“Even with those teeth. You drink a lot of tea, don’t you?” she asked sympathetically as she leaned close to me, studying me intently.
I gave up on smiling. Anayla mouthed, “She’s mean to all of us. But she’s the best.”
Kami opened up a kit and began to apply various powders and lotions to my skin. “Drink this,” she said, holding something to my lips. Anayla nodded encouragingly, so I swallowed it. It tasted sweet and grassy all at once.
“There you are,” she said, stepping back. “You’ll need new clothes. Your wardrobe will be delivered tomorrow.”
“My wardrobe?”
To Anayla, she said, “What does she need besides training clothes and a few gowns? Does Fieran have any requests?”
I was about to respond tothatwhen I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and the words died on my tongue.
My hair was long and thick and shining, loose around my shoulders, and the color was the deep, burnished gold that it only was in the most flattering light. My skin was smooth and perfect, my cheeks shining and pink. I looked like the version of myself that one sometimes manages for a moment in the mirror, angled just the right way in flattering light, but never managesto keep.
“I’ve got to get her to dinner, Kami,” Anayla told her.
Kami clucked her tongue and gave me a sympathetic look. “I wonder how that will go!”
“That makes two of us.”
Anayla held the door open for Kami, and I caught a glimpse of Fieran outside, tall and broad shouldered; I could feel Kami’s beaming smile and joyful energy radiating toward him as soon as she saw him. He smiled in response, that irresistibly confident, charming smile.
He was smiling when he’d brought me into this fuckery?
“Fear and I usually have breakfast in the common room, though most of the clan eats downstairs,” Anayla said demurely, though with a raised brow that made me think she’d clocked my extra-murderous impulses toward Fieran. “Join us in the morning?”
I wasn’t sure which I dreaded more: a loud space full of shifters or a small space full of Fieran
Nineteen
Downstairs, the mess hall was another enormous room, with long tables filled with laughing, talking shifters. Anayla took a few quick steps ahead of me to throw her arm over Maura’s shoulders, the two of them turning inward to whisper. They looked close as sisters, their hair mingling as their mischievous faces dipped to each other’s ears.
I’d often felt alone in my village. I was even more alone here, where they all bantered so easily, pushed each other in teasing or slung their arms over each other’s shoulders. I hadn’t had such ease with anyone I was a little girl running in the schoolyard, before my friendships frayed.
There was an enormous buffet in front of us. I cut to the right, wanting to get away from the clan, and followed the lead of some others who were picking up plates.
The tables were heaped with more food than I’d ever seen in one place. I’d ended up at a table with a variety of savory and sweet hand pies. We were surrounded by more tables with more food than I’d ever seen in one place, and my mouth watered; I was torn between wanting to take two ofeverythingand needing to escape. I grabbed a meat pie and plopped it onto my plate, thenanother.
As I turned away, a shifter grabbed my arm. I looked up at him in shock.
“There’s a spill,” he said, pointing to a wet streak on the floor.
Before I could respond, someone else pushed a mop into my hand. I didn’t take it, so it started to fall, and I caught it before it could. I turned, but I couldn’t even see where they had gone.
I stood there for a second with the mop in one hand and my plate in the other, not quite sure what to do.
Suddenly Fieran was there. He took the mop out of my hand, pushed it across the spill, and then carried the mop in one hand as he half-pushed me toward the other side of the room.
“That’s not all you want to eat,” he said, handing over the mop to someone else. It was whisked out of sight before I could see where we were going in the crowd.
“I’m not hungry,” I told him.
“Mm.” He nodded to a seat at a long table filled mostly with unfamiliar faces, though Anayla, Maura, and Dairen were nearest us. “The rest of the clan is here.”
It was an overwhelming number of people. “I don’t?—”
“Sit.”
