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“Our warlord is a great man,” the majordomo told her, in unmistakable tones of awe. “What would bring other men to their knees only makes Cayetano stronger.”
She was still mulling that over when he delivered back to what he called herroomswith Ile d’Montagne history in her head and a strange worry for Cayetano in what she was terribly afraid was her heart, to find the same three servants buzzing around. They were laying out garments and if she wasn’t mistaken, that was a curling iron she saw being plugged in.
“Surely it’s time to rest,” she protested.
Because she had never been so tired. She wanted todroop.
This is maybe real jet lag, a voice inside suggested.Because it’s an actual thing, not just an excuse.
“Don’t be silly,” one of her servants was saying gaily. “We have to get you ready for dinner.”
“The warlord regrets that he is unable to dine with you this evening,” said another, with the kind of giggle that Delaney associated with memories of middle school. As if Cayetano was some kind of boy band singer.
“You will be dining with the Signorina instead,” said the third.
“The Signorina?”
Delaney didn’t know what to do as they swarmed around her, so she stayed still. She didn’t object when they started looking at her clothes as if they meant to remove them right there where she stood in the middle of the bedroom floor. Or even when they did.
She was so exhausted and overwhelmed it didn’t seem real.
And they were so matter-of-fact about the whole thing that it felt perfectly acceptable, in this strange, unreal place, to find herself surrendering. They tugged everything off and whisked a silk bathrobe of sorts into place so seamlessly that she had the possibly half-hysterical urge to ask if they had choreographed it. Then they spun her around, making clucking noises as they sat her in front of a mirror in what she hadn’t recognized was a vanity table in the separate apartment that was her bathroom. Though calling it abathroomdidn’t really cover the many rooms, nooks, and walk-in closets that were each bigger than the farmhouse’s whole attic.
Delaney couldn’t really process anything, it turned out. So it seemed reasonable enough—or almost—to let someone work on her hair while the other two kept holding different garments that weren’t hers in the mirror’s reflection, then conferring.
Why not?something in her asked.
After all, she had a whole month. Surely she could effect her escape later—or rather simply leave without all the melodrama.
Not tonight.
“The Signorina is the foremost expert on manners and customs in the valley,” Delaney was informed. The girl applying the hairbrush and curling iron to her hair looked very serious as she said this. “She has dedicated herself to the Arcieri family. She has been the governess not only for the warlord, but for his father before him. It is a great honor that she has agreed to this.”
Once again, Delaney was aware that she was being studied. For her reaction.
She made what she hoped were noises that suggested she felt appropriately honored.
After they finished fussing with the hair she usually paid no attention to, or put into braids to really ignore, she was packed into a dress that was finer than any other single garment she’d ever beheld. It was soft. It seemed towhisperat her, little secrets about its own finery.
Delaney wanted to hate it on principle. But she couldn’t.
When they angled her so she could look at her full reflection, something in her...seized, maybe. Or went so still it amounted to the same thing. The woman looking back at her from the mirror wore a dress that belonged behind glass somewhere, maybe in Hollywood. The rope of pearls wound around her neck felt silky against her skin but looked impossibly elegant—a word that had never been used in reference to a girl who spent most of her life in dirty overalls. Never, ever. And it was all topped off with the kind of sophisticated twisty updo that made her look like a complete stranger.
She understood, then. This was a dream. Or it felt like a dream, and that was why she was simply going along with the whole thing, because that was what a person did in dreams. What did it matter that none of this made sense? It didn’t have to.
Because in a dream, it wasn’t necessary to check with her feelings of dislocation and despair on the one hand and something too much like desire on the other. It wasn’t necessary to untangle that knot. Or face this shocking joy in things she would have said repulsed her, like a pretty dress that moved around her legs like it was made of light. If it was real life, she would have had to square up to all the things that were happening to her and had already happened. In a dream, she might as well decide to give herself over to the sheer madness all around her without complaint. So that was what she did.
And a person who was wide awake might have objected to being marched down to what the majordomo had told her was the private wing of the palace, where she was shown into a dining room. But the dreamer in her simply went along with it.
There were only two places set at one end of a glossy table in this new room, packed to the ceiling with the kinds of priceless artifacts she’d been told so much about today, but what caught her attention wasn’t more vases and candelabras. It was the tiny woman with an enormous beehive hairdo who waited, peering at Delaney through a pair of spectacles.
Delaney had the strangest urge to curtsy.
When she wasn’t sure she even knewhowto curtsy.
The doors closed behind her, and then there she was. Shut in yet another room in this castle, this time with a diminutive woman who emanated a certain intensity that made Delaney feel...
Well, unfortunately awake, for one thing. But also as if she didn’t quite fit in her skin. As if everything about her waswrong.
