24. Chapter 24
Chapter twenty-four
Jessica
The dress has been in the back of my wardrobe for over a year.
I take it out and lay it on the bed and look at it, and it's exactly what it was: burnt orange, clean lines, a long neckline, a skirt that moves.
The color of a crest in an old illustration with a scraped-clean blank where its name should be.
I didn't know that the first time I put it on.
A stylist in a room Jon had filled with racks told me nobody had asked for that shade in longer than she could remember, that it was an old color, that you don't see it anymore, and I thought she was being nice about my complexion.
Then I sat in Faris's lecture two weeks later and watched her point at an empty space on a wall, and I went back to my room and opened the wardrobe and stood there for a while.
"You're going to wear it," Freya says from the doorway.
"I'm going to wear it."
"Good."
Sophia arrives a few minutes later with a case of things she has no business owning and immediately takes over my bathroom, and my bedroom.
"Sit. Not there, there, the light's better. Freya, hold this. Jessica, stop touching your face."
"I'm not touching my face."
"You were about to. I could see it forming."
It takes two hours and it's the best two hours I've had in weeks.
Sophia does my hair with a running commentary on every single person who will be in that hall, most of it slanderous.
Freya sits on the end of the bed with the shoes in her lap and adds one devastating sentence about every eighth person.
Somewhere in the middle of it Sophia puts music on and we stop being efficient entirely.
Last time we did this in a room somebody else arranged for us, wearing clothes somebody else paid for, terrified of four forks.
This time it's my room and my dress and Sophia's hands and Freya telling me to hold still.
"Up or down?" Sophia says.
"What do you think?"
"Up. Off the neck. All the way up." She's got pins in her mouth and she does not take them out to talk. "Because of the shoulder."
I look at her in the mirror.
"I'm not hiding it," I say.
"I know you're not. That's why up." She sets a pin. "Down means it's peeking out from under your hair like you're embarrassed. Up means you meant it."
So we do it up.
The scar comes over the top of my left shoulder, a groove about the width of my finger where a bullet took the muscle and Bergstrom irrigated it and left it open for weeks. It's gone from red to a shiny pale pink. It'll never be anything else.
I look at it in the mirror for a long moment.
"Leave it," I say.
"Obviously," Freya says.
Sophia turns me around by the shoulders when she's finished, and neither of them says anything at all, which from those two is the loudest possible review.
Then Sophia says, "Okay, I need you to understand that I'm about to cry and it will ruin forty minutes of my work, so nobody speak."
"Sophia—"
"Nobody speak."
Freya hands her a tissue without looking up from the shoes.
I turn to the mirror.
The woman in the glass is in a burnt-orange gown that lights up the amber in her eyes, with her hair off her neck and a healing bullet channel across her shoulder like it's part of the design. She doesn't look delicate. She doesn't look like she's borrowed anything.
"Right," I say. "Let's go."
"Wait." Freya stands up. She's in the dark charcoal silk she found in that same fitting room and never wore again, and she's put something in her hair. "You know the rule."
"Which rule?"
"The one Natasha used on you."
Oh.
You do not ask a prince to dance. Princes extend invitations. You wait to be chosen.
"You're an acknowledged heir of a Great House," Freya says, in exactly the voice she uses for correcting my map reading. "As of the day before yesterday it's in the record, and the House has its name back. So at a traditional Great House event, you don't wait."
"I extend the invitations."
"You extend the invitations."
Sophia makes a sound like a kettle.
The Great Hall is candles and crystal and the smell of hot wax and too much perfume, and the three banners drop the full height of the far wall the way they did the first time, the way they've done for two hundred years.
Deep forest green, a gray wolf sitting sentinel between two crossed spears.
Dark navy, a silver wolf caught mid-leap over a single sword.
Royal purple, a snarling wolf's head crowned in gold flame.
And to the left of them, the wall. Just wall. Stone and candlelight and nothing.
I stand in the doorway and look at it for three full seconds, and I don't know what my face is doing, and I decide not to fix it.
Then the room notices me.
It's not the same as last time. Last time the ripple went through the room because six scholarship students walked in wearing clothes that fit, and because a prince stopped talking mid-sentence.
Tonight it moves differently — it starts near the doors and travels, and people don't stop talking so much as change what they're saying, and every head that turns does the same thing.
Eyes to my face. Eyes to the dress. Eyes back to my face.
They know what the color is. Every single one of them has sat in that lecture and looked at the founding plates.
Somebody near the Ardent tables says "oh" out loud.
"Chin," Sophia murmurs beside me.
I lift my chin.
Dinner is a logistical crisis and I enjoy every second of it.
Somebody has had to decide where to put me.
Three House tables at the front, the faculty along the side, everyone else arranged in a hierarchy I can now read fluently.
And an acknowledged heir of a House with no table, no seat, no colors on the wall and no precedent in two hundred and seventy-five years.
What they've done is move a table. Not to the front — that would be a statement — and not into the general seating, which would be an insult.
It's been set at an angle at the near end of the House tables, close enough to be among them and separate enough to be nothing in particular, and it seats eight, and my friends are all on it.
"They've invented a table for you," Declan says, deeply impressed.
"They've invented a table for us."
"Even better."
Sophia sits down, looks at her place setting, and says, "There are five forks."
"There were four last year."
"There are five, Jessica."
"Start from the outside."
"You said that last year and I have never verified it."
"It's still true."
"You don't know that it's true."
Renzo picks up the outermost fork and eats a piece of bread with it purely to establish dominance.
Declan leans past Sophia. "Casualty scenario was in the wrong place."
"I knew it."
"Two hundred meters below where the map has it, on a slope you can't get a stretcher off. Renzo said so out loud to the instructor."
"Renzo said it," Renzo says, "in a respectful tone."
"He did not."
"I said it in the tone of a man who had been awake for nineteen hours."
"You were awake for nineteen hours because you talked all night."
"To keep morale up."
"Nobody's morale was up."
"There'll be a report," Declan says. "I'm writing a report."
"Nobody asked you for a report," Sophia says.
"Jessica asked me for a report."
"I did," I say.
I get through three courses and one long conversation with a woman from the Soren delegation who asks me four questions about the recopying schedule and listens to all four answers, which is more than anyone at that end of the room did for me a year ago.
Across the hall Faris eats with the total concentration of a woman who intends to leave at the first legal opportunity.
Falken does a circuit. Caspian Ardent lifts his glass to me from two tables away, once, and doesn't make a production of it.
And Jon is at the faculty tables in a dark suit with his hair behaving for the first time in living memory, and he does not look at me for the entire meal.
He's very, very careful about it.
Then the tables clear from the center and the music starts.
Luke is standing with Soren near the end of the House tables, in black, and he has been watching me since the doors and hasn't bothered to hide it since the soup.
I walk over. The room watches me walk over.
"Luke."
"Jessica."
"Dance with me."
There's about a half-second where the nearest twenty people work out what just happened — that it was me who asked, and that this time nobody in this hall gets to say it was a mistake.
Luke's mouth curves. He doesn't look at Natasha's table. He doesn't look at anybody.
"It would be my honor," he says, and takes my hand.
He is, it turns out, alarmingly good at this.
"You've done this before," I say.
"I've done this since I was six. It was every second Thursday and I hated it.
" His hand settles at my back, just below the shoulder blade, well clear of the left side, and he moves us into the current of it like it's nothing.
"It's the only thing my father ever made me learn that I've been grateful for twice. "
"When was the first time?"
"At the last Great House Dinner. Turn."
I turn. He tells me things in a low voice the entire time — small step, my hand is going to move, you're about to be looked at by a councillor, ignore her — and I understand for the first time that a ballroom is a room Luke can read the way Freya reads mud.
"They're all looking at the dress," I say.
"They are." He turns us again. "Last year you didn't know what you were wearing."
"And tonight?"
His hand tightens slightly at my back.
"Tonight you did."
Soren doesn't wait to be asked, which is Soren.
He simply arrives at the end of the song, says, "My turn," and Luke hands me over like a man surrendering territory under a treaty he helped draft.
Dancing with Soren is like dancing with a building that has decided to cooperate.
He barely moves. The floor rearranges itself around him and somehow I'm moving perfectly, and it takes me half a song to work out that he is doing every single thing for both of us and making it look like I'm doing it.
"You're flawless at this," I say. "I hate it."