"I'd rather be on those frozen slopes, facing an avalanche, than here."
I wanted to take those words right back because they were disrespectful to the memory of the men who had died in that avalanche.
"You don't mean it," my mother said.
"No, I don't."
Through the mirror, I saw Lotian walk into the room, his mouth curled in an amused smile. "I'd also take an avalanche over Madame Verrin's pins."
"You are both being silly." Cardilia crossed the gallery and stopped in front of me, her gaze sweeping over me, cataloging everything about me that a princess shouldn't be. The tan I'd brought back from the mountain, the calluses on my palms from garden work, the hooked nose I'd inherited and she'd somehow escaped.
"Your hands," she said, taking one of them in both of hers. "Idrilia, you can't go to the Catonian ball with hands like a stonemason's."
"Ursa is working on them. She says everything will be perfect by the time she dresses me for the ball."
Thankfully, Cardilia couldn't see my feet under the dress.
She turned my palm over, frowning at the rope burn that hadn't quite healed. "I just don't want them whispering about you. You give them so much to whisper about already."
That was Cardilia in a single sentence. She loved me, fully and without reservation, but she'd never once understood me. She'd been groomed since childhood to be the next Queen of Tarina, and she'd taken to it the way I'd taken to botany, until duty and personality had fused into a single refined entity.
She made our parents proud, and I was happy for her and for them, but I couldn't do what she did.
"I don't care," I said. "Let them whisper. People do that no matter what. I could be perfect and they'll still find something."
"Let her be, Cardilia." Lotian came to my rescue. "She climbed a mountain. The calluses at least make for a good story."
"You're not being helpful," Cardilia said.
"I never am. It's my one consistency." He grinned at me in the mirror and winked.
I felt the knot in my chest ease a fraction. Lotian always had my back. He was second in line and perfectly content to stay there, and that contentment had made him the only member of my family who didn't care that I didn't toe the line. In fact, he was proud of me for doing my own thing, and I loved him for it. I also loved him for needling our mother on my behalf so I didn't have to.
She would never admit it, but he was her favorite and could get away with stuff that Cardilia and I never could. Maybe it was because he was a man and our mother didn't have the same expectations of him. She wanted her daughters to be a reflection of her, majestic and proper, while Lotian was a mirror image of our easygoing father.
Our mother rose from the chaise, crossed to the dais, and the seamstress melted back, the way everyone melted back from Queen Margada of Tarina.
She studied me in the half-pinned gown, and I watched her decide which battle was worth fighting and which she'd let pass. Her nerves were close to the surface today. I could see it in the set of her jaw and the way her gaze kept flicking to the bolts of fabric as if their exact shade might be the thing that saved or doomed us.
"It will need taking in at the waist," she said to the seamstress. "And the silver thread at the collar, not the trim. The trim reads cheap from a distance."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Everything reads from a distance this year." My mother's hand settled on my shoulder. "I need all of you flawless. This is not an ordinary ball."
"It's the same ball it is every year," I said. "Old men and women congratulating each other on their cleverness while the rest of us starve in our finery because the speeches take forever and the food is served late."
"Not this year." Something in her voice made me look at her properly. "There are matters in motion within the Federation that you are fortunate not to carry. Alliances are shifting. What happens in Vedona this season could shape the next decade." Her fingers tightened, then released. "I need Tarina to look like it belongs in the conversation."
"Then have Cardilia dazzle them," I said. "She's the heir, she's beautiful, and she knows how to play the part and actually enjoys it. I can stand at the back in sky-blue and silver and let the lighting do the work."
"All my children represent Tarina," my mother said, in the tone that ended discussions. "Including the one who would rather be a botanist."
"Pharmacologist," I corrected. "Botany is only the half of it."
My mother chose not to hear me and turned to inspect Cardilia's half-finished dress that was draped over a mannequin.
Tarina was a small, unimportant province whose only currency was the border it shared with Elucia. I was its third child, plain by my own honest accounting, with calluses on my hands and a tan my mother despaired of, and no one in Vedona had ever spared me a second glance. Whatever was shifting in the Federation and making my mother's hands restless and the silver thread suddenly a matter of state, it would flow around me like it always had.
