Page 56 of Once Broken Faith

“Uh.” I glanced at Quentin. As I had expected, his cheeks were so red that he could have replaced Rudolph as the lead reindeer for Santa’s sleigh. “I’m going to go with ‘no.’”

The Luidaeg rolled her eyes. “When you people learned all this modesty shit from the humans, I may never figure out. There’s a screen in the bathroom. Go get it, stand behind it, and strip.”

“Why am I stripping?” I asked. Quentin was blushing harder all the time. I was starting to wonder if the Luidaeg missed the sight of blood all over everything, and was trying to make my squire explode.

“Because you need to change your clothes.” She narrowed her eyes. “Unless you want to argue with the sea witch?”

I groaned, throwing my hands up in the air. “Sure, now you get all dire and terrifying, because you want something. Why can’t you be dire and terrifying when people are stabbing me? That’s when I need you to be dire and terrifying.”

“The bathroom’s over there,” she said, pointing.

I stopped complaining and went.

The bathroom, as she called it, was bigger than my living room, and contained a recessed tub that would have given me nightmares if it had been full. If the Luidaeg hadn’t been attending the conclave, this would probably have been the room assigned to Patrick and Dianda; she could have gone swimming in that tub. The promised screen was propped against the wall next to a large rack of soaps, bath oils, and baskets full of bath salts. I grabbed it, hoisted it up onto my shoulder, and returned to the main room, where the others were waiting.

“That is the biggest bathtub I’ve ever seen,” I said, putting the screen down.

“So glad to know that your pedestrian concerns continue to take priority,” said the Luidaeg. “Now strip.”

Arguing with her wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I unfolded the screen, stepped behind it, and began removing my clothes, trying to pretend I wasn’t sharing the room with my regent, my squire, a sea witch from the dawn of time, and an easily amused Duchess with a penchant for rewriting the luck of others. Tybalt, Elliot, and Karen were almost irrelevant; none of them made me that nervous, at least where nudity was concerned. Finally, I stepped out of my trousers, and called, “Done!”

“Great. Hold the cloth in front of you, hold your breath, and close your eyes.”

I did as I was told. I’d come this far. What was a little more ridiculousness?

The Luidaeg said something else, more softly this time. That was the only warning I received before a wall of hot, soapy water cascaded over me, leaving me gasping. Then I realized I could feel corset stays pressing against my sides. I looked down. The copper scrap had become a strapless, corseted gown. The skirt was loose enough for me to run in, cut mid-calf in the front and extending to the floor in the back. The whole thing was covered in that delicate forked lightning embroidery, giving the impression that I’d just walked out of the heart of a storm. There were even shoes, flats, made of leather that was the same beaten-gold color as the lightning.

“Well?” said the Luidaeg. “Come out.”

I came out. “How?” I asked, gesturing to the dress.

“Bannick magic repairs what it cleans,” she said. “Normally, that means patching and mending, but if you set up the right conditions—like, say, a piece of spider-silk cut from the gown of a dignitary at a conclave similar to this one, several centuries ago—you can sometimes convince the magic it should recreate the clothing out of whole cloth. You can keep the dress, by the way, assuming you don’t manage to bleed all over it. I have no use for that sort of thing.”

“And the shoes?”

“No outfit is complete without shoes, earrings, and, if necessary, gloves.”

I looked down. The gloves were tucked into the top of my bodice. I pulled them out and pulled them on, managing not to grimace at the feeling of the silk wrapping tight around my fingers. “Happy now, Fairy Godmother?”

“Ecstatic,” she said, somehow drawing the word out until it was four syllables long and packed with bitterness. “I won’t tell you to be home before midnight. Just try not to get stabbed again.”

“I’d prefer she try not to get stabbed in the first place,” muttered Tybalt darkly.

The Luidaeg turned on him. “You, get out,” she said—not unkindly, which was a nice change. “You need to get to the conclave without the rest of us if you don’t want to damage that independence you cats prize so much. They can’t start without Arden, but they’ll start without you. Hurry along.”

Tybalt cast me one last, pained look. Then he was gone, stepping back into the shadows and pulling them around him like a curtain, becoming nothing but the memory of a man.

The Luidaeg wasn’t done. She turned to Arden, and said, “Now’s your turn to play taxi. Get us to the conclave.”

Arden blinked, raising her eyebrows. “I’m the Queen here.”

“And I am clearly coming around too often and putting up with too much of your monarchist bullshit, because you seem to have forgotten the essential fact that I. Will. Fuck. You. Up.” The Luidaeg took a step toward Arden. Her eyes were suddenly black, and while her features hadn’t shifted, there was an element of menace to them that hadn’t been there a second ago. She didn’t need to change her form to be as brutal and mercurial as the sea. “Familiarity may breed contempt, Your Highness, but I recommend you find a way to shake off that tendency, because you have no power over me, no authority to command my actions, and no reason to expect my good will. Now, are you going to be a smart girl and open a door for us, or am I going to remind you why even the rulers of the Divided Courts listen when the Firstborn decide to speak?”

Arden had gone white. She didn’t say anything, simply sketched an archway in the air with her hand. It opened, smelling of blackberry flowers, to reveal the stage in the arcade. Then she curtsied to the Luidaeg. Curtsied deeply, until her forehead was almost pressed against her knee, revealing the swan’s-wing slope of her back, graceful and vulnerable in her white gown. The Luidaeg stepped forward, resting her fingertips against Arden’s spine. Arden shivered.

“Don’t mistake me for a friend because I sometimes choose to be friendly,” said the Luidaeg. “Don’t pretend you have some sort of control over what I do. I’m Firstborn. That means something. Even here, even now, in this washed-out mockery of Faerie, that means something. If you forget again, I’ll have to leave you with something to remember me by. So please, Arden. Because I loved your father, in my own way, in my own time, don’t make me remind you.”

She stepped through the portal, onto the stage, leaving the rest of us to stare, silently, after her. For a long moment, no one could find anything to say. Then Karen, of all people, cleared her throat.