"This one." She opens the poetry book to a blue ribbon. "Evander read it to me before I'd told him my family name. He didn't know I was anyone. He read it because we reached for the same shelf."
Her thumb hovers over the page without touching it.
"I want the first line here." She touches her collarbone. "Where a necklace would sit. Small enough that from three steps away, it looks like a vine."
"And from one step away?"
"From one step away, it's ours."
I have been making wedding dresses for eleven years. I know every kind of bride. The ones who want armor. The ones who want disguise. The ones who want their mother to finally say the thing she has never said.
I have never had a bride ask me to sew a library into her gown.
I pick up my pencil.
We work for two hours, and it is the easiest consultation of my life. She wants a line from Evander's first letter running along the inside of the hem. She wants the archive's catalog number for the shelf where they met embroidered into one cuff.
"It's a very good number," she says solemnly.
I have to put my pencil down.
"Marginalia," I say when the first sketch is done. "That's what this dress is. Notes in the margins of a book only two people have read."
Brynna goes still.
"Write that down," she says. "I want to say it to Evander at the wedding."
I laugh and turn back to the sketch. The lines of text climbing the bodice need an anchor at the shoulder. Something for them to grow from.
My hand does what it always does.
I draw an oak leaf crossed by a needle, with thread winding around them.
Brynna stops talking.
"Where did you learn that?"
I look down at the page. "Learn what? It's a filler motif. I use it everywhere. It's on half the dresses in this shop. It's probably on the curtains."
"Lissy." She turns the sketchbook toward herself, careful with the page. "That's the Oak and the Needle."
My stomach tightens.
"Well... yes. It's an oak and a needle. It's a dressmaker's mark. The tree is for growing, and the needle is for creating."
She shakes her head slowly. Not to disagree. She looks stunned.
"I did my archive work on regional versions of old tales," she says. Her voice has gone quick and precise. "There is a fable called The Fable of the Oak and the Needle. The older manuscript copies have this exact symbol on the binding. The leaf, the needle, the thread. I've only seen it twice, and you just drew it without thinking."
The kettle begins to sing behind me.
I don't move.
"It's a story," I say. "A seamstress and a lord. It ends badly."
"You know it?"
"I could recite it in my sleep." My back has gone cold, and I don't know why. "My grandmother read it to me. Every Sunfell dress carries..."
