“I was wrong to keep it from you. I thought I was sparing you a worry that would come to nothing.”
“Torgan.” She doesn’t raise her voice. She comes around the table and stands in front of me. She is more than a head shorter than I am, and I have faced enemies with less will behind them. “I spent weeks with those supplier letters in a drawer, telling no one, because I thought carrying it alone was protecting people. Then two days ago, I found out all my friends were doing the same thing. Each of us alone, and all of it one thing the whole time. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“That the silence protected no one.”
She nods. “Not only that. The silence did his work for him.” She takes a breath. “I’m not angry about the dinner. You couldn’t have known what it would grow into. But from here on, no sparing me. Whatever you know, whatever you find, I get it. All of it. Even the parts you think will worry me. Especially those. Promise me.”
The vial sits in my chest pocket, where it has been every day since the witch’s counter, four steps from where we’re standing. Lissy was there. She has never brought it up.
She can keep a secret. She can keep something between us.
And here is where I could tell her.
There’s an anti-love potion in my pocket that I bought the day we met. There’s a proposal the Duke made me in his own gallery, and it sounded like my own thoughts spoken aloud. That is how I know exactly what kind of man he is.
But I can’t tell her what happened in the gallery without telling her what the Duke offered. That he wants Mirelle to fall out of love. And I can’t say those words without saying what’s in my pocket, because Lissy knows my family now. To tell her would be to admit that I bought the potion for Mirelle.
Mirelle is happy. The courtship stands. The vial has never been opened. Confessing it buys nothing except Lissy looking at me the way she looked at that rent collector.
That is the reasoning I complete in the space of one breath. I’ve gotten very good at it.
“I promise,” I say. “Everything I find.”
She searches my face. She must find whatever she’s looking for, because she nods once and steps back, brisk again. A woman with a street to save.
“Good. Then here’s everything of mine.” She squares the letters and the card into a stack and puts them in my hand. “Copies for whoever needs them. What do we do with it?”
“Brynna is pulling the Merreach manifests for me. Shipping records, sale prices, the difference between them. If the skim is real, it’s written down somewhere. Men like Voss can’t help keeping books. It’s how they know they’re winning. Give her a fortnight and we’ll have numbers instead of letters.” I look at the stack in my hand. “The property side is harder. Everything Princeton is doing is legal. But legal schemes stop working in daylight, so the first thing is your street knowing what it’s dealing with. No more of anyone being frightened alone.”
“That part’s done. Friday night, June’s Tavern. You should have seen us.” She smiles for the first time all morning. “Four shopkeepers and a toast. The Duke should be terrified.”
“He should,” I say, and I mean it.
She laughs because she thinks I’m being kind.
Then she takes my hand over the stack of letters and squeezes it. She turns the shop sign to open, because Saskia’s fitting is in an hour and the world doesn’t stop for dukes, even when they’re trying to make it bend to their will.
17
LISSY
"If you cry on the silk, I'm charging you for it."
"I'm not crying," Grammy says. She dabs her eyes with her handkerchief. "It's the lantern smoke."
"The lanterns aren't lit yet."
"Then it's the anticipation of smoke. Hold still, girl. Your collar's crooked."
We stand at the edge of a forest clearing an hour before sunset, and Grammy reaches up and fixes my collar the way she has fixed it for thirty years. I let her, because tonight I need my hands steady, and my grandmother's fussing steadies them.
It took me two weeks to talk her into coming. I don't travel, she said. I have the shop, she said, though she hasn't kept the shop in a decade. What she meant was, I haven't been to a wedding since your parents got married, and we both knew it.
Then Saskia solved it the way Saskia solves everything. She showed up at Grammy's blue door on Thistle Lane with an armful of forest lilies and told her that the woman who taught Lissy Sunfell to sew was on the family list, and family attends a wedding.
"She's a battering ram, that one," Grammy said afterward, pleased.
Now she stands beside me in her good gray dress, her silver thimble hanging from its chain, watching dryads hang the last of the lanterns. Her hand keeps drifting up to touch the thimble, like she's grounding herself in what she's seeing.
