32

WITH ALICE NOT COMING IN EARLY IN THE MORNING, AND PENNY tending to come in later and work late into the evening, I had plenty of time to finish the cursed shawl. Less than a week after Alice was attacked, it was finished. I wrapped it in a triple layer of paper and sent it by messenger to the palace. Guilt stabbed me as I thought of the queen—Mimi, the woman who seemed so kind and like any of the ladies I might meet here in my shop—opening the package of poisoned wishes.

I then sent a message to Pyord to tell him that the commission was done, sending it to the university and trusting it would find him. It is finished, I wrote. Nothing more. Nothing less. I had done the sewing he required and I had caused Alice’s horrible injuries—I hoped desperately he would not, that he could not, extort anything more out of me. One cursed garment had woven a dark web that pulled into its snares too many people I cared about already.

I tried to pull our shop into as regular a rhythm as I could. Penny’s stitching improved fivefold under the pressure of deadlines that should have had several seamstresses attending to them. Emmi picked up tasks quickly, and sometimes I found she had sorted a scrap bin or swept a floor before I had even thought to ask. I discovered that I stitched charms more quickly and deftly as well, having honed an unrealized part of my ability with the curse. Without the oppressive darkness of the curse hanging around me while I worked, weaving the brightness of charms into cloth seemed far easier than it had before. Still, on occasion, a darkness hovered at the edge of my mind as I worked, a black glimmer that threatened to infuse itself in my stitches without my bidding. I drove it away, but it concerned me—had I opened a door I couldn’t close?

I spent the morning finishing Viola’s pink gown. The cheerful blushing color defied the grim gray winter sky on the other side of the window, and I couldn’t help resenting its optimism. The gown represented something I’d already lost, plans for a future for my shop that seemed, with each passing day, further from reality. I was relieved to wrap it in brown paper, and was tying the package’s strings into a neat bow when Alice walked in the door.

I was surprised by the force in my own embrace as I nearly bowled her over.

“Don’t break anything else!” she cried, stumbling into the wall.

“I’m so sorry,” I said with a big, real smile, “but I’m so glad you’re well enough to be up and about.”

“It still hurts once in a while, but it’s not so bad,” Alice said. “And heavens! But I got bored.” Her gaze darted around the shop, landing on one mess after another. “What should I start on? The advertisement for hiring another girl or the ciphering?”

I could have kissed her. “Either one. It’s good to have you back, Alice. Don’t overextend yourself,” I added.

“No fear. I’ve been so bored I could work for four days straight. It looks like that’s exactly what you all have been doing,” she said with a laugh.

“You and Penny take it easy this afternoon—I’m going to run this to Viola.” Alice smiled, and Penny clapped her hands, delighted to have her friend back.

I finished wrapping Viola’s gown, and left Penny and Alice catching up on gossip as I slipped out to deliver it. Miss Vochant answered Viola’s door, and Viola met me in the hall. “I saw you coming,” she said, leading me to her boudoir. The salon was empty today. The quiet felt strange.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

“Perhaps not.” She pulled me onto a chair next to hers. My quilted silk petticoat wadded into the corners and bunched uncomfortably, but I didn’t stop to smooth it out. Viola’s voice had an urgency I hadn’t heard before. “My father is investigating the murder of a messenger boy. About thirteen. Stabbed and thrown in the river. They found his body yesterday night, caught on an—it doesn’t matter, never mind.” Whatever gruesome detail Viola was envisioning, she was kind enough to want to shield me from it. “He’d been dead several days.”

“That’s awful,” I replied, brows knitting. And it was—a young boy’s murder was a horrible thing. But I didn’t understand why Viola looked so disturbed.

“He was on his way here. From your shop. They found the delivery order in his pocket. What was he bringing here, Sophie? I thought at first it might have been my gown, but you have that here.”

The shifts. My mouth went dry. Somehow, Pyord had discovered that I was sending the shifts to Viola and had killed to keep them out of the princesses’ hands.

I took a shaky breath. “It was Annette’s commission. Part of it. I sent it here to protect—for greater anonymity. I thought it would be—” I couldn’t finish.

“The shifts? Then perhaps he was just killed for money, or some personal grudge. I can’t imagine,” Viola said with raised eyebrows, “that anyone would kill for a few shifts.”

“Perhaps,” I said vaguely.

“You would be so kind as to write a short statement for my father? He’ll want to know. But I see no reason for you to sit through questioning at the Stone Castle just to tell him you were sending the princesses’ underclothes to my house.” She produced a sheet of linen paper and a glass pen and ink, and I wrote a short note.

“Ongoing investigation and all that, so keep that between us,” Viola said. “Not that I peg you for a gossip.”

I nodded weakly. Not a gossip. Just someone who got other people hurt and killed.

“All right, something more cheerful. I want to try on this gown,” Viola said, unlacing the front of her jacket. She hadn’t even bothered to step behind the screen. Her agitated fingers tore at the silk cord, and it snagged on each lacing hole. “I am glad you made me those charmed shifts, by the way. There’s a new pamphlet out. They’re even clearer about their goals now, if there was still any question—open revolt, the need to erase the nobility.”

A new pamphlet—did Kristos write it? Viola watched my strange expression, and I had to say something. “They might as well call it civil war.”

“Perhaps they should.” She gestured to the side table, where a crinkled pamphlet lay open.

I picked it up. “I hope your shifts are enough,” I said, turning to the cover. “I added a charm to the gown, too—it’s not much. But it’s a protection charm.” There were my brother’s initials—K. B., written in large type right under the title. I bit my lip, eyes widening.

“Thank you for that. I know charm casting is an imperfect art, Sophie. I know it’s not insurance against a deliberate assassination attempt.” She threw her jacket on the nearest chair. The boning stood starkly upright, and the rest of the silk crumpled into a sad heap.

“You’re worried about that?” I opened the pamphlet and skimmed the first page, and saw why—the language was starker, brasher, more openly violent than I had ever known Kristos to write. But it was his voice in the words. Was Pyord forcing him to write this? To call for an uprising of righteous indignation to spark a fire of revolution and for the scythe and the rifle to work together to undo oppression? I shuddered.

“Of course I’m worried. If this truly comes to violence, my father is going to be targeted early, mark me. The Lord of Keys? How many of them has he imprisoned?”

My stomach knotted—of course. And Pyord’s cold eyes flashed in my memory—he wouldn’t hesitate to target the family of high-ranking nobles. “If there’s anything I can do—”

“I don’t even know why I’m telling you this,” she said, taking the gown from me, “save that I only feel it fair to warn you.”

“Warn me?”

“You’re becoming tied to us now. A part of my little circle,” she said with a secret smile. “If the revolutionaries are truly determined, they may not stop with the nobles most in the way of their plans. The bloodshed might extend to those they feel are sympathetic to the nobility.”

I shivered as Viola pinned her new gown into place. I could scarcely consider it. Kristos could never be complicit in widespread violence. He cared about the people he was goading into revolution—truly wanted the best for the common people of the country.

Kristos had never wanted open war, or violence against the common people. But his idealism had blinded him to the stark truth that, in order to effect his proposed change, war was inevitable. Pyord Venko realized it, knew before we did, and orchestrated a disheveled League into a means for revolt. Cold seeped from that understanding until it covered all of me, chilling me to the bone. I couldn’t keep Pyord from harming anyone, could I? He had injured Alice and killed an innocent messenger. I had thought that, once the curse was finished, once the dark magic was out of my shop, I could be free of Pyord’s schemes. No—the whole country couldn’t be free of them, let alone me.

And Viola thought to warn me. I wanted to smack her for her kindness—Don’t warn me, don’t worry about me. I’m partially responsible. This is my fault, I wanted to scream.

“It fits perfectly,” she said, turning in front of her mirror. “And it’s beautiful.” It was—clean lines and perfect rows of stitching. The front was strikingly geometric—a triangular inset of cream silk interrupted the pink, which joined into the fullness of the skirt’s back. I had added a pair of loops and strings under the skirt so that it could be tied up into a full drape, a feminine contrast to the masculine tailoring of the front. There was nothing like it in the whole city.

“It hardly seems to matter now,” I whispered.

“It never did,” Viola said with a shrug. She smoothed a lock of her hair back into place in the elaborate pouf she had dressed it into. “And now we’ll go on as though our lives are not about to be overturned. You will be at the music evening later this week, yes?”

“Yes, I was planning to.” I had agreed to meet Nia then, with my translations, or I would have refused. I didn’t want to see Theodor. I thought of the confusion on his face when I had run out of the greenhouse, and winced. At the same time, he hadn’t contacted me, and that gouged at me. I could be easily set aside after all.

“Good. Revolution hasn’t come yet, and I can still make the best punch in Galitha.”