Torn, page 18
My hands met the rough stone wall behind me, and I realized I’d backed away from him. “I have every intention of holding true to our bargain for Kristos’s sake,” I said in a low, angry whisper. “But I can’t be held responsible for doing things I’m unable to.”
Pyord cocked his head, his gaze nearly paternal and entirely unwelcome. “You’re capable of so much more than you know, Sophie. So much more.”
I seethed under his patronizing smile.
“Your next step, of course, alongside learning your new skill, is to obtain a commission from the royal family. You spend enough time playing at Lady Viola Snowmont’s house. I am confident you will come into the acquaintance of the queen or princess soon.” His brows rose as though he’d just remembered something, but I assumed it might as well have been an act.
“I can’t guarantee that. I have many clients among the nobility, but—”
“I have no doubts a commission can be arranged. You seem on exceptionally friendly terms with certain highly influential members of the nobility. You have not only called on the Lady Snowmont’s personal residence to do business—quite familiar behavior, I must say—you and the First Duke are on quite friendly terms, it seems.”
I tried for words, but none came.
Pyord shrugged. “Yes, I had you followed. Insurance, you know. My man saw the duke’s servant, in his full livery, at your shop.” I recalled the man hovering outside my door in patched breeches, whom I had assumed to be a common gawker, and felt ill with the violation of my privacy. “You don’t tailor men’s clothing, so I assume the visit was personal.”
“That seems to be more than insurance,” I managed to say through clenched teeth.
“It’s almost amusing, really, that a seamstress can worm her way into circles that a learned man cannot.” Pyord’s smile was cold.
Was Pyord jealous? I considered my words carefully. Angering him wouldn’t benefit me now. “I suppose there is always a line between those of noble and non-noble families, even at the university.”
“Despite my reputation and publications, despite everything I have achieved in my field.” He flared, then reconsidered. His cool demeanor returned. “Yes. I have professional acquaintances, of course, of noble birth, but one does not socialize outside of one’s station at the university. And given my birth, I will never be anything more than a subordinate lecturer.”
I could appreciate his motivations—snubbed by the nobility, never elevated to equality with them in spite of working alongside them. And he was learned—he knew the downsides of our particular system, had studied the potential for others. The ancient Pellians, I remembered Kristos saying, were more democratic in their form of governance. Perhaps the modern revolution Pyord wanted had been born out of reading ancient texts. I considered, again, his demands of me, and his intentions to assassinate the king. A learned man, a seemingly ethical man, yet willing to incorporate dark magic and murder into his plans—it was paradoxical. Or, I considered as evenly as I could, perhaps it wasn’t. I couldn’t fathom believing in the seedlings of a cause so intensely that I was willing to do anything—truly anything—to see it blossom. Pyord did, and would water the seeds of revolt with whatever blood they required.
And he had Kristos. I imagined what he could have done to him already, what sort of horrid cellar or drafty attic he might have him imprisoned in. The taunts and intimidation he surely threw at him to keep him as compliant as possible, as he did with me.
“I want proof.”
“What?” Pyord’s forehead wrinkled with surprise.
“Proof my brother is alive, proof he’s well. I want him to write me a letter. I want him to seal it and to sign over the seal.”
“I could force him to write whatever I wanted,” he said with a lilting smile, but the amusement was forced.
“You could. But you know as well as I that Kristos has his own voice in his writing.”
Pyord ceded the point with a nod. “He’s gifted enough that I could not copy him—and you know him better than I.”
I hoped, fervently, that Kristos could slip details or warnings to me into his writing. Maybe he could give me some hint of where he was being held, or even what the plot against the king entailed. If nothing else, I would have some assurance of his safety. “So you will provide me with a letter from him. Soon.”
“All right. I’ll acquiesce, if only to prove to you that I do have him and that he will be punished if you do not do precisely what I ask.” There was a cruel glint in his smile. I hoped I hadn’t put Kristos in more danger.
“Thank you.” There was no gratitude in my voice.
“I will contact you soon, and I expect a report on your progress with curse casting. And I shall have your letter for you.” Then he put out the lamp and closed the book.
22
I ARRIVED AT THE SHOP BEFORE PENNY AND ALICE, DETERMINED to lay to rest Pyord’s theories once and for all. He would know if I was lying, I was quite willing to bet, so I had to try as honestly as I could.
I settled myself into my chair behind the screen, where I did all of my charm casting. I picked up a scrap of purple-sprigged cotton and a needle threaded with stark white thread. What kind of curse could I even cast? I racked my thoughts—I could wish that Pyord would break his neck.
The mere thought chilled me. I couldn’t wish that. I mustered my courage and instead thought about simple bad luck. Picking the wrong horse at the track, catching every cold all winter long. Stepping in horseshit on the street and tripping over loose cobblestones. I thought of Pyord suffering each of these mild misfortunes, ignoring an instinctive warning that made my stomach clench, and then reached outside myself as I did when I cast charms.
There was nothing. No light surrounded my needle as it did when I charm casted, but nothing else, either. What I worked into the cloth were plain backstitches.
Maybe, I thought as I tugged on the thread, I needed some sort of crutch. I had sometimes mumbled words to myself as a child, makeshift incantations to keep my focus on the charm and off outside distractions. I had long since outgrown this, but, blushing even though no one could see, I tried it again now. The words were an embarrassed jumble, and I felt even further from crafting a curse than before.
The stitches stayed plain. I sewed a few more absent inches, trying to feel only the linen thread under my fingers, the eye of the needle, situating myself solely in the present and the work itself. I inhaled and tried to exhale the habits and assumptions that surrounded charm casting for me. If I could expunge myself of charms, perhaps I could channel a curse.
I tried again, imagining misfortune, naming dark wishes in my mind.
Nothing.
The shop door banged open, and Alice called a greeting from the front room. Any experiment would have to wait until after my assistants left for the day. Not only could I not concentrate on something so difficult and foreign to me with them close by, but our full slate of orders demanded my attention. As pressing, and far less cheering: as soon as Penny arrived, I had to deploy my lie so that she could stop looking for Kristos.
Alice and Penny both waited for me in the front room. They held a market basket between them, a yeasty, sugared smell wafting from it. “We thought you could use some cheering up,” Alice explained, lifting the cloth covering a beautiful array of scones and pastries. “My cousin works at the bakery down by the harbor and snuck these out for me. They’re defective,” she added, matter-of-fact.
I eyed something golden brown and glazed with cinnamon. Faint guilt surfaced that they were taking care of me, when as their employer I shouldn’t have needed it, but the scones looked delicious. I hadn’t eaten anything before attempting to work the curse, and even fighting unsuccessfully with it had left me ravenous. “Thank you, both,” I said, then shored up my resolve—I had to deliver my lie to Penny.
I snagged the cinnamon scone from the basket and beckoned Penny to come outside with me. The morning sun wasn’t doing much to warm the air outside, but I wanted some modicum of privacy.
“Penny,” I began, chewing my lip, unsure what to say. “I heard from Kristos.”
“He’s all right! Where is he? Is he coming home?” She paused. “I’m going to box his ears.”
“You’re going to want to do more than that,” I added, stopping myself as though I hadn’t meant to say anything out loud. “He wrote to me once he was safely out of town—he decided to take a job as a sailor.”
“Of all the—now? Why? The League, the movement—why would he run away from his work here?”
I shook my head as though just as bewildered as Penny. “I don’t know.” I thought of the explanations I could add—maybe there was a falling-out, maybe he had run afoul of the law, maybe he was afraid of the repercussions—but any of them could be investigated, exposed. “I don’t understand,” I added weakly.
Penny bit her lip, fighting with the words. “Why didn’t he tell me?”
“Probably the same reason he didn’t tell me,” I lied. “He didn’t want us talking him out of it.”
“Well, why didn’t he at least write to me?”
The question hung like ripe fruit between us. Of course—any real lovesick boy would have written to his girl. The potential flaw in my lie.
“I don’t know,” I said again.
“I thought I was actually special to him,” she said in a low whisper. A tear coursed down her cheek. I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. I remembered falling for a boy who worked at the butcher shop when I was fourteen—how I was convinced his confident grin when I bought soup bones meant he liked me, too, how I was overjoyed when he took me for a walk in Fountain Square on market day. And how I was devastated when I saw him promenading with another girl the next week. There was no way to protect Kristos except by lying, but making Penny question his feelings for her was cruel.
Cruel, but unavoidable.
“I’m sorry, Penny. You can … take the morning off if you want. Or the day. With pay. It’s all right, whatever you need.” Feigning ignorance was necessary to protect Kristos, but it also meant that I could find no good way to offer Penny any comfort. My financial loss in Penny’s unproductive wages was worth any comfort I could offer.
“No, I’d rather work. I feel so stupid—but I should have known better.”
I couldn’t find any way to disagree with her without betraying the truth. Instead, we went back inside and finished a pair of mitts and a muff and a cloak. I imagined Kristos reuniting with a very angry Penny. Perhaps he could dream up a reason for ditching his sweetheart that I couldn’t think of. Of course, that hinged on getting Kristos away from Pyord alive, which wouldn’t happen before I had fulfilled my part in Pyord’s scheme. Inside the workshop, it felt almost too much like a normal day, silk and cotton and linen transformed by needle and thread into gowns and jackets, that familiar magic never failing to please my sensibilities. The russet jacket I had begun was taking shape under Alice’s careful construction, and I began the pinked and pleated trim while Penny hemmed a pomegranate-pink dressing gown, its main seams well-charmed for good health. I could almost fall into our shop’s comfortable rhythms and forget about the task I had to return to, but as evening fell, shadows crept into the atelier, and Penny and Alice began tidying up for the day, I knew it was unavoidable. As soon as both had left, I returned to my corner and took up my needle and thread again.
I began at the same place as before, imagining misfortunes and trying to force them into the cloth with my stitches. Nothing happened except a row of jagged and uneven backstitches that revealed the frustration building in my chest, pinching my breath. There was something missing, something Pyord didn’t understand because he knew only books and theories, not practice. I didn’t want to discover it for myself, and I hated him for forcing me. It was an ugly feeling, a bitter, dark pit like the heart of a plum knitting itself into my thoughts.
In that moment, I realized the difference between my charm casting and how I had attempted to cast a curse. I didn’t imagine good fortune for my charms—that is, I didn’t envision good things happening as much as I accessed some form of vibrant, dynamic joy that existed outside my imaginings. This was the light around my needle. I didn’t create it, as I was trying to do with the curse, with my thoughts—I simply harnessed it. I had grown so used to seeing it, to accessing it and gripping it with my needle—or, likely more accurately, my mind—that I had stopped looking for it, and in not looking for it, I had forgotten that I felt it, too.
I would have to actively look for the darkness—and I would have to find my way to it by feeling it first, through an invisible internal map like the one I had created, slowly and over time, for the light. I started with the angry, bitter pit of hate.
At first I merely circled it, tracing it with my thoughts, becoming more mired in it, and in myself. I forced myself outward, trying to tie what I felt to something outside myself, something as alive and independent as the light was. I began to feel a strange confidence that it was there, that what I felt, black and cold, in me, had a counterpart outside myself, inhabiting the ether as the light did. I pulled at it, pushed myself, and felt a final, strong resistance. I didn’t want to see it, I understood—I not only didn’t want to see it by training and disposition, but by some primal instinct, the same instinct that made rabbits run from foxes and hawks and made humans shy away from dark alleys and deep caverns.
I pushed past that resistance, trying to forget what I was doing, and it was as though a tiny yet fundamental door swung open in my awareness. I saw it—I could trace my own understanding of darkness into something outside myself and see it, black and glittering and repulsive and enticing.
Without thinking any further about the implications, I reached out and caught a strand of it with my thoughts, the way I did with the charm-bound light. I pulled it toward me, binding it to my needle, pulling it into the next stitch I took.
A thin black line twined around my needle, entered the cloth, and held.
I gasped, almost losing it back into the ether. Instead, I held it, taking a few small backstitches. The thread embedded the hard, dark sparkle just as it did the faint light I was used to. I kept sewing, pulling the darkness into the cloth.
I finished a seam, then looked up. My eyes felt hot, and a viselike pressure wrapped around my head. I set the needle down, blinked, and was promptly overtaken by nausea. I made it to the scrap bin before my stomach overturned, and my eyes flooded with tears as I coughed and retched.
I could do it, I realized with lead settling into my now-empty stomach. I could cast curses. And unlike the refreshed lightness that finishing a session of charm casting gave me, casting a curse was going to tax me in a way I had never encountered.
23
THERE WAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MY NEWFOUND UNDERSTANDING of curses except wait for the commission Pyord was sure would come, and in the meantime I had to keep the shop running as though nothing was amiss. Within a week, I was ready to fit Lady Viola’s gown and decided that, instead of sending a messenger to request an appointment, I would go myself to see if she was home. I winced—Pyord was right that I had acquired a certain familiarity with Lady Snowmont if I was comfortable marching up to her door and knocking, and I checked for hooded figures outside my shop before leaving. I walked to her house, trying to put distance between myself and the guilt I felt for lying to Penny. It didn’t work.
As I turned the corner onto the avenue that bordered the river, something tugged at my peripheral vision. I glanced sideways at the figure walking just behind me, a few paces off to my left. There was a flash of red where the cap he had stuffed in his waistband peeked out from under his jacket.
I picked up my pace, and he stayed alongside me, as though in step for some complicated military maneuver. My sewing kit, with needles and thread and wax and a single pair of very sharp scissors, knocked against my thigh, buried in my pocket. I wrapped my hand around it, finding the scissors and gripping them.
The man, nondescript aside from the red cap he carried, was still there as I continued toward Viola’s, turning off the crowded avenue and onto a narrow street. Don’t let a thief or a rake force you out of a crowded area, Kristos had always said. And, It’s better to fight than let someone take what isn’t theirs to have.
My fingers constricted around the scissors, my only weapon. But if the man was Pyord’s hired hound, what could I do? If I fought him, Pyord might retaliate by hurting my brother. In any case, this man was only one of the men Pyord must have at his disposal. He wasn’t my problem; Pyord was. I let the scissors drop back into my pocket. If he wanted to follow me, I was powerless to stop it.
He peeled off as I reached Viola’s gate, and I tried not to watch him stalk across the street and hover under an ornamental tree. The maid let me in and announced me to Viola, then invited me to wait in her private sitting room. A painting stood on an easel in the corner, unfinished. A woman, draped in a dressing gown and reclining in a chair, laughed at me from the canvas. The rich colors of the center of the painting bled into plain white at the edges, and the setting was unclear. I squinted, recognizing the upholstery on the chair the woman lounged in. It faced me across the room.
Of course Viola would paint here, I reasoned, but the picture possessed a faintly private quality—the intimate space of her boudoir, the casual dressing gown, the natural, laughing face. I felt as though I was intruding. This wasn’t a formal portrait, but something I had never encountered before. Like a sketch composed in a moment, capturing a scene, but crafted into a painting.
“I suppose you want the gown off,” Viola called as she swept into the room, her voice ringing ahead of her like a bell. She caught me looking at the painting and stopped.
“It’s very nicely done,” I stammered, convinced that I shouldn’t have seen this half-finished work. “The painting, I mean.”
