Page 21 of Beds and Blades

Ten minutes later, I was standing in front of the small mirror by the door, and I was going to need another minute.

The corset had taken two attempts. The coat settled on my shoulders with the reassuring weight of something made for exactly this kind of morning. The boots were buckled, the belt cinched, and the woman looking back at me from the mirror was not the woman who had put on a red sweater in Philadelphia yesterday and worried about a presentation.

I looked like someone who belonged here.

The corset did what corsets do. The waist was smaller. Everything else was impossible to ignore.

The crimson underlayer showed at the V of the neckline, and I stopped. My hair had partially escaped whatever arrangement I had attempted that morning and was falling where it pleased. Against the deep red fabric, it looked intentional. The color pulled warmth from my hair; my hair pulled warmth from the color. Together they were doing something I had never quite managed with a sweater and a pair of jeans.

The coat framed the whole thing perfectly. The boots added an inch. The result was taller, straighter, more of a presence than I had historically allowed myself to be.

I stood there and conducted an honest self-evaluation.

The result was unambiguous.

I looked good.

Not in the qualified, well-she-has-a-great-personality way I had spent years categorizing myself. Actually, straightforwardly, forensically good. Hot, if I was going to use the word.

I had never thought of myself as the kind of woman men looked at twice.

For most of my life, I had been the woman men looked at once. Intelligent. Competent. Probably fine. Then they looked somewhere else.

The woman in the mirror was making that assessment difficult to maintain.

She looked like someone worth looking at.

The whole composition. The coat. The lacing. The corset helped. So did the crimson.

But the real difference was the woman inside them. She had finally decided she was done being invisible.

I straightened my glasses.

I went to find the battle.

***

I worked my way up through the keep and into the eastern tower, which I had identified on the tour as the highest accessible point on that side of the fortification. The men already stationed there spared me one collective glance—civilian, female, glasses, leather, not an immediate tactical problem—and returned to what they were doing, which suited me perfectly.

I looked out.

The army below was not what I had expected. It possessed all the outward characteristics of a military force—formations, spacing, hierarchy—but none of the reassuring evidence that it was composed of living people.

The front lines were filled with the newly turned. I could tell by their clothes—ordinary work garments and travel-worn cloaks. They wore the kind of clothes worn by people who had been living their lives until a vampire found them and remade them.

Their movement was stiff and relentless. They didn't move with the micro-adjustments that living bodies make constantly without knowing it. Arrows came down on them from the wall slits in steady, methodical volleys, and they kept moving.

Behind them, spaced with a precision that told me immediately they were not there by accident, stood the command layer.

These were not recently turned.

They did not gesture. They did not shout orders. They scarcely appeared to move at all.

And yet the force ahead of them responded.

Entire sections of the assault shifted direction, adjusted pace, or changed objectives with a fluidity that suggested communication was occurring somewhere. I could not see how.

Further back, mounted figures on horses that were not behaving the way horses behave when there was fire and noise nearby. These horses were standing at parade rest in the middle of a siege.