Ethereal

Chapter 15

    I stood on a pedestal, watching Eglantine take my measurements in the mirror. I was in a room I had been in a few times before for other dress fittings, but I had always used the team that lived in the servants' quarters. My mother wanted them to be at her beck and call. Dresses and gowns were always being commissioned in this court.

    Eglantine Cigogne was a thin faerie with a perfectly tailored set of silk doublet and trousers. She couldn't have been much older than my parents, her bright blonde hair voluminous and flawlessly styled. Her accent was heavy, but that didn't stop her from speaking her mind.

    As she marked off the circumference of my hips, she frowned and made eye contact with me in the mirror. "You are curvier than I was expecting." I reddened, my eyes drifting away from hers. "Faerie girls are slim and flatter-chested," she added, motioning to my breasts. I sucked in a breath, glancing at Aelfwine and Eolande. They were busy collecting fabrics for Eglantine's team of seamstresses, though.

    I knew it was true that I wasn't skinny and that made me different from all of the other Fae girls here. For some reason, my body had remained stubbornly human in shape.

    Eglantine acted as though she hadn't just insulted me, moving the measuring tape to my waist. She frowned again, sighing.
What was her problem?

    After what felt like an eternity later, she finally motioned for her assistants to bring over fabrics. "You are reasonably tan, so we shall need lighter shades."

    "Lighter shades?" I asked hesitantly.

    "Of course."

    I watched as a large stack of different shades of purple fabric were brought out. Maybe it was naive of me to think that faerie brides wore white dresses, but I had never pictured myself wearing a different color. I supposed it made sense, though, since white wedding dresses were popularized by Queen Victoria, not faeries.

    Eglantine picked one up. "How about this, Your Grace?" It was a light lavender color. I shook my head, running my fingers over the smooth swatches of color. I paused on one that was so light that it almost looked white. I picked it up, letting it glint in the near-blue light of the evening. In the blueish night, it turned more purple. "Ah, sotterweed silk. You have quite the expensive eye."

    I didn't know whether she was insulting me again or approved of my choice, so I just nodded along. Eglantine took the fabric from me, holding it up against my skin. "Parfait." She then turned to her assistants. "J'ai besoin de cinq mètres de soie de sotterweed. Et mes ciseaux. Dépêchez-vous!" As her assistants were told several times to hurry up with increasing intensity, they collected the things Eglantine had asked for: five meters of sotterweed silk and her scissors.

    Eglantine then began to wrap sections of fabric around me. In this part, she actually seemed to value my opinion and wanted me to like the style of the dress. By the end of the hour, I had decided on a dress with a tight bodice and a long skirt. Tulle in a matching shade would make up the sleeves and cover part of the skirt. I had managed to convince Eglantine that I didn't need a hoop skirt, but she'd insisted that the skirt be bouffant.

    After my dress fitting, I had more lessons with Madame Seaglass. Instead of our normal lessons, she taught me about the process of repairing the istochnik. The istochnik was apparently housed within a safely guarded compartment underneath King's Hall in Ethereal Palace. The room was merely a precaution, Madame Seaglass had told me, as a select few had become cult followers of Faerydae the Cursed. Several hundred years ago, they had managed to damage it further, creating an echo of the destruction wrought on dusha originally. Needless to say, those insurgent faeries were stripped of their rights and exiled to Siberia like common humans.