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“No, just to call. But Rhea doesn’t think that would be a good idea. She says—well, she can tell you,” Tami said, as Rhea came in.
“I said that it is customary for the Pythia to be put through immediately,” she told me quietly, looking concerned. Her eyes went over me and a worried frown appeared on her forehead. And I suddenly realized that she’d never seen me looking much better.
None of them had. It was entirely possible that my court was starting to think that I always went around with black feet and mud-splattered ankles, wearing a stolen war mage coat and reeking of cheap booze. Really cheap.
I shuddered at the memory of what passed for wine at the Bollocks, and put my head down on the bed.
“Hand me a phone?”
She obliged, biting her lip, but Tami wasn’t so shy.
Tami didn’t know what shy meant.
And Tami didn’t think I ought to make that call. “You let them walk on you, they’re gonna walk on you,” she told me. “You know that. This is the Circle we’re talking about.”
And yeah, Tami had never been overly fond of the Circle. Or vice versa. Maybe because some of those kids she’d rescued hadn’t been on the street. They’d been in the Circle’s little reeducation camps; at least they had until she broke them out.
She’d started with her own son, and then some of his friends, and then it had become something of a habit, gaining her the nickname in the press of the “Vixen Vigilante.” Because climbing into well-warded prison compounds does not mean one has to do it ill dressed. Unfortunately, the Circle hadn’t been as fond of her as the press, and had slapped a sizeable bounty on her head. I’d managed to wrangle her a pardon, back when Jonas was playing nice, but he would probably not be happy to learn that I had his old enemy as my newest staff member.
Not that she knew she was on staff yet.
And not that he was happy anyway, so it didn’t really matter, did it?
“I’m not calling Jonas,” I told her.
“Who, then?”
I hit the button for the front desk. “Augustine,” I told it, and there was some ringing and then there was some beeping and then there was the sound of an outraged genius who was yelling about something. I heard Marco’s voice in the background a second later, which probably explained the yelling, only that didn’t work on Augustine.
Fortunately, I had something that did.
“You know,” I said, not waiting for a break in the conversation because there probably wouldn’t be one, “I was thinking the other day that what I really need is a new design for the initiates’ uniforms.”
There was sudden silence on the other end of the phone.
“Or whatever they call their formal wear. Jeans and stuff are fine for every day, if nothing special is happening, but there are times when they’re going to have to get dressed up. And then they’re going to need something a bit better than the nightgowns they’ve been wearing. I mean, have you see them?”
“Yes, they’re appalling,” Augustine said. “Who designed them?”
“I think it was one of the Pythias, Gertrude something, back in the nineteenth century. And maybe they looked okay then, I don’t know, but—”
“You can’t have them running around like that,” he agreed, sounding suddenly reasonable.
“Well, that’s what I thought. And then, naturally, I thought of you.”
“Naturally.” He sighed, and it was long-suffering. Because he was so overworked and my request was such a burden—a burden he would shortly have plastered on every bit of ad space he could find.
Augustine found his association with the Pythia very lucrative.
He just didn’t like paying for it.
I heard some pages flipping. “I suppose I could fit it in,” he told me. “It will be difficult, mind you. I have the pre-fall show coming up on the twentieth, and then there’s the—”
“And in the meantime,” I said, because Augustine could give Rosier a run for his money in the loving-the-sound-of-his-own-voice department, “I asked Marco to pick up some everyday stuff for the girls, to tide them over. You heard about what happened to their wardrobe?”
“If the rest was anything like that nightmare, they’re well rid of it.”
“But they have to wear something, until you’re ready to show the world your masterpiece. Don’t they?”
