22

I ARRIVED AT THE SHOP BEFORE PENNY AND ALICE, DETERMINED to lay to rest Pyord’s theories once and for all. He would know if I was lying, I was quite willing to bet, so I had to try as honestly as I could.

I settled myself into my chair behind the screen, where I did all of my charm casting. I picked up a scrap of purple-sprigged cotton and a needle threaded with stark white thread. What kind of curse could I even cast? I racked my thoughts—I could wish that Pyord would break his neck.

The mere thought chilled me. I couldn’t wish that. I mustered my courage and instead thought about simple bad luck. Picking the wrong horse at the track, catching every cold all winter long. Stepping in horseshit on the street and tripping over loose cobblestones. I thought of Pyord suffering each of these mild misfortunes, ignoring an instinctive warning that made my stomach clench, and then reached outside myself as I did when I cast charms.

There was nothing. No light surrounded my needle as it did when I charm casted, but nothing else, either. What I worked into the cloth were plain backstitches.

Maybe, I thought as I tugged on the thread, I needed some sort of crutch. I had sometimes mumbled words to myself as a child, makeshift incantations to keep my focus on the charm and off outside distractions. I had long since outgrown this, but, blushing even though no one could see, I tried it again now. The words were an embarrassed jumble, and I felt even further from crafting a curse than before.

The stitches stayed plain. I sewed a few more absent inches, trying to feel only the linen thread under my fingers, the eye of the needle, situating myself solely in the present and the work itself. I inhaled and tried to exhale the habits and assumptions that surrounded charm casting for me. If I could expunge myself of charms, perhaps I could channel a curse.

I tried again, imagining misfortune, naming dark wishes in my mind.

Nothing.

The shop door banged open, and Alice called a greeting from the front room. Any experiment would have to wait until after my assistants left for the day. Not only could I not concentrate on something so difficult and foreign to me with them close by, but our full slate of orders demanded my attention. As pressing, and far less cheering: as soon as Penny arrived, I had to deploy my lie so that she could stop looking for Kristos.

Alice and Penny both waited for me in the front room. They held a market basket between them, a yeasty, sugared smell wafting from it. “We thought you could use some cheering up,” Alice explained, lifting the cloth covering a beautiful array of scones and pastries. “My cousin works at the bakery down by the harbor and snuck these out for me. They’re defective,” she added, matter-of-fact.

I eyed something golden brown and glazed with cinnamon. Faint guilt surfaced that they were taking care of me, when as their employer I shouldn’t have needed it, but the scones looked delicious. I hadn’t eaten anything before attempting to work the curse, and even fighting unsuccessfully with it had left me ravenous. “Thank you, both,” I said, then shored up my resolve—I had to deliver my lie to Penny.

I snagged the cinnamon scone from the basket and beckoned Penny to come outside with me. The morning sun wasn’t doing much to warm the air outside, but I wanted some modicum of privacy.

“Penny,” I began, chewing my lip, unsure what to say. “I heard from Kristos.”

“He’s all right! Where is he? Is he coming home?” She paused. “I’m going to box his ears.”

“You’re going to want to do more than that,” I added, stopping myself as though I hadn’t meant to say anything out loud. “He wrote to me once he was safely out of town—he decided to take a job as a sailor.”

“Of all the—now? Why? The League, the movement—why would he run away from his work here?”

I shook my head as though just as bewildered as Penny. “I don’t know.” I thought of the explanations I could add—maybe there was a falling-out, maybe he had run afoul of the law, maybe he was afraid of the repercussions—but any of them could be investigated, exposed. “I don’t understand,” I added weakly.

Penny bit her lip, fighting with the words. “Why didn’t he tell me?”

“Probably the same reason he didn’t tell me,” I lied. “He didn’t want us talking him out of it.”

“Well, why didn’t he at least write to me?”

The question hung like ripe fruit between us. Of course—any real lovesick boy would have written to his girl. The potential flaw in my lie.

“I don’t know,” I said again.

“I thought I was actually special to him,” she said in a low whisper. A tear coursed down her cheek. I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. I remembered falling for a boy who worked at the butcher shop when I was fourteen—how I was convinced his confident grin when I bought soup bones meant he liked me, too, how I was overjoyed when he took me for a walk in Fountain Square on market day. And how I was devastated when I saw him promenading with another girl the next week. There was no way to protect Kristos except by lying, but making Penny question his feelings for her was cruel.

Cruel, but unavoidable.

“I’m sorry, Penny. You can … take the morning off if you want. Or the day. With pay. It’s all right, whatever you need.” Feigning ignorance was necessary to protect Kristos, but it also meant that I could find no good way to offer Penny any comfort. My financial loss in Penny’s unproductive wages was worth any comfort I could offer.

“No, I’d rather work. I feel so stupid—but I should have known better.”

I couldn’t find any way to disagree with her without betraying the truth. Instead, we went back inside and finished a pair of mitts and a muff and a cloak. I imagined Kristos reuniting with a very angry Penny. Perhaps he could dream up a reason for ditching his sweetheart that I couldn’t think of. Of course, that hinged on getting Kristos away from Pyord alive, which wouldn’t happen before I had fulfilled my part in Pyord’s scheme. Inside the workshop, it felt almost too much like a normal day, silk and cotton and linen transformed by needle and thread into gowns and jackets, that familiar magic never failing to please my sensibilities. The russet jacket I had begun was taking shape under Alice’s careful construction, and I began the pinked and pleated trim while Penny hemmed a pomegranate-pink dressing gown, its main seams well-charmed for good health. I could almost fall into our shop’s comfortable rhythms and forget about the task I had to return to, but as evening fell, shadows crept into the atelier, and Penny and Alice began tidying up for the day, I knew it was unavoidable. As soon as both had left, I returned to my corner and took up my needle and thread again.

I began at the same place as before, imagining misfortunes and trying to force them into the cloth with my stitches. Nothing happened except a row of jagged and uneven backstitches that revealed the frustration building in my chest, pinching my breath. There was something missing, something Pyord didn’t understand because he knew only books and theories, not practice. I didn’t want to discover it for myself, and I hated him for forcing me. It was an ugly feeling, a bitter, dark pit like the heart of a plum knitting itself into my thoughts.

In that moment, I realized the difference between my charm casting and how I had attempted to cast a curse. I didn’t imagine good fortune for my charms—that is, I didn’t envision good things happening as much as I accessed some form of vibrant, dynamic joy that existed outside my imaginings. This was the light around my needle. I didn’t create it, as I was trying to do with the curse, with my thoughts—I simply harnessed it. I had grown so used to seeing it, to accessing it and gripping it with my needle—or, likely more accurately, my mind—that I had stopped looking for it, and in not looking for it, I had forgotten that I felt it, too.

I would have to actively look for the darkness—and I would have to find my way to it by feeling it first, through an invisible internal map like the one I had created, slowly and over time, for the light. I started with the angry, bitter pit of hate.

At first I merely circled it, tracing it with my thoughts, becoming more mired in it, and in myself. I forced myself outward, trying to tie what I felt to something outside myself, something as alive and independent as the light was. I began to feel a strange confidence that it was there, that what I felt, black and cold, in me, had a counterpart outside myself, inhabiting the ether as the light did. I pulled at it, pushed myself, and felt a final, strong resistance. I didn’t want to see it, I understood—I not only didn’t want to see it by training and disposition, but by some primal instinct, the same instinct that made rabbits run from foxes and hawks and made humans shy away from dark alleys and deep caverns.

I pushed past that resistance, trying to forget what I was doing, and it was as though a tiny yet fundamental door swung open in my awareness. I saw it—I could trace my own understanding of darkness into something outside myself and see it, black and glittering and repulsive and enticing.

Without thinking any further about the implications, I reached out and caught a strand of it with my thoughts, the way I did with the charm-bound light. I pulled it toward me, binding it to my needle, pulling it into the next stitch I took.

A thin black line twined around my needle, entered the cloth, and held.

I gasped, almost losing it back into the ether. Instead, I held it, taking a few small backstitches. The thread embedded the hard, dark sparkle just as it did the faint light I was used to. I kept sewing, pulling the darkness into the cloth.

I finished a seam, then looked up. My eyes felt hot, and a viselike pressure wrapped around my head. I set the needle down, blinked, and was promptly overtaken by nausea. I made it to the scrap bin before my stomach overturned, and my eyes flooded with tears as I coughed and retched.

I could do it, I realized with lead settling into my now-empty stomach. I could cast curses. And unlike the refreshed lightness that finishing a session of charm casting gave me, casting a curse was going to tax me in a way I had never encountered.