POV: tress
Summary
Tress has stopped lying to herself about why she climbs to the mansion. Charlie is, she has decided, like a pair of good leather gloves — the kind that mold to your hands and that you forget you are wearing — and the longer she spends with him the better the moonshadows look and the lighter her work feels. Love has always frightened her because the way the other youths talk about it makes it sound less like a comfortable pair of gloves and more like a hot coal that burns the hands holding it. With Charlie it feels more like a coal banked carefully in a stove: warm, contained, and giving heat where she wants the heat. So when his hand finds hers again, she does not pull it away. He freezes — they have touched before, but never quite like this — then leaves the hand there. He blushes, raises it at last to push it sheepishly through his hair, and the moment, somehow, holds.
She gropes for the right thing to say. Half a dozen graceful lines suggest themselves, and what she produces instead is, "Hands are warm," followed by a laugh that breaks halfway through and comes out, by pure bad luck, sounding exactly like an elephant seal. Charlie looks at her and smiles a slow, growing, newly confident smile she has never seen before — the smile of someone who has just decided, *elephant seal notwithstanding,* that he loves her.
Over Charlie's shoulder, Tress sees the duke standing in a window above them in his medal-pinned military jacket. He is not smiling. The only time she has ever seen him smile was at the punishment of old Lotari, who once tried to slip off the island as a stowaway, and a single smile from the duke is the kind of thing that uses up the day's allowance of teeth for an entire family. He fades back into the shadow of the house without a word. The silence that follows is the tense pause after a lightning flash, and it stays with her all the way back down the path. She makes her excuses to her parents, tells them she is tired, and goes to her room to wait for the soldiers' knock that does not come. She begins, faintly, to hope she was reading too much into the duke's face — and then she remembers his one smile, and her hope fails her. The worry nips at her all night.
She rises before dawn to do the marketing, hair wrestled into a tail, and finds the streets already loud. Men are sweeping inert grey spores off the path and the townspeople are gathered in chattering knots. She braces herself for the news, tells herself it cannot possibly be worse than the night she has just had, and is wrong: the duke has had a proclamation posted. He and his family are leaving the island that very day. His ducal heir has come of age, the announcement says, and is to be presented to the various princesses of the civilized seas for betrothal. Tress — practical, polite, considerate Tress — does no more than briefly consider shredding her shopping basket, briefly weigh the merits of swearing at the top of her lungs, and briefly entertain the idea of marching up to the mansion to demand the duke change his mind. She does, in the end, none of it. She finishes her shopping in a numb haze.