She looked exhausted, her face drawn, tension at the corners of her mouth and eyes. I recognized the expression; my parents’ patients had often tried to disguise the extent of their pain. Angelique’s headaches might have lessened enough for her to get out of bed, but they hadn’t let up entirely.
“Have you tried putting a cold, damp cloth on the back of your neck when you feel a headache coming on?” I could no longer in good conscience leave her to the tender mercies of the chirurgeon. “It sometimes helps if you put a few drops of peppermint oil on it.”
Her brow drew down in puzzlement. “What? No.”
“You can also try taking ginger extract, or feverfew.”
“I don’t—” She stopped and began again. “That’s not what I brought you here to talk about.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to, though? Those remedies might not work, but they have more of a chance than wormwood smeared on your forehead. Or leeches.” I shuddered.
She shook her head, then stopped, grimacing. Her hand rose to press against her temple. The motion clearly hadn’t done her pain any favors. “You are so very odd. Now, listen: There’s a matter we need to discuss.”
She glanced into the hallway, to make sure the rest of the ladies had passed out of earshot, and then shut the door, leaving us in the dim light that crept in around the edges of the frame. I was beginning to wonder exactly what her intentions were. And whether I should object if an assignation in a closet was what she had in mind. But that didn’t strike me as her style.
“The others,” she said, “think that you’ve been putting on airs.”
“They do?” I racked my brain for what I might have been doing. Did I have some princessy habit giving me away? “Why would they? Do you?”
“I’m not certain.” She looked me up and down with that keen gaze of hers. “Why won’t you spin?”
I gaped at her in bewilderment; the answer to that question seemed obvious to me. “Are they blaming me for not sharing the risk?” I refrained from pointing out that Angelique did as little spinning as I did; being the king’s sister, I imagined, had its privileges here.
She blinked. Whatever answer she was expecting, that wasn’t it. “The risk? What on earth are you talking about?”
“The risk of death? Or a hundred years of sleep? Or any curse, really.”
A long pause followed before she spoke again. “Are you…are you worried that our spinning wheels areenchanted?”
“Aren’t you?”
“That doesn’t happen here!”
Now that I gave the matter a moment’s thought, I realized that without any sorcerers, witches, or evil fairies in Tailliz, the concern simply wouldn’t exist. I’d been avoiding anything with a spindle for so long it hadn’t occurred to me that the fear of them might not be universal.
“In Skalla, no one would touch one,” I said. “They’ve been banned for a century or more.”
“Because of the terrible peril,” she replied evenly, “of spinning wheels.”
“They’re ridiculously easy to enchant. It’s got something to do with the combination of rotating bits and stabby bits. They suck up dark magic like nobody’s business and spit it out on anyone so unlucky as to brush past. I thought you’d just accepted it.”
“You thought we’d accepted chancing death every time we want to make a shirt?”
“Well, I mean…you need the shirts, don’t you?”
Princess Angelique let out a long breath. “So very, very odd. What do you do for shirts in Skalla? Surely someone’s needed new clothes in the last hundred years.”
“Fairy godmothers are popular. And the fae folk can weave dresses out of cobwebs and moonlight.” They did have a tendency to dissolve back into cobwebs and moonlight if you tore them, which could be embarrassing at a dinner party. “My sister gets birds and mice to make most of her clothing. There’s all kinds of methods, really.”
“Fascinating.” She did not sound particularly fascinated. “But be that as it may, everyone here assumes you consider spinning beneath you. Handmaidens spin. Embroidery is reserved for ladies of higher station.”
“It is?” So much for my powers of observation. I’d worked out that seats by the fire were a sign of status, but it had escaped mynotice that the chores were structured by class position. It might have been easier if I’d been able to work out whether a baron’s daughter ranked higher than a viscount’s sister in Tailliz—assuming I could even keep track of which Yvette was which.
“I’ll let the others know you have strange foreign customs,” Angelique decided. “They’ll think you’re somewhat dim, be delighted by their own superior ways, and forgive you. I won’t mention the part about enchanted spinning wheels.” She turned and reached for the door handle, but then she hesitated and looked back at me. “You know a fair bit about magic, don’t you?”
“Some,” I said, wondering where this was headed. “It’s a basic survival skill in Skalla.”
“Are you a sorceress yourself?”
