Chapter 20
Pip
Aeldryc had been in meetings since dawn, but that was fine, because I had a job now. Lyriel had sent word that the Queen’s gown was ready for its first fitting, and Lyriel had asked me to help her with it.
We’d stayed up so late working on it that a grumpy Aeldryc had stormed into Lyriel’s workshop, slung me over his shoulder like a sack of particularly loud flour, and hauled me back to his quarters.
So I hadn’t seen the final product. I breezed through the doorway, surprised to find the workshop far less chaotic than usual.
The central worktable had been swept clean, and laid across it, shimmering in the morning light, was the gown.
I stopped to stare.
“I know.” Lyriel was standing on the other side of the table with her hands on her hips, looking at the gown. “The draping on the left shoulder is a quarter inch too low.”
“It’s the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen.”
It truly was. The fabric was a deep twilight blue that shimmered violet whenever it caught the light.
The bodice was a map of the night sky over Feravael, each constellation stitched in impossibly fine silver thread.
While Lyriel had been charting the stars, I’d tackled the skirt, which fell in soft layers of gradually lighter fabric until the hem was nearly white—the color of the sky just before dawn.
“The left shoulder is perfect. Gorgeous.”
“It will haunt me.” She adjusted the draping, then stepped back. “Better. Come, let’s get this to the fitting room.”
She placed the gown on a wide, padded hanger of sorts, and lifted it high. I scooped up the skirt and made sure none of it dragged.
She paused at the door. “And Pip?”
“Yeah?”
“Try not to do anything that’s grounds for execution.”
“What?”
She rolled her eyes, leading me out into the hall. “Rumor has it, last time you saw the Queen, you sat on the sofa right beside her!”
“What’s wrong with that? She told me to sit and I sat.”
“She is the Queen! You were not meant to sit in the same chair as her.”
“Well, that would be a really stupid reason to execute someone.”
Lyriel was smirking at me as a maid rushed ahead to hold the door open, and we carefully carried the precious dress into a room across the hall.
The Queen’s fitting room was the workshop’s opposite: not a sprawling creative chaos, but a small, exquisite space built for one purpose: making its occupant feel like the center of the universe.
Three silver-inlaid mirrors formed a half-circle, ready to catch every angle.
I wanted to sink into the deep plum velvet on the cushioned benches.
Even the light was magical, coming from everywhere at once, warm and soft.
It was the kind of light designed to make fabric, and the person wearing it, look perfect.
“Whoever designed this room understood lighting.” I arranged the skirts while Lyriel hooked the hanger over the rack.
“The Queen designed this room.”
We arranged the gown on the rack and fussed over it, smoothing the fabric, adjusting the constellation work on the bodice and making sure the layers of the skirt fell in the correct gradient.
Lyriel, who was never more than arm’s reach from sewing supplies, produced a small kit of pins and needles from somewhere on her person and set it on the bench.
Then we waited. I missed my phone. This was one of those times where a little game of candy crush would go a long way. If I’d had it with me instead of leaving it on that bathroom counter, I probably could have found a magical way to charge it by now. Were there fae with electricity powers?
Queen Delsynarea entered without announcement or fanfare, making me feel privy to the tiniest glimpse of her inner life.
Lyriel jumped to her feet and bowed deeply.
I followed, a beat behind, and I was certain the Queen had noticed.
She wore a simple morning dress the color of burnt copper, her silver-streaked auburn hair pinned loosely at the nape of her neck.
Two handmaidens rushed in and took posts at the back.
Our eyes met. I took a frightened step back and tripped over the bench, landing feet-up on the floor.
“I said not to do something stupid,” Lyriel hissed.
The Queen snickered and offered me a hand. “If you’re going to fall ass over heels in front of us, we suggest you avoid wearing a skirt. I have seen your underthings.”
“You’re lucky I was wearing underthings.” I snapped my mouth shut. “I mean, very vast apologies, Your Majesty. The sort of apologies that make you not want to execute me at all.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Is that one of the options today?”
“No! I mean, um, here is your gown, Your Majesty!” I did jazz hands at the gown.
“Oh.” The Queen stepped closer to the gown, her attention captured. The handmaidens, however, were not distracted. They glared at me with the coordinated intensity of a drill team, and I flattened myself against the wall, making a silent vow to fuse with the plaster before I tripped again.
Lyriel straightened. For all her confidence in the workshop, she looked surprisingly nervous when presenting her work to the Queen.
Moving to the gown, the Queen touched the edge of the bodice with one finger, tracing a constellation. “This is the Crown of Aelthyrl.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Lyriel said.
“And this—” She traced another. “The Weaver’s Thread. You’ve mapped the summer sky.”
“The summer sky as it will appear over the palace on the night of the solstice ball, Your Majesty. The constellations are positioned for that specific date and hour.”
The Queen looked up at Lyriel, smiling. “Whose idea was the color variation on the skirt?”
“That was Pip, Your Majesty.”
Two sets of fae eyes turned to me and I immediately wished I could melt into one of the plum velvet cushions. “It was mostly Lyriel,” I said. “I showed her a technique called ombré. Where the color fades, like a gradient.”
“He suggested the gradient, designed the color sequence, and selected the silver-white fabric for the hem,” Lyriel said. “I stitched it. The vision was his.”
The Queen studied me for a moment. “You have a good eye, Pippin Crane. We have never worn anything quite like it before.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty,” I said, then cleared my throat. “Um, is that a good thing?”
Lyriel shot me a panicked look.
“We find the gown to be quite extraordinary, Lyriel. We shall avoid any executions, for the time being.”
“I mean, you don’t really execute people, do you?”
“Pip,” Lyriel hissed. The Queen didn’t answer, but her expression made me wonder if she was enjoying my panic.
The fitting itself was a fascinating process. Lyriel circled the Queen with pins between her lips and her bright green eyes narrowed, tugging at seams and adjusting the fall of fabric with tiny, exact movements.
I sat on one of the cushioned benches with a pincushion on my lap, handing over more pins when Lyriel held out her hand, which she did without looking.
I didn’t yet have the expertise to understand how she was making the call on adjustments, but I could already see the difference in the fit.
I took a quiet pride in being an excellent pin assistant.
“The bodice is perfect,” Lyriel said, stepping back to assess. “The waist may need to come in a fraction. Your Majesty, if you turn?”
As the Queen turned slowly before the three mirrors, the gown caught every angle of the enchanted light, making the constellations glitter.
“So,” the Queen said, while Lyriel pinned something at her left hip. “Tell us the news, Lyriel. We have been trapped in council all week and we are starved for information that doesn’t involve troop movements.”
Lyriel smiled around a mouthful of pins. “The news, Your Majesty? The weather has been fine. The kitchen gardens are coming in early this year. The head gardener says it’s the warmest spring in a decade.”
“We do not want weather,” the Queen scoffed. “We want gossip.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. There was something deeply satisfying about hearing the most powerful woman in Qoksmere demand gossip with the same regal authority she used to command armies.
Lyriel removed the pins from her mouth and set them on the tray I held out. “Gossip. Well. Let me think.”
“Don’t be bashful. Seamstresses hear everything,” the Queen said.
“Well,” Lyriel said, kneeling to adjust the hem. “Gladys in the kitchens is expecting her fourth child and has requested a maternity gown.”
“We admire her commitment to reproduction.”
“The stable master has a new apprentice who is apparently pretty, and three different members of the household staff have asked me for advice on what to wear to impress them. One of them asked if I could make a hat.”
The Queen pursed her lips. “A hat?”
“A hat, Your Majesty. I told them I don’t do hats.”
“This gossip is boring,” the Queen said.
Lyriel caught my eye and I saw the flicker of something there—amusement, certainly, but also a glint that I couldn’t quite read. She stood up from the hem, brushed off her knees, and moved around to adjust something at the Queen’s shoulder.
“Grukk has asked me to dinner,” Lyriel said, with studied casualness. “For the third time this week.”
I sat up, smiling. “Is it getting serious?”
“I don’t know. We’ve been…” She trailed off and waved a hand, which could have meant anything from casually dating to deeply in love. “He’s attentive and surprisingly creative. He made me a set of knitting needles carved from heartwood.”
I smiled dreamily, loving that for them. Grukk wasn’t just the quiet troll committed to fine tailoring; he was the one with the flower tattoo that meant something, the one who always worked at the table closest to Lyriel’s station.
“I think that’s wonderful,” I said, meaning it completely.
“He wants to cook for me,” Lyriel said. “He’s been learning recipes. Elven recipes, so I feel at home.”
“Lyriel’s love life is mildly interesting,” the Queen said. “But we note that she is deflecting.”
Lyriel’s hands paused on the Queen’s shoulder.