“All together, they’re enough material to make a dress. Which layer goes on first?”
“Oh no. No, darling. One dress. One layer.” She reached over and pulled the second dress off the bed, unzipped the side of it, and held it open for me.
It wafted there as if made of spiderwebs.
“You have got to be joking.”
“What is the problem?”
“My arms will be bare. My legs, my neck.”
“Yes, of course. You are galvanized. Every stitch is your strength, your pride. In this gathering, you must be seen, your stitches revealed. Next gathering will be different. But for this, you stand with head high. Unafraid of what you are. Strong for your House. Here. Try this.”
She lifted the dress toward my head and I shrugged out of the bathrobe and into the soft gray material.
I’d expected it to be a disaster, but the dress floated down around my body, not too tight and with a lot more modesty than I’d expected. Both my arms were bare, ribbon straps covering just the crest of my shoulders, and while the back plunged enough that I could feel a breeze, the skirt fell to my feet, allowing the cleverly placed slits to give a glimpse of my leg up to my thigh when I walked.
“Yes,” she said, zipping up the side and steering me by the shoulders over to the full-length mirror. “I think this will do. So pretty.”
It had been years since I’d stood in front of a full mirror. It had been never since I’d worn a dress. So the woman who stared in mild shock back at me from that mirror was a little unfamiliar.
The dress fit perfectly, and the soft gray of it, along with a barrage of cleverly placed jewels, brought out the silver lines of my stitching that crossed beneath my collarbone, curved above my breast, and looped around my arms and wrists and hands.
Elwa pulled back my hair so the stitches down my cheek and neck were revealed. “Beautiful and strong,” she said.
I never much cared how much stitch I was showing out on the farm. After all, it had just been Grandma, Quinten, Neds, and me. But I had always been meticulous to hide my life stitches from anyone else.
Standing there in that dress didn’t make me feel vulnerable or exposed. I felt strong. Like I was getting all gussied up to go hunting for a different sort of feral beast.
“I can do this,” I said. “I can wear this one.”
“Good, good. Now we try on the shoes.”
That turned out to be more of a problem. I was not made to be balancing on stilts, and nothing Elwa did could convince me otherwise.
“I’ll just wear my boots,” I said for the hundredth time.
Elwa frowned. “No.”
“Then I will go barefoot. Listen, I’m letting you put me in frills, I’m letting you pull my hair up and stick pins and nonsense in it, but the high heels are never gonna happen.”
“Boots,” she muttered. “Show me.”
I pulled my boots out from under the edge of the bed, and she took them out of my hand like she was holding a dead rat. “I will see what can be done.”
“Wait—you can’t take them.”
“We have only a few hours before we leave. And if it must be boots,” she shrugged, “then it will be boots. But better than these.”
She clipped out of the room, and I changed back into my jeans and T-shirt. All this nonsense had shaken loose a small plan. A way to get Quinten out of the city as quickly as possible. A place for him to stay.
I didn’t dare write anything down or scan for information. If Reeves Silver had cameras hidden away in House Orange’s most private rooms, I could only assume he had done the same to House Gray.
Any plan I was going to try would have to be constructed solely in my head.
So I got busy constructing.
A couple hours later, there was a knock at the door.
