𝔸 ℂ𝕠𝕦𝕣𝕥 𝕠𝕗 𝕃𝕠𝕧𝕖 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕎𝕣𝕒𝕥𝕙 (Book 2)

Forty-Nine

"What does one wear exactly in the Mortal Lands?" Mor questioned, sprawled across the foot of Feyre's bed in the House of Wind. She seemed oddly perky for someone who claimed to have been out dancing all night. Cassian and Azriel had been grumbling and wincing when Feyre and I had run into them earlier. They looked half to death and yet Mor was in tip-top shape. I wanted to know her secret about that.

    Feyre stood from the bed, coming to my side at the armoire as I rifled through clothes upon clothes. Rhys had stacked both our armoires with a ridiculous amount of clothes. I wondered how much it all cost, I hated spending his money. It felt disrespectful. He'd already done so much for me, It felt like a betrayal to take advantage of that.

    Feyre flipped through the bounty of clothes, "Layers." she answered Mor.

    "They cover themselves up. It's practically a scandal if a woman's ankle can be seen." I scoffed, stopping at a dress that might do well enough.

    Feyre nodded in agreement as I held out the dress to her, "The decolletage might be a little daring depending on the event, but... everything else gets hidden beneath skirts and petticoats and nonsense."

    "Sounds like the women are not used to having to run—or fight. I don't remember it being that way five hundred years ago."

Feyre took the dress from my hand, a turquoise dress with accents of gold. "Even with the wall the threats of faeries remained, so...surely practical clothes would have been necessary to run, to fight any that crept through. I wonder what changed." Feyre spoke.

    "Men." I said, pulling out the rest of the outfit and holding it up to Mor.

    She nodded her approval—no commentary. No, you have to wear a dress like Ianthe would have done.

    A small burst of fury ripped through me once more at the thought of Ianthe...what she'd done to Rhys, to me, to Feyre. Fury was too loose a term for what I felt about her. I willed it down. But it would come back. Ready for the day that I spilled her guts across the cobbles.

    "Nowadays, most women wed, bear children, and then plan their children's marriages. Some of the poor might work in the fields, and a rare few are mercenaries, hired soldiers, assassins..." she looked at me from the corner of her eye, I shrugged irreverently. I wasn't ashamed of my occupation, I just hated the way others didn't understand it. Even more, I hated how I never had a choice on the matter. "The wealthier they are, the more restricted their freedoms become. You'd think that money would buy you the ability to do whatever you'd pleased."

    "Some of the High Fae," Mor said, pulling herself into a sitting position. "are the same."

    Feyre slipped behind the dressing screen in the corner of the room, carrying the dress in her hands. "In the Court of Nightmares," Mor went on, absently toying with a loose thread on Feyres blanket. "Females are...prized. Our virginity is guarded, and then sold off to the highest bidder—whatever male will be of the most advantage to our families."

    I kept wading through the closet if only to give Mor a sense of privacy. I'd brought my clothes with me, and there was no reason to be by the closet anymore. But the horror of what she was saying was too much too for me to not do something else.

    "I was born stronger than anyone in my family. Even the males. And I couldn't hide it, because they could smell it—the same way you can smell a High Lords Heir before he comes to power. The power leaves a mark, an...echo. When I was twelve before I bled, I prayed no male would take me as his wife, that I would escape what my elder cousins had endured: loveless, sometimes brutal, marriages."