The sleeves were sheer. Iridescent and embroidered with the same pattern that adorned the rest of the garment. They seemed much too long.
“It turned out well, I thought.”
I rammed my knee into the bottom left post of the bed. “Fu—” I swallowed the word down, choked on it, and started coughing.
I had to hang onto the bedpost to keep myself from careening forward from the force of my cough onto my unreliable knee.
Garrick’s mother got to her feet quickly and pounded a fist on my back to help me clear the cough. She alternated the motion with wide, arching circles between my shoulder blades.
“I… I did not realize anyone was here,” I sputtered.
“I should not be,” she said, glancing over her shoulder to the spot where she’d been seated on the floor, between the bed and the window. “This is your room now.”
“It’s Garrick’s,” I said. Stupid. I sounded stupid.
“One and the same now, I think,” she said with a knowing smile. A motherly smile. Not that I’d had a mother long enough to remember what that looked like. But I could make logicalassumptions. “I come up here sometimes to enjoy the daylight. My room is deep within the inner spiral. It doesn’t get any natural light.”
Garrick had told me, but it felt worse hearing it from her directly. I could not imagine never seeing the sky. “Of course.”
She drew back a step, giving me more space, and dipped into a very proper curtsey.
“Iravena,” she said. “I am Garrick’s mother.”
“I know.” Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
I did not know what else to say. This was only the second time I had seen her. Garrick favored his father in appearance—the blue-green eyes, the silver hair, the breadth of his shoulders. I searched for him in Iravena’s face. He was there in the shape of her nose and the curve of her lips. I wondered if she smirked the way he did. Maybe she’d never had the occasion. That empty part of my chest ached. I rolled my shoulders to banish the discomfort. There was already plenty of it in this exchange.
Iravena nodded over my shoulder. “Do you like your gown for the Winter Tithe?”
I frowned, not understanding. But she moved past me to the wardrobe. The gown. Gods, I’d forgotten it completely. Which was a travesty. I’d never owned something so spectacular, living or dead.
“It is an homage to your familiar,” Iravena explained. “I hope she will forgive me. I was not able to capture all of her colors. I don’t believe a human ever could. But I thought it turned out well.”
The lavender fabric, the turquoise and emerald thread that seemed to move. It evoked Isanara’s scales. The long, sheer sleeves, cut wide to hang in a graceful arc… they were reminiscent of her wing membranes. Of course I had been drawn to it. Garrick’s mother’s interpretation of my dragon was beautiful beyond?—
Garrick’s mother. Iravena.
My breath tried to desert me.
“You made this,” I said softly, with the bit of air that remained in my chest. “You made all my clothing.” All the new pieces that arrived in the wardrobe each fit perfectly to my body. I’d assumed that Garrick had paid off a troupe of servants somewhere in the castle, but it was his mother.
She’d only seen me once, in the throne room on the night I’d broken out of the bathhouse. New garments had appeared almost daily. She must have spent hours every single day crafting them.
“How?” I asked.
My awe earned me a small smile.
“I am good at approximating sizes,” Iravena said. “My son weighed in on the styles. But I used my own judgment. Garrick can be…” She shrugged her slim shoulders and smiled again. Yes, I knew exactly how Garrick could be.
I was already barely breathing. My throat decided this would be a good time to close, too. My eyes burned. My entire body seemed ready to turn on me.
“No one has ever taken care of me like this before,” I managed to rasp. Except that was not true. Who had carried me from the Devotion Gate when I could not walk? Who had cooked for me night after night as we climbed the mountains between the gates? Garrick. Her son. “Garrick has,” I said softly.
Iravena’s smile deepened, a series of interlocking lines appearing around the corners of her mouth. Guessing ages was always difficult. Fae, witches, and humans all aged differently. But Garrick had been working in Velora as a bounty hunter for almost tweny years, and he’d been in Balar Shan for a decade before that. He was an adolescent when he came… Iravena must be past fifty. Half a century. More than halfway through her mortal life.
But when she smiled at the thought of her son, she looked decades younger.
“Then I did the right thing, keeping him from here for as long as I could.” She exhaled with her whole body. “And letting him go after…”
