Torn by Rowenna Miller

Author:Rowenna Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2018-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

27

ALICE COULD TALK OF NOTHING BUT THE PALACE THE NEXT DAY, but though I dutifully worked on their orders, I wanted to forget the exchange. They may have been princess and queen, but Annette and Mimi—I couldn’t help but remember her as Mimi—were kind, normal people. I didn’t want to curse them. If Mimi had been awful, would it have made things easier?

I admitted to myself that, yes, it would have. As terrible as it was, compromising my principles would have been less horrid if I had felt that the victims were deserving. Pyord certainly did—solely because they were royalty and stood in the way of his goals. Weren’t there more people like me, like Alice and everyone else doing business on our street? I fumed quietly. People who perhaps wanted change but didn’t want to tear the world apart to get it? Why did Pyord and the Red Caps speak for the rest of us?

Not that it mattered—to keep him from hurting my brother, I had to do what he said. So I cut a length of yellow silk and began sketching out designs for embroidery. I couldn’t cover the shawl—not and have time for Annette’s commission—so I mapped out a twining design of vines and buds and leaves, culminating in explosions of blooms at the corners.

I couldn’t work on the cursed garment while Alice and Penny were in the studio—not with the violent side effects I was left with from curse casting. So I started on Annette’s instead, unrolling a length of ice-blue silk taffeta and placing silver trims next to it to test the colors.

“There’s someone here to talk to you,” Penny said. “In the front. Oh, I like that one,” she added, pointing to a silver braid that I also fancied.

“Cut a few swatches of the combinations I have laid out,” I directed her. “And have them sent to the palace.” Penny grinned.

To my surprise, Lieta was waiting for me in my front room. She had never visited me at work, and the lines of worry on her face concerned me. “Oh, Miss Sophie. I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she said.

I wished she hadn’t been so deferent—I knew from observation if not from direct proximity that Pellian custom respected age, not status. But Lieta was meeting me here, a Galatine milieu, and seemed ill at ease doing so. “Grandmama,” I said, hoping that I was using the respectful familiar term correctly, “what’s the matter?”

“I need help,” she nearly whispered. “The new taxes—I wasn’t expecting them, and I owe the surgeon money, he pulled my tooth last week, and—”

“Wait—new taxes?”

“You don’t know?” She sank onto the bench by the door. Lieta looked frailer than usual, her gray hair working its way out from under her kerchief. “They’ve levied a new tax, to pay for the new soldiers and patrols in the city. On the markets.”

“They’re taxing the markets? But not us—” And then I understood. The vendors at the markets were mostly poorer farmers, tradespeople who could

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