"I was nineteen," he says. "Raiders came at the east wall in winter. My mother took an arrow before anyone raised the alarm. I was the one who found her in the snow."
He says it like a battle report, which is worse than if his voice shook.
"I froze. I stood there doing nothing while my mother bled." He turns the lantern side of his face toward me. "She lived, but some of it stayed permanent. I haven't sat easy in a room since. Any room. I walk in and find the doors, the exits, the things that could go wrong, and I watch them. Weddings are the worst. Everyone I love in one place. It would be the perfect place for an ambush."
I remember Lady Ishara's careful breathing and the way she favors one side.
I don't say I'm sorry. He would hate it, and it isn't what this moment needs.
"You froze," I say instead. "That's what you've built all this on? Torgan, you were nineteen."
He shakes his head. "You asked what happened. That's what happened. Your turn."
I blink. "My turn?"
The tune behind the wall changes.
I could give him something small. I have a dozen harmless truths sorted and ready, the way I keep spare buttons. Myabsent-mindedness. My fear about the shop. The customer I once pinned a dress to at the hip.
Safe truths.
But he gave me something else.
"I've never let myself want a wedding," I say.
It comes out plainer than I've ever said it to anyone. I have never said it to anyone. Not Lyra. Not Grammy.
Especially not Grammy.
Torgan goes still.
I thread my fingers together. "Not the marriage. The wedding. Any of it. I've made hundreds of wedding dresses, and I love them more than anything. But I stand at the edge of every wedding and pretend I don't want to step inside."
The story is right there. The curse. I step around it.
"Women in my family don't get them. We make them. That's the arrangement. It's a good arrangement. A fine one."
The courtyard goes watery, and I blink hard.
"But tonight, Evander read one page of a whole book he wrote for Brynna, and there is an entire story waiting for them. So I had to leave."
Silence. My face burns despite the cold.
"So there." I give him a little flourish with my hands. "The dressmaker doesn't let herself want the dress. Laugh whenever you like."
"I'm not going to laugh."
"You should. It's funny. It's the funniest thing about me."
"Lissy."
He is standing closer. I don't remember either of us moving, but the lantern is behind him now, and he is looking down at me the way he did during our dance. Before the mask came back. When he forgot every rule he has.
He is forgetting them now.
"You should want the dress," he says, low, as though the words cost him. "You should want the whole..."
He doesn't finish.
