I stop.
Grammy's stitch. The single strand of pink silk hidden in every hem. For luck.
Why have I never put the stitch and the story together before?
Brynna watches me without rushing me.
"Tell me how your version ends," she says. "The one you were raised on."
The kettle keeps singing. I take it off the heat because my hands need something to do.
Then I tell her.
The seamstress and the lord fall in love. They marry and have a child, but their families tear them apart. The lord dies young at the hand of a trusted friend and is buried with a blanket the seamstress made for him. The seamstress gives up her dreams, and their child is raised by her grandmother.
I finish with the words Grammy always used.
"And so the story repeats. Wanting is the needle, and the world is the oak. The needle that sews against the grain will break. That is the seamstress's curse. She will make dresses forother women, but she will never have a happy ending of her own."
My mouth is dry.
My life follows the story too closely for it to be a coincidence. My father was a lord. His family disowned him for loving my mother, and one of his friends killed him in a duel. Then my mother disappeared, and Grammy raised me.
Grammy lived her own version before that. So did her mother.
How many times does a story have to happen before it becomes a curse?
I can't let it happen to me.
Brynna is quiet for a long moment.
"That matches the newer archive copy," she says at last. "There are two in the royal collection, and they don't agree. The newer one is perhaps a century old. It ends the way yours does. The older one was damaged in a fire, and the last pages are missing."
She taps the oak leaf once.
"But the middle is different, Lissy. Longer. It doesn't read like a warning against wanting more. There's a term we use for texts like that. A warning that ate its own story."
"I don't know what that means."
"It means someone changed what the story was for."
She sits back. "Does your family have an old copy?"
There it is.
"My grandmother has one," I say. "It sits on her mantel, and it doesn't leave her mantel. I'm sorry. It's hers. It isn't mine to lend out."
Brynna studies me. I expect her to push, but she doesn't.
Somehow, that makes me feel worse.
"Then I'll say only one more thing." She gathers her books and winds her scarf around her neck. "The archive catalog lists where each copy was collected, generations ago."
She pauses at the door.
"Both came from Starling Vale."
The bell jingles, and she's gone.
