9

EMMI AND I LEFT EARLY ONE MUGGY AFTERNOON TO JOIN OUR Pellian charm-casting friends at our favorite coffeehouse. The months after the Midwinter Revolt had been difficult for some of the casters; Venia’s brothers had been involved and their livid father had thrown them out of the house, and Lieta had lost a son in the fighting. We didn’t meet for months, with the city under a cold veil of mourning and its various factions—workers, merchants, nobles, Galatines, Pellians—uncertain in trusting one another. As spring thawed the city and the snow and ice released their hold on the streets, the meltwater began to flow, and we resumed our visits.

Lieta waited on the steps of the shop, facing the sun with her eyes closed in her weathered face. Emmi tapped her arm. “Ah!” she said with a grin. “The sun feels so wonderful, doesn’t it?” I was surprised to see a red-and-gray cockade pinning closed her traditionally Pellian, busily printed cotton neckerchief. Viola’s statement had caught on among her salon and spread through the class strata of Galitha City quickly enough, but I hadn’t realized it had penetrated so deeply into the Pellian quarter that octogenarian Lieta would wear one.

Emmi and I had to laugh—the hot sun felt like choking oppression to both of us. “It’s just your dusty old bones that want to drink up the heat,” Emmi joked.

“You two never knew Pellia. This—this is a fine summer’s day in Pellia.”

I shook my head. “Right now I think I’m grateful I’ve never known what a scorcher in Pellia feels like.”

Lieta laughed. “Yes, the sun stretches—that’s what we called the long midsummer dry spells—are a bit strong. Venia and Parit are inside.”

Parit was Venia’s cousin, a new member of our regular charm-casting group with a quick wit and a dry sense of humor. Like Venia, she had come from Pellia as a child, but like Emmi, she was more acclimated to Galatine culture than her cousin.

The women exchanged pleasantries, Emmi chattering happily about the new gown she was draping and Venia sharing a new recipe for saffron rice she had perfected.

“Sophie, are you going to teach Emmi how to cast with needle and thread?” Venia passed me a cup of strong cold-brewed coffee.

Emmi flushed. “I’m not that good at sewing yet,” she said, protectiveness raising her voice a bit. We hadn’t discussed charm casting in stitches becoming a more regular part of her training yet after Emmi’s initial attempts hadn’t worked. Given my difficulties in casting, I had been putting it off.

“Emmi’s progressing wonderfully. I do think we’ll work a bit more on the finer stitches and draping—I think it’s easier to incorporate the casting into something you’re confident with,” I said. I hesitated. These were the only people I knew who might have some insight into my problem, but I feared that admitting my difficulties could open the door to other admissions—curse casting.

“I need to work on my prick stitching,” Emmi confided to Venia.

Parit giggled. “That sounds rude. And painful.”

“Top stitching. Tiny stitches,” Emmi amended, blushing.

I decided I had to ask. “I wonder—has anyone ever struggled to cast a charm?”

“Oh, lots of times,” Venia said. “When I was first learning, I had trouble concentrating, trouble making the clay tablets themselves, trouble keeping the charm going…” She ticked off reasons on her fingers. “I wasn’t good at it for a long time.”

“I don’t think anyone is,” Lieta said gently.

“I meant more… recently,” I said. “I mean, after you’ve learned. Does anyone backslide? I’ve never taught anyone before,” I added hastily, covering my reason for asking.

Parit scrunched up her mouth. She used a deep carmine on her lips, accentuating the faces she made as she talked. “Not that I know of. At least, it’s never happened to me.”

“Me either,” Emmi said. “But I’ve never really learned anything new beyond basic casting.”

“I stopped casting for a while,” Lieta said. I sat up straighter. “After my husband died. It was as though… as though I didn’t have the energy,” she explained.

I sank back, slightly disappointed. She didn’t describe the dark magic infiltrating her work as she continued, “I tried several times, but it was as though I couldn’t focus enough. The light kept slipping away. It only lasted a few months. I probably shouldn’t have tried to work while I was still in mourning,” she added.

“There’s a reason we have the quiet fortnight,” Venia replied, referring to the Pellian custom of families retreating after the burial of a loved one, usually for two weeks but sometimes more. Others in the community brought them food, ran their errands, and did whatever work was necessary for them.

“Galatines don’t,” Emmi said.

“Galatines don’t know a good thing if it doesn’t come from Galitha,” Parit said. “But how are you supposed to manage a quiet fortnight if you need to make your day wages?”

Lieta nodded in agreement. “I tried to work too soon. It was Galatine thinking, not Pellian,” she said. I bit my lip; this wasn’t pertinent to my problem at all.

“At any rate,” Parit said, “I had a question for you, Emmi—you said your mother used different tools for her tablets?”

I let the conversation flow away without me, its current dipping into clay types and the wording of inscriptions that had been passed down from mothers to daughters to granddaughters.

“Is something troubling you?” Lieta said quietly, laying her hand on my arm, the motion familiar and maternal, though we were not related.

I shook my head as Parit related a story about the Pellian quarter’s market day. The others laughed as she mimicked a Pellian market woman shooing rambunctious children from her stall. “Everyone has moved on,” I said, almost without meaning to.

“From this winter?” Lieta pursed her lips. “Not quite, I do not think.”

Her son. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

“No, you’re not mistaken. It is like any other Galatine summer in so many ways.” She sighed. “My miri’ta—she is struggling. It pains me.” She used the Pellian term for a daughter-in-law. There was no good Galatine translation for what I knew meant something closer to “given daughter” or “gift daughter” than the Galatine phrase, which sounded more like a legal relationship than a familial one.

I nodded, thinking quickly. “She is taking in work?”

“She sews, actually. She’s quick with mending. She tried to pick up work at the laundry, but the forewoman didn’t like her.” I wondered why—was it because she was too close to the Red Caps, or that she was Pellian, or something altogether unrelated?

I hesitated—Alice had already placed the advertisement, and already had inquiries. I didn’t want to imply that I didn’t trust Alice to find a new hire, but I wanted to help this woman. “Tell her to inquire with my assistant,” I said.

Lieta looked surprised. “But she—she is no couture seamstress!”

I glanced at Emmi with a smile. “If she can learn, she can become one. And if she can’t”—I shrugged—“I am like any other business owner. I will give her severance and she’ll be no worse off. What is her name?”

“Heda,” Lieta replied. “She’s a good worker.” She paused before adding, “And soon you will be someone’s miri’ta, as well. It is a blessing, to be given another family.” She didn’t need to add that I had no family of my own left, and in the Pellian traditions, this made me worse than a pauper.

“Yes,” I said, “though I am not sure they will welcome me as kindly as you’ve welcomed your miri’ta.”

Lieta smiled sadly. “Yes, it is a different world that you move into. Are they kind to you?”

The question took me entirely off guard. I hadn’t stopped to consider whether I had received or even expected kindness from some of the most powerful people in the country—and my future family. “Some of them,” I said. “Theodor’s parents… there is some distance there. But his brothers here in the city are kind enough. Ambrose is a student of law at the university, and Ballantine is in the Royal Navy—on occasion he’s here. They are both welcoming, but of course they’re also very close to Theodor.

“Gregory and Jeremy—the twins—are both at the military school in Rock’s Ford. They’ll be sixteen in a year and will both commission in the army, so I doubt I’ll see much of them in any case. Jonamere is too little to know any better, but I made him a stuffed lion and so he likes me well enough. Polly—Lady Apollonia—isn’t quite sure what to think of me, I believe.” I knew enough of Theodor’s golden-haired, whip-tongued sister to know that she loved her brother fiercely and, given who I was, reserved her trust when it came to me.

Lieta nodded. “You know that you always have family here, too.”

I quietly took her hand while the others talked. Lieta had been like an aunt or a granny many times, unassuming and gentle in her advice. Even when I had gone to her months before, knowing the risks inherent in a relationship with Theodor, to ask certain embarrassing questions about delaying starting a family. There were ways, I understood that much, but I had never known who to ask—certainly not my brother, who wouldn’t have known women’s methods anyway. So, shame-faced and stumbling over my words, I had gone to Lieta. I had a feeling I was the only adult woman she had ever enlightened regarding a woman’s cyclical fertility, but she was calm and kind and tried not to make me feel like a fool.

And now, she didn’t make me feel foolish for joining myself in marriage to a Galatine and a noble whose family would never welcome me as a Pellian family would have, as her family would have. Whose customs felt cold and created to build boundaries rather than welcome newcomers. Whose mores might mean seeing far less of my Pellian friends in favor of duties to Crown and country instead of family, whether born of blood or choice.

She poured me another glass of strong coffee. “When someday you are princess and then queen,” she said, “you will be the first royal lady, I wager, to cast charms in the palace.” She laughed. “I suppose you can’t begrudge an old Pellian for being proud enough of that.”