Chapter 22 #2
All the things I hate about court gowns are missing.
There are no laces to pull tight, no stiff corsetry to bind my ribs, no heavy skirts dragging from my waist. The material slides down my body, settling against my skin like it was designed just for me.
The neckline doesn’t seem as bad now. It still plunges low enough to make my face heat, but the overlapping layers cover my breasts completely.
Oddly, I don’t feel exposed, even with the warm air touching my back.
But I do feel strange. Strange in a way that I don’t know whether I should cover myself or stand taller.
“Sit.” Serath points to the small stool in front of the table set in one corner of the room.
When I cross the room, the dress swirls around my legs, giving quick flashes of skin before falling back into place.
I sit on the stool, and Serath bends and picks something up.
When she straightens, she’s holding a pair of soft, ash-gray slippers.
She crouches in front of me and guides my feet into them, her fingers making quick work of lacing the leather securely up around my ankles.
“Perfect. Turn around, so I can do something with your hair.”
She reaches for the brush on the table and takes her time detangling the strands, then twists it up, and pins it away from my neck and shoulders. With it lifted, there is nowhere for me to hide the new shape of my ears.
I try very hard not to think about that, while Serath returns to the bed and picks up the final item the brownies left.
The necklace is made from two distinct, intertwined chains.
One is a blazing, bright silver, and the other a dark metal with a faint, crimson sheen.
Suspended from them is a pendant, a piece of polished, dark stone that seems to swirl like the deep, churning water surrounding the keep.
It is cradled inside black metal shaped like twisting thorns that remind me of the design of Cairn’s armor.
I stay perfectly still as the cold metal settles against the nape of my neck. The heavy pendant drops against my chest, the caged stone coming to rest over my heart. Where it touches my skin, there’s a slight vibration.
“There.” Serath’s voice is softer now. “Go and look.”
I stand up and walk a little unsteadily into the bathing chamber.
The woman in the mirror doesn’t look like me.
With my hair up, the new shape of my ears is clearly visible, the angle of my eyes more prominent.
My skin has a faintly luminous glow that I’m still not used to.
The dress moves around me like smoke and sky, sheer until it isn’t, fragile-seeming until I look at the thorns at my wrists and the stone resting over my heart.
I don’t look human anymore.
I look like … fae.
I smooth my hands down the dress and take a deep breath. Between the heat of the fabric, the grip of the leather at my ankles, and the weight of the stone at my chest, I don’t feel like a fragile human hiding anymore.
I feel protected.
Serath smiles in the mirror. “Now then. Shall we go and see Wildmere?”
I stare at my reflection for a few seconds longer, then turn to walk out of the bedchamber.
“Where is Westwatch?”
“It’s the tower that rises just beyond the library you spent time in with Caelum.” She opens the door and steps out into the hallway. “You can see it from your bedroom window.”
Serath leads me away from my rooms. Instead of heading toward the stairs that lead down to the great hall, she takes us up. We climb to the next level, turning down a passageway, until we reach a heavy wooden door.
I’m not sure what I expect when she opens it, but it isn’t a narrow bridge spanning the open air between this passageway and the tower at the opposite end.
There is nothing on either side to stop a fall.
No rails, no walls. Just a sheer drop to the courtyard below.
While the ground isn’t that far, it’s still enough that I would break something if I slipped.
Serath glances over her shoulder. “Not everything is how it seems, Alleria. Come.”
She steps out onto the bridge, and walks across without a single moment of hesitation.
I swallow hard, keeping my eyes fixed on the stone beneath my feet, and follow cautiously.
The cold sea-scented breeze whips across the open gap, teasing the split hems of my dress.
I clutch at the silk, half-expecting it to lift and bare me to the entire world.
“Where is the sun?” I’m not really expecting an answer I can understand. I’m just trying to distract myself from the walk and the sheer drop on either side of my feet.
“Underhill doesn’t have a sun the way you understand it.” Serath doesn’t break her stride. “Our light comes from our magic.”
“But you have a moon.”
“The moon has its own magic.”
In Shentari, the sun rises, and the day begins. Here, the sky simply glows, violet and endless, as though Underhill doesn’t need anything so normal as a sunrise.
At the end of the bridge, a pair of tall doors are set into a stone archway. Dark wood frames clouded glass panels, and behind them, I’m almost certain I can see a shifting green glow.