With a sashay of her hips, Sophierial led Lark away. He glanced back at me once, lips pressed together and gaze hard, before following her into the estate. When they had gone, Cass and I turned to Semyaza who kept her distance from the Bone Court princess as she led us toward the opposite side of the manor. I realized then that I hadn’t the slightest clue when Rook had vanished. I looked back at the city behind us once more, wondering where he had gone.
The estate itself was nothing short of sheer elegance. The main halls, which Cass and I traipsed through warily, were arranged in a square surrounding a beautiful central courtyard which overflowed with crawling vines, porcelain statues, and marble fountains. Little offshoots from the hall opened up into larger concourses or separate rooms, all of which were light and airy, open and breezy.
The palace containing the Ivory Throne seemed to prefer not to use walls or windows when it didn’t have to. Most of the rooms were open on one side, furniture continuing into the outdoor area as though the atmosphere hadn’t changed at all. And truly, it hadn’t. Some magic kept the heat of the desert at bay, keeping the whole place at a consistently cool and comfortable temperature. But it brought the desert inside as well, in other ways. Carved from sandstone, this palace was not competing with nature, nor was it a refuge from it. It was one with its environment, capitalizing on the harsh vastness of the desert to bring out the beauty within the biome itself. It was an architectural wonder, a palace fit for the living gods within it.
I could have wandered the halls for hours, brushing my fingers over that smooth sandstone, eyeing every vine and bloom which boasted the Fae’s ability to create life where it did not thrive naturally, appreciating the sculptures and art adorning the walls and archways. But Semyaza was impatient with her role as attendant and hustled us into a room while muttering something about not keeping the Queen waiting. So I left the beauty of the estate behind and trudged forward into whatever the Queen of the Ivory Throne had waiting.
Chapter ten
A Feast Fit For A Queen
Lessthanhalfanhour later, I stood in front of an enormous, gold-plated mirror wearing an exact replica of the white gossamer gowns that Sophierial and Semyaza had been wearing. Semyaza had scrubbed me clean before magicking my blonde strands into some lifted style of the court and smacking my face with a pouf of white powder until I looked like an innocent cherub. Pleased with herself, she had left Cass and I alone in the dressing room and gone to inform Sophierial we were ready.
She hadn’t so much as touched Cass. Whether that was out of respect for the Bone Court or because she was terrified of the darker Fae, I wasn’t certain. Now Cass was walking up behind me with a grimace.
“You look just like them,” she said.
To a mortal, it might have been a compliment. Did I look like Aphrodite, the sexual goddess of love and beauty? Maybe Artemis, the innocent virgin goddess of the moon? But to me, I simply looked ridiculous. Like a bride still clinging to the mast of her chastity on a ship that had sailed long ago. I frowned.
“I thought you said I shouldn’t wear a court’s color until I had decided to be a part of it,” I recalled, wrinkling my nose at the fabric as I lifted it with a finger.
“Good listener,” Cass said, sucking her teeth.
“So why would she dress me in white?”
“To claim you,” Cass muttered and then added, with a shrug, “and to piss Lark off.”
My head swiveled so that my eyes snapped to hers.
“I can fix it,” Cass whispered conspiratorially, her eyes twinkling with mischief, “if you want. Unless you prefer to look every bit the chaste virgin.”
“How?” I asked.
She snapped a finger and the dress changed. I changed. My lips, now a deep cherry red, parted in surprise. Kohl lined my eyes, making them intoxicatingly dark. The pale powder was gone from my skin, replaced with a thin glittery shimmer over my natural skin tone. And the dress. It was now a shimmering gray, still light so as not to offend our host but most definitively not white, and the billowing sleeves were gone. Instead, it hung over my shoulders in two thick straps that dipped low to expose my cleavage and disappeared entirely in the back. The skirt was mostly the same. Only now, there was a long slit in the left side all the way up to my thigh. I knew without testing the theory that it would expose my entire leg when I walked. And my shoes. The simple satin ballerina flats were gone, replaced with shimmering silver stilettos. My eyes widened in shock.
“Too much?” Cass asked, biting a nail. “The shoes can take some getting used to.”
“I’ve been a working woman for forty years,” I told her. “I can walk in heels.”
Cass grinned.
“You look delicious,” she purred, gripping me by the shoulders and looking into my reflection with me. “You look… like us.”
Something stirred in my chest at that and I pushed it aside immediately. I shouldn’t feel a little flutter of pride in looking like them. I shouldn’t even be standing among them. I shouldn’t even be here.
“Lark told me you could take me back,” I said then, my smile having vanished. “If I want.”
Cass’ smile faltered as well. But she held my gaze.
“I could,” she told me then. “Any time you want.”
She waited. For me to give the command, for me to beg her to take me home. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should want to return to the university, to my uncle, more than I did. Maybe I would drown in guilt if I stayed here any longer. But this court and these people. I’d been here for less than forty-eight hours and I’d already learned more about the Fae than I ever could have hoped to back in the mortal plane. I owed it to myself, to academia, and in fact, to my uncle, to learn everything they could teach me before I returned. And not only that but I suspected that a certain DAA agent would await my return with questions I didn’t want to answer. Not yet.
“I’m starving,” I told Cass instead and her smile was back, spreading across her lips as she stuck out an arm and I wrapped mine around it.
Semyaza was not pleased when we finally emerged. That graceful smile of hers disappeared the moment she laid eyes on me. But I kept my head held high as I walked arm in arm with Cass all the way across the manor to the dining hall.
Sophierial was already inside. She and Lark were speaking too quietly for us to hear from outside so Cass and I stepped into the dining hall.
