37

I LET THEODOR TAKE ME TO HIS HOUSE WITHOUT PROTESTING that he should take me home instead, arriving in silence at a tall gray stone building with narrow windows and an incongruous, peacock-blue door. I let him lead me from the carriage and through the front door, let him take my cloak and gloves. The servants didn’t say anything, and I didn’t care to speculate if that was merely because they were polite and well trained in their trade or because this was a regular occurrence.

“Build up the fire in the small parlor,” Theodor said to a manservant. I followed him numbly through the beautifully furnished hallways, thick with expensive wool carpets and hung with botanical paintings. As the fire blazed in the hearth, Theodor pulled me onto the settee next to him.

“Thank you,” I said. “For Penny. Even if she is … less than grateful.”

“I don’t blame her.” He let the words fall quietly between us, more meaning in them than either of us knew how to express. He had seen the demands of the Red Caps, he had heard their shouts in the streets, and he had carefully read my brother’s pamphlets, but I realized he had never seen himself as a despot until now. Until he had so obviously wielded power, even though it was intended to help, in front of others who didn’t have it.

“There’s no way out, is there.” I sighed. “Even if your intentions are good and your actions benevolent, we still live by your leave.”

“I think I see what has to change,” he said quietly. “I don’t know how, but the answer is neither revolt nor quashing it.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t solve any of these problems—I could sew and charm cast and run a business, but I found myself utterly helpless in the face of this standoff that was escalating into war, already claiming casualties like Nia.

“You know, I always imagined bringing you here,” Theodor whispered into my hair. “I hoped you would like it here so much that you would refuse to leave. And that I could tell my parents there was a madwoman in my house so I couldn’t get married after all.”

Despite myself, I laughed. “That would do it.”

“Why were you angry with me, before? At the greenhouse?”

I turned my face so that Theodor couldn’t see it. “I wasn’t angry with you.”

“It rather seemed you were.”

“I was angry with … myself, I suppose, for letting myself feel the way I did. I realized how impossible it was and …”

“I thought you had no interest in anything permanent,” Theodor said. It wasn’t an accusation, but I felt guilt.

“I know. I—I never thought I wanted anything permanent. The first time I do, and it’s not possible.” The fire burned bright, and I let Theodor pull me closer to him, feeling his heartbeat beneath my cheek.

He brushed my hair away from my face. “The world is changing. Who knows what might be different in the morning.”

Even a month before, I would have brushed him off. Now I felt a tiny hope that maybe he was right. Maybe in the barrage that was sure to assault us, we could at least find each other. I felt that, in him, I could gain something without giving everything else up. It was a foolish hope, barely worth being called a hope at all, but a nobleman’s wife could have her own pursuits, her own vocation. Even without my shop, I could remain an artist of cloth and thread.

A frail hope, and I could hardly consider it now, with revolt brewing, Nia dead, Kristos still missing, and my own guilt clinging to me like the frost on the windowpanes.

“You know,” I finally said, “I didn’t get to hear you play your violin.”

“That’s right,” he said softly, smiled, and turned back to the fire.

“Well?” I said, laughing. “I’d like very much to hear you play,” I said with playful force.

“See, if I play, I can’t lounge here on the settee with you. And I would need both hands.” He tugged at his arms, wrapped around me, as though he couldn’t be moved.

I swatted his chest. “Please.”

“Very well.” Theodor dipped a comical bow in consent, and then fetched his case from the back of the hallway where he had left it. He sat by the fireplace and began to tune the instrument.

As he concentrated on the tone of each string, I watched him. His face transformed from the joking laughter of before and was instead fully absorbed in the motions of his hands and the sound of his violin. A lock of hair slipped over his forehead and he ignored it, but a strange flutter rose in my chest, and a pang of something like loss gripped my stomach.

I loved him. I did—whether I wanted it or not, whether I would have asked for it or not. I loved Theodor, and I loved him more the more I saw in him.

He drew his bow softly across the strings, and I recognized instantly a folk melody from the south. His version was more refined, and smoother, and of course lacked the words, but it still seemed to tell the story I remembered—a lover lost to the sea. Of course, nearly all Galatine folk songs were about lovers, and many of them involved someone either drowning in or choosing to sail off on their “true love” the sea. This was a particularly sad story about love lost to the inevitable tide, and I couldn’t help but feel it could be about Theodor and me.

Then the bow sparked on the violin, like the flash of static when I stacked fabric on a dark, dry winter night.

I gasped, but Theodor kept playing, his attention turned fully to the music now, a soft rapture replacing the jokes of his performing face. As I watched, more bright sparks of light jounced off the strings, flashing briefly in the air before fading, like embers rising from a fire.

Theodor was charm casting.

As with the ballad seller, the music carried a charm, growing around him, and like the ballad seller, he seemed unaware of it. I gripped the arm of the sofa, digging my fingers into the fine brocade and not caring if my nails snagged the delicate fibers. Did he know? I considered how I saw the light woven into every charmed item I made—it was impossible to ignore. And if he knew he was a charm caster and hadn’t told me, he had lied. To charm cast was an integral part of who we were.

Unless he didn’t know. Was it possible to not know what I felt permeated every part of my identity? I watched him playing. The charm grew brighter, dimmer, flashed when the melody spiked. There was no indication he saw anything.

Then he finished with a flourish that sent a whorl of light spinning around his bow, and turned to me.

I stared back, dumbfounded.

“It was that bad?”

I gathered myself. “It was beautiful.”

“You look like you’ve seen a spirit.”

“You didn’t?” I blurted out before I could compose a more eloquent question.

“What?” He laughed. “No one’s ever compared my music to a haunting before—I suppose I’ll take it as a compliment, but—”

“No one’s ever noticed?”

“Noticed what?”

It wasn’t impossible—those without the gift and the training to use it couldn’t see the light, and whom had Theodor played for? Nobles, court guests? Unless there was a chance charm caster among them, no one would have noticed. I was again acutely aware of my ignorance even in this, so integral to my work and my world. I had never known a non-Pellian charm caster; I had assumed there was something in our blood that gave us the gift, or something in others’ blood that made them immune to the ability. Perhaps I was wrong. There were rumors that Serafan sorcerers were charm casters of some kind; maybe they were. Perhaps the gift lay dormant in plenty of people outside Pellia who didn’t have the benefit of a culture that welcomed it and mentors who taught it.

“Theodor, have the maid bring a needle and thread,” I said, suddenly aware of how I could show him, how I could find out if he knew the capabilities he harbored.

“Do you end all of your romantic evenings this way?” he asked as he summoned a maid and requested a sewing kit. She dipped a curtsy but gave me a questioning look.

“Only with men I really like,” I replied. The maid returned. I swiftly cut a length of white linen thread and pulled Theodor’s cravat from his neck.

“Any idea how long that took me to tie properly?” he joked weakly.

I stitched a few whipstitches in, over the fine hem. I worked a charm quickly, for luck, for protection. He watched me, curious. His eyes, I noted, followed only my needle, not the swirls of light that I embedded into the fabric.

“Theodor,” I finally said. “Take this end here, where I’ve already sewn.” I handed him a length of linen, white on white thread glowing to my eyes with brilliant light.

“All right. Look at it.”

“I am looking.” Still polite, but brimming with frustration. I pressed on anyway.

“No, really look. Into it. Look into the stitches themselves.”

“What does this have to do with anything?” he asked.

“Everything,” I replied, impatient. “Now—if you look at the stitches, if you look at them with your instincts as well as your eyes, what do you see?”

“I see a line of stitches.”

“Do you remember—” I smiled. “The night the Red Caps threw a rock through Viola’s window. When we stopped in the gardens, by the frozen pools and the willows.”

Theodor’s face softened. “Of course.”

“Just—think about how you looked at those frozen waterfalls. How you saw the stars that night. The way you—the way you looked at me.”

He forced his gaze past me, into the dimly candlelit room, but I could see something loosening and opening within him.

“Now look at the stitches the way you look at me. Looking with more than your eyes.”

He obeyed, squinting. Suddenly his eyes came alive and he dropped the fabric.

“There’s light in it,” he said, snatching the fabric up again. “I can see it now. It’s woven into every stitch—you did this! This is what magic looks like, isn’t it?” He turned the fine linen over in his hands.

The astonishment in his face convinced me, if I had held any doubts—he had never realized he had this gift before. Perhaps as a child he saw things, perhaps he even cast charms without meaning to. It was buried now. I wondered if it could even be developed this late in life. I certainly didn’t know anyone who was trained in adulthood.

“When you played your violin,” I said, “when you played your version of that folk tune, you were charm casting.”

“That’s impossible,” he said. “I didn’t mean to; I didn’t even know I could.”

“It wasn’t very good casting,” I said with an unintentional smile. “Just sparks now and then, not controlled. I see now that it was because you didn’t know you were doing it.” Like that ballad seller in the square, long weeks ago. I traced Theodor’s hand, wondering how many others had the power to draw light from nothing hidden in their hands.

His mouth was still slightly agape.

“Could you teach me?” he asked. “Could I learn to control it?”

Pyord’s cursed commission loomed over me, Nia’s death, my brother’s kidnapping. All due to my gift. Were I an ordinary seamstress, I would never have to face any of it.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to make Theodor risk a similar burden.

But that wasn’t my decision. With the threat of revolution hanging over the city, Theodor might need any help he could get. Charm casting might, someday, save him.

“I can try,” I said. I returned his cravat to him, protection woven into the hem.

Were I an ordinary seamstress, I couldn’t have given him this gift. I wouldn’t have met him at all. I sighed and leaned into him, feeling his heartbeat and the golden light we shared all at once.