I’ve seen Fae clothing on the court members. I assumed it was silk. I reach out and touch it. It’s not.
“What is this fabric?” I ask.
“It’s something the Lithenmere produces, spun from fibers that grow in the deep gardens,” she says.
The material moves like liquid and catches light from angles that shouldn’t be possible.
The color is deep crimson. Almost black in the folds, burning red where the light hits.
“For the bondmate of Lord Maximus,” the attendant says. “The mountain chose the color.”
The mountain chose my dress color. I’m going to need a minute with that.
She helps me into it. The fabric knows where to go. It settles against my body like it was measured for me. The neckline sits low across my collarbones. The back is open to the base of my spine. The skirt falls straight and then flares at the knee, and when I move, the crimson shifts through shades I don’t have names for.
I look down at myself, and I don’t recognize my own body.
“Sit,” the attendant says.
She does my hair. Her fingers move through it with speed and precision. She pulls it up, twists it, pins it with something gold. Sections of hair fall around my face in a way that looks accidental but absolutely isn’t.
When she steps back, I stand and face the mirror.
The woman looking back at me has brown eyes that catch the gold in the chamber walls. The crimson fabric makes my skin glow. The hair frames everything the dress reveals, and the overall effect is someone who belongs in a Fae court. Someone who looks like she was built for this. Someone who looks like royalty.
I was built for a cage. For a ring with chain-link walls and concrete under my feet and a crowd that wanted blood.
I’ve never looked like this.
“High Princess Seraphina and High Princess Mira are in the corridor,” the attendant says.
I walk out.
Seraphina is unrecognizable. She’s spent the entire trip in practical clothes, her hair tied back. Tonight she’s wearing silver. Her hair is loose. It falls past her shoulders, and the silver in it catches the Lithenmere’s glow, and she looks like what she actually is, which is the daughter of a king.
Mira is beside her in deep green. The dress is sleeveless, and the burn scar on her left wrist is visible. She chose that. Her golden hair is braided with gold thread, and her jaw is set the same way it was in the garden with Lanthar. She looks like a woman walking into a room that owes her something.
Seraphina’s eyes move over me. Both eyebrows rise.
“Well,” she says.
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“Your face is saying plenty.”
Mira’s mouth curves. “You look dangerous, Celeste.”
“Good.”
We walk.
The Lithenmere opens a passage I haven’t seen. Wider than the corridors, the gold veins in the walls brightening as we approach, the stone smoothing itself ahead of our steps.
The mountain is showing off.
The passage curves and opens and the sound reaches us before the sight does.
