he says, with a secretive smile.
I straighten my skirt. He tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear, and his hand stays at my jaw a moment, and we stand there in my cramped storage room like two people for whom the entire world is different.
"There's a wedding in the forest in five weeks," he says softly, as he searches my face. "Come with me. Not as the dressmaker. Not as the chaperone's errand." His jaw works. "With me. Where everyone can see."
A laugh bubbles out of me. "You're asking me now?"
"You were preoccupied before."
"Yes." I press my palm flat against his chest, over his heart, the way I did in the courtyard. It pounds against my hand. "Yes, I'll come with you.”
Where everyone can see us.
The bell out front jingles.
"LISSY! Your baker friend is a GENIUS and I bought twelve?—"
We break apart. I turn the doorknob and we both burst out into my shop. Saskia stands with her back to us in the doorway with a pastry box balanced on one palm while she’s completely engrossed in a tart. She finally looks at me. She looks at her brother.
Then she looks at my hair and my flushed cheek.
Then, very slowly, she bites into her tart.
"So," she says, chewing. "What'd I miss?"
14
TORGAN
"Hold still."
"I am holding still."
"You're doing forms, Saskia." For once, Lissy sounds irritated, and I like it. "Pick one. Statue or warrior. Not both."
"I'm testing the seams." Saskia growls at her. "What if Mikka comes in low on the third pass and the skirt doesn't open? Do you want me to trip at my own wedding?"
"I want you to stand still long enough for me to put in one pin." Lissy speaks around the pins in her mouth, kneeling at my sister's hem. "Then you can kick whatever you like."
I watch from my corner. I haven't brought the newspaper today. There's no point pretending anymore. Neither Lissy nor I acknowledges what happened in the storage room, but we're not denying it either.
No one has asked us the right question.
Saskia stands on the dais in the mock-up of her wedding dress. Even unfinished, even in plain cotton with chalk lines down the seams, I can see what Lissy is building. My sister lookslike a bride. My sister looks like a weapon. No one has ever managed to make her look like both.
Lissy has.
Kenna, the master weaver I overheard talking about the tariffs at Ysolde's wedding, arrived an hour ago without warning. That wedding already feels like it happened months ago. Saskia suggested her when Lissy asked for silk that could survive a warrior bride. Kenna didn't send an answer by courier. She packed her cart and rode two days to see the human who thinks she can sew armor into a dress.
Now she sits at the side table with Brynna, a pot of tea between them, watching Lissy work with her arms crossed. Kenna doesn't give approval away cheaply. She's been weaving for the clan since before Pa held the Hall, and she made her disapproval of a human sewing for us clear from the moment she arrived.
Mirelle came too, officially to help. She has helped with nothing. She's claimed my old window seat with a pastry and Lissy's sketchbook, and every few minutes she turns it toward the dais with another question. Would pearl thread hold on velvet? Could a train be detachable? Is winter too late for an outdoor wedding?
She isn't planning Saskia's dress. Everyone in the room knows whose dress she's planning, and nobody teases her about it.
"When it's my turn," Mirelle says for the third time this hour, "I want slits in my dress like this."
