3

“I WANT TO EAT THIS,” EMMI SAID, PULLING A BOLT OF SHOT SILK, cross-woven with gold and pink warp and weft, from the shelf. It was newly arrived from the Silk Fair and had already been picked up for an order. “Really. It’s just too delicious.”

“But can you imagine a whole gown of it?” Alice asked, screwing up her mouth. The dual colors produced a brilliant sunset hue, and the effect was bright—almost too bright.

“Yes,” replied Emmi dreamily. “With a sheer white apron to break it up? Trim of the same fabric?”

“On some fat old countess dripping gems, toting a tiny dog that smells of the scullery? That’s who would pick that color, not some fashionable young lady.” Alice shook her head. “You’ll see.”

Emmi just laughed. “What fell in your tea this morning?”

“Plaster, actually,” Alice said. “The roof is leaking again. At least it’s cropping up now and not in the middle of winter.”

Alice did seem in a more dour mood than usual, and Emmi more effervescent. The two usually coexisted quite peacefully, almost complementary in their moods. Today, I feared, might be an exception. Still, Alice had the management of the shop’s schedule, ledger, and staff of two so well in hand that I felt more and more at ease leaving it in her charge when I had business elsewhere. Someday, I knew, Alice would make a fine shop owner. The thought came as a sharp, almost painful, surprise, that if I ever left shopkeeping, for marriage or politics, having Alice take over my shop and its license would be a nearly seamless transition, in everything but the charm casting.

“At least this time we needn’t worry about whether the customer can carry a whole ensemble,” I said. The silk was for a sash, for one of the frothy white chemise gowns in the style I had created and that Viola had made so popular. All of the ladies at Viola’s salon had one, created by me or by one of the dozens of other seamstresses who had quickly copied the style for their clients. A welcome bit of unadulterated professional pride swelled in my chest—I had set a new style. The city’s elite seamstresses, the private hires and upscale shops, were copying me. Though I had built my business on charm casting, becoming known for my designs and the quality of my work had always been a quiet, driving goal.

“And for that, it’s absolutely perfect,” Alice said, holding the length of silk she cut next to the white cotton voile.

Emmi couldn’t disagree, and she set to stitching the bright edges into a tiny hem. “One more down,” she said, “and the board still full.”

“Very good,” I said. “I’m going to try to catch up on pieces that are waiting on charms.” That list was growing—and only I could complete those orders. Emmi was a charm caster in the traditional Pellian methods of clay tablets and herb sachets, but our limited lessons with charm-cast stitches had proven ineffective, and there wasn’t time to spend on refining her technique.

I slipped behind my screen in the workroom, taking a deep breath to push the list of orders and deadlines to the back of my mind as I sank onto the divan. The piece was one of my favorites from the spring’s commissions, a dainty blue riding habit trimmed in sharp black. The young merchant’s wife who had commissioned it had been content with imbuing the trim with the protection spell she wanted. It allowed for precision with the charm and, better, let Alice and Emmi handle the construction of the jacket and petticoat themselves. I threaded my needle with black silk and began with an anchoring stitch. The black wool tape was already pinned in place with Alice’s careful workmanship. I took a few uncharmed stitches to begin to tack it securely into place.

Then I took a deliberate breath and began to pull the charm into the thread as I stitched. The golden light gathered around my needle and thread, and I fell into the easy rhythm of drawing the charm into each small stitch I made. I had only finished a few inches when my needle slipped.

At least, that was my first assumption—the golden light I was so used to controlling hiccupped and then receded. I caught it and drew it back, and resumed sewing. But it happened again, and as I squinted at the fabric under my hands, I almost dropped my needle.

Black sparks like hard obsidian speckled the pale blue—not that anyone else would see them. They were the marks of a curse, the dark magic that a curse caster would deliberately pull into their work. But I wasn’t curse casting—I was casting a charm as I had done hundreds of times before. Impatient and more than a little frightened, I waved my hand over the black sparkle and it dissipated quickly.

But now the golden light was fickle and reluctant, fighting my needle and my thoughts like it had a will of its own. More than once I saw the black glittering lines encroaching on the golden lines of stitching, as though they thought I was calling them into my work, as well. I wasn’t—I deliberately pushed them away, but they hovered, threatening to tie themselves into the stitches as firmly as the pale light. I struggled to complete the row of trim, frustrated with the sloppy stitching and weak charm that my work produced.

Confused, I lay the piece aside. Was I just tired? Was there something about this piece, about the young woman it was for, about the materials? Nothing about the piece itself seemed out of the ordinary, and the recipient of a charm had never mattered before. Had I been reusing materials, I would have wondered if, somehow, they had been previously charmed, but these were brand-new woolens and threads. As I examined them, they bore no signs of charming or cursing—and I would have seen either clearly.

Startled, I realized that the proximity of the curse magic had not made me feel ill, either. Controlling the glinting black as I had stitched it into the queen’s shawl had made me nauseated and fatigued, even as I progressed in my control of it. Maybe if I didn’t try to control it, I was free of its effects. This made me feel a bit better—I hadn’t drawn the darkness into my work. It hadn’t worked through me; if it had, I surely would have felt ill.

I stood up, shaking my hands as though I could shake the problem away. I was tired, I concluded, overwhelmed by the influx of orders. The conclusion didn’t satisfy me, but I pushed the concerns aside and returned to the main workroom, determined to finish cutting a new gown instead.

“Is this the right fabric for the bodice lining?” Emmi asked as I scanned the specifics of the order, a deep wine silk gown for a minor countess. Imbuing different stomachers with different charms had been her ingenious idea—one for love, one for luck, one for financial fortune—to interchange as she needed. The gown itself, however, could be sewn entirely by Alice and Emmi, and would avoid further backlog for me.

I glanced up and nodded. “You’ve picked up on the linen weights very quickly,” I praised her. It had taken my former assistant, Penny, the better part of three months to finally discern the difference between linen lining fabric, hemp drill, and linen sheeting.

“I enjoy it,” she said. “It’s so much more interesting than helping at home or working for Nanni Defaro at the fishmonger’s.” I didn’t doubt that. Nanni was a cranky old bat from everything Emmi had told me, and fish… I didn’t relish the idea of handling fish all day, either. “And it’s—it’s a real trade, you know?”

I did. Even if Emmi never progressed to the level that Alice had achieved, she would always have adequate skill to be an assistant in a seamstress shop. I had no doubt she could do even better. I sighed—I needed to take the time to train her more thoroughly, not only for the benefit of my shop’s bloated to-do list, but for Emmi’s future, as well.

“Help me draft out these sleeves,” I said.

“Oh, I’ve never—”

“I know.” I handed her a ruler. “I’ll show you how, and then you repeat the process. It’s just translating these measurements to the fabric—and we’ll cut a muslin for fitting first. Make a mistake, and we can just put it in the scrap bin.”

Emmi smiled nervously, and soon we were so engrossed in patterning Countess Rollet’s sleeves that I had almost forgotten my loss of charm-casting control.