Chapter One
Esme
It takes two hours to make a girl worth buying.
Darina slides the last pin into place while the light through the balcony doors turns orange.
“Stop frowning,” she says. “You’ll crack the powder.”
“Good. Maybe he won’t want me.”
She meets my eyes in the vanity mirror and doesn’t smile, which means I sound worse than I think I do.
I study myself instead, since that’s what two hundred people downstairs will be doing soon enough. Red hair pinned high and threaded with thin, gold leaves, blue eyes, and rosy skin that shows everything. Which is why I learned young to lie with my posture and keep my chin steady while my throat goes pink. I’m thin and elegant, because I was raised to mind my weight and keep my curves discreet under good tailoring. Every visible part of me is arranged to suggest breeding, wealth, and obedience.
The dress hangs on the stand by the wardrobe. It’s emerald green silk, chosen by my mother because green flatters my red hair.
“Arms up,” Darina says.
I stand and lift them, and she lowers the dress over my head with more care than the silk deserves. She works the small buttons up my spine with quick, warm fingers, humming under her breath. She only hums when she’s nervous for me and won’t say so.
“Have you ever seen him up close?” she asks. “Lord Wycliffe?”
“Across dinner tables, at Father’s political evenings.” I hold still so she can reach the top buttons. “He always sits near the most important men in the room and laughs half a second after they do. He’s older than Father by twenty years and richer by more, and when he looks at me, he takes his time.”
“Maybe he’s kind,” she says.
“He’s influential. In this house, that’s considered the same thing.”
She finishes the last button, turns me around by the shoulders, and looks at me honestly, which nobody else in this house bothers to do.
“You look beautiful,” she says.
“I wish I didn’t.” I sigh. “I wish I were ugly, Darina. Properly ugly, the kind powder can’t fix. Ugly girls don’t get promised to old men with good connections.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
She takes my hands in hers and squeezes them.
“It’s one evening. You’ll dance, you’ll drink something you’re not supposed to, and you’ll survive it. And maybe you talk to your parents. Tell them plainly that Wycliffe is a bad match. They want this family to look strong, and a miserable daughter doesn’t look strong.”
I huff out a bitter laugh.
“I’ve never convinced my parents of anything in twenty-two years. I couldn’t convince them to let me choose my own shoes. Mother picks those, too. Green tonight, to match the dress I also didn’t pick.”
“Then good luck anyway,” she says quietly.
She hugs me, careful of the pins, and I hold on until she laughs and pushes me toward the door. Then I go downstairs to be looked at.
The grand staircase curves down into the front hall in wide marble steps, and I’m three steps down when the hall below goes quiet. There are two hundred guests tonight, give or take, and every face that matters in Concord turns up toward me. I know how to do this part. I keep my chin level, my hand light on the rail, and my face set in the smile Mother taught me. They watchthe only daughter of Aldric Elmsley come down to them, and I let them watch, because that’s what I’m for.
The ballroom is beautiful. I can hate this evening and still admit that. Chandeliers burn above a floor of pale polished stone, the tall windows stand open to the gardens, and musicians play at the far end behind banks of white hothouse flowers.
Concord builds everything this way – pale stone, clean lines, order you can see from across a room. Father likes to say we live in the richest and most civilized walled city in the south, a city that keeps treaties with monster cities most humans won’t even name at dinner, a city that puts everything in writing. Half the council is here tonight, along with the big trade families and two magistrates, all of them drinking Father’s wine and speaking in the low, pleasant voices of people who own things.
Mother finds me first. She adjusts a curl at my temple and studies the result.
