10

“I’D BE HAPPY TO MEET WITH HER,” ALICE SAID CAREFULLY. I’D explained Heda’s limited sewing experience and my hope that we could hire her. In truth, Alice had already selected several, far more proficient, candidates from the response to the advertisement.

“I know she’s not going to be the most qualified, but as I said before, I would very much like to—” I stopped, noticing Alice’s dour countenance. “You can’t be worrying over her being Pellian, can you?”

Alice’s grim stoicism broke into a heaved sigh. “Not at all! No,” she repeated, composing herself. “It’s that you’re—how can I explain this?” She pursed her lips, considering for a long, uncomfortable moment. “Do you want me to take over the shop, or no? Am I going to have my name on it, make the decisions, or are you going to—stay on? Directing from behind the screen?”

I blinked, began to argue, and stopped. I had carefully mapped the practical steps to hand the shop over to Alice, but I had failed to actually untangle myself. In my mind, the shop was still mine.

“I’m sorry, Alice.” Tears rimmed my eyes, and I swiftly wiped them away. “I should have—I should have made this your decision. You’ll have to manage the new employee, after all. Because I am stepping away. Completely. As soon as the transfer is finalized.” I bit back more tears—there would be time to mourn the loss of my shop later, not in front of Alice.

“If you don’t want to—I mean, I wouldn’t be unsatisfied with a manager’s job instead of owner. If that’s what you wanted instead.”

“I do want that, dearly. I want to hold on to this place until they pry the business license from my gnarled, liver-spotted old fingers.” Alice cracked a faint smile. “But I can’t. I can’t own a shop and be—Theodor’s wife.” I let a single tear slip and wend its way down my cheek. “And that’s the more important thing for me to be, now. I gave women a place to work, I started—too late—giving Pellian girls a chance to learn a trade that they could succeed in, here in Galitha.” I smiled. “Now? Now I can do much more than help a few women at a time.”

Alice nodded. “I understand. You love this. The shop, the work.” She laughed. “You really love work. For what it’s worth, I would have hired your friend’s daughter-in-law anyway, if she wasn’t a louse. I wish you’d given me the chance to do it on my own.”

“From now on, you will run this business on your own,” I promised.

“Good. Because we wasted money on the advertisement in the Weekly if you were just going to trot someone in here anyway.” Alice hesitated, then patted my hand. “I’ll take care of the shop. On my honor,” she added with the closest thing to a grin I’d ever seen grace Alice’s face.

Heda started within the week. She didn’t have any experience in a formal atelier, but she had made a quick business taking in mending and had even sewn a few sets of baby linens for sale, making her far more skilled with a needle than Emmi had been when I hired her. Knowing that she would have little enough chance at being hired by any other seamstress in Galitha City, I signed her wage contract.

Though I couldn’t trust her with any fine sewing, another set of hands basting and cleaning caught us up within days; at least, it had caught up the non-charmed cutting and construction for our orders. I was still woefully behind on my charms, struggling to cast without the darkness creeping into my work. Fortunately, Alice and Emmi were so caught up in their work that they didn’t notice me falling behind, or that I took work home with me most nights, wrangling it mostly unsuccessfully.

I found that I had only so much energy to cast in a day before the effort in keeping the light and dark from warring with one another in each seam became so taxing that I was fully wasting my time, so I felt only some guilt leaving Alice in charge of the shop one bright afternoon to meet Theodor. He waited for me in his study, papers strewn across his desk and his violin case propped open on top of them.

“How were the debates?” I asked, not even giving him time to greet me with a kiss.

“I think we’re making real progress,” he said. “That is, no one is happy with the state of the bill at the moment, yet no one is ready to walk out on it.”

“What has your father said?” Theodor hadn’t said much about him, but the king had distanced himself from the reform efforts. I didn’t bring it up, but he still had not publicly acknowledged our betrothal. Theodor’s mother had sent me a kindly worded if rather perfunctory letter expressing her felicitations, apologizing that she would be unable to receive me before leaving the city for the family estate in Rock’s Ford, and suggesting a late fall wedding. Between the rote politeness of her words, I sensed her avoidance and her hesitation, almost as though she hoped that the passage of a few months would erase this aberration to the plans she had certainly held for her eldest son.

Theodor’s slumped shoulders confirmed my suspicions. “He’s cowed by all of the nobles opposing the bill. Unfortunately, some of them are the richest, and their taxes fill the coffers.” I read what Theodor meant without further explanation—his father didn’t have the political capital to spend challenging them. But without his vocal support, plenty of nobles would continue their confident opposition. “Most of the nobles coming to session have taken to wearing blue-and-gold cockades to counter the reform red and gray.”

“Brilliant blue?” I recalled the bright ribbons on Lady Sommerset and her friends at the croquet party.

“Royal blue,” Theodor said with a wry smile. “They’re currying favor with my father, picking the color of the royal standard, and of course gold, for the crown, as their emblem.”

“What do the students call that at schools—licking boots, I believe?”

“One of the more polite terms,” he said, handing me a glass of iced citronade. “But I know this much—that your influence has been a positive one so far. More than once one of the lords has, in formal debate, insisted on the determination of the common people.”

“Niko would be so pleased,” I said, smile brimming with taut sarcasm. “And we won’t ask how they feel about the little wasp of an upstart stinging everyone with threats at social functions.”

Theodor pulled me to him. “It was never a role that would win you friends,” he conceded.

“Don’t I know it.”

“Let’s talk of something else. Not politics, not the infernal heat. I’ve been practicing with the violin and thought I might get your thoughts. I don’t want to boast, but I think I’ve gotten better,” he said. “I can hold the charm longer and draw it out more quickly.”

“When have you had time to practice?” I asked. Theodor’s ability to cast charms through music, golden light following the bow as he played, had surprised both of us. I hadn’t realized that the gift might strike outside my Pellian community, and he had no idea that he could manipulate magic at all until I showed him. “With the reforms and the council, I figured you wouldn’t work on casting for months.”

“I probably shouldn’t,” he said, checking his tuning. “But it’s relaxing. I feel—I don’t know, happier when I’ve practiced an hour or so. It’s been like a tonic the past months.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said, recalling the veil of tranquility and contentment I felt after a long session of casting. Recalling, because that feeling had eluded me for weeks now.

Theodor began to play a cheerful, bright melody. “New composition,” he said. “One of Marguerite’s.” Then he concentrated on his work and began to cast.

His casting was stronger. The golden light bloomed more quickly and steadily and grew comfortably, without the hesitation of his earlier casting.

“Let me try something,” I said. As I had done as the dome collapsed at the Midwinter Ball and as we’d practiced a dozen times since, I caught threads of his charm casting and drew them together. This time, instead of weaving a net or manipulating the charmed light in the air around us, I pulled a thin strand toward me. Thinking of the way that a spinning wheel or drop spindle twisted and bound fibers of wool, I pulled the disparate golden light taut and fine. It spooled as I twisted it.

Could I use this charm thread, drawn from the ether by someone else, in my own work? I directed the end of the spooled thread—thicker and less smooth than sewing thread, but visible only to a charm caster—toward the hem of a curtain. Concentrating, I drove it between the weave of the silk. It resisted; without my physical motions of a needle, it wanted to remain on the surface of the silk. I pushed it harder, and to my shock, it began to meld with the silk fabric itself, a thin gold line permeating the gray fabric, embedded like a slim line of dye.

“Well, what exactly did you do?” Theodor asked as he set his violin down. “Aside from—charm my curtains?”

“The curtains were just convenient,” I apologized. “I used the charm that you cast to imbue a physical item with a charm—what I usually do with my own casting.”

“Interesting. I mean, as an experiment. Hardly useful if you can cast yourself, though,” he said with a laugh. I forced a smile. It would be hardly useful if my work wasn’t somehow tainted.

“Unless,” I said, thinking out loud, “you could double a charm’s potency, or relieve a tired charm caster, or—I don’t know, I haven’t really thought it out.” Not to mention, I realized, I had bypassed any physical process to embedding the charm. No sewing, no inscribing in clay, no mixing herbs. I had simply pressed my plan upon the golden light, and it had complied. “I’ll have to check for its durability, though,” I added, mostly to myself. Still, I thought as I examined the golden light now a part of the fabric itself, it was possible I had opened the door to something new and potentially very practical.