Queen Of Glass

Book 2 Chapter 3

Celaena Sardothien looked down at the dress she was wearing and frowned. It was nothing like the finery she had worn at the palace. In fact, it was the polar opposite. It was brown and plain and made her feel like a sack of potatoes. True, she was grateful that the dress didn't have a corset of any kind, but she just felt ugly in this dress.
She knew it was wrong to complain—she should be thanking Stephaenya and Leighanna for taking time out of their day to get her appropriate servant's clothing—but she couldn't help but wish they had gotten her something that wasn't so...
Ugly.
She took the back of the dress and pulled it tight, trying to create some kind of a waist for herself. It was too bad that
she didn't know how to sew...
Sighing, she released the fabric of the dress and picked up the large white apron that lay on the back of a nearby chair, pulling it over her head. Tying the strings of the apron in the back as tightly as she could to give the dress the illusion of having a drawn waist, and she quickly tied her blond hair back with a ribbon.
Celaena looked in the mirror again. The face was the same, but the dress...

What would Dorian say if he saw this?
Celaena shifted around on her feet uncomfortably. The wool was scratchy. Too scratchy. In the back of her mind, she had a feeling that the two women had given her this dress just to make her miserable. She didn't even know where they had gotten it.
Probably the barn.
She couldn't wear this! She could just wear her expensive, flattering clothes from Adarlan... And I suppose those glass slippers while I'm at it.
Celaena narrowed her eyes and chewed on her lower lip. Would it be rude if she asked for something nicer? Something that wasn't so coarse and revolting?
You've become so spoiled! Why, not even a year ago you would have killed for a bath and a piece of clothing that didn't have more than one layer of dirt on it!
Celaena scratched one of her irritated arms.
It was too hot to be wearing wool! She clenched her fists in frustration.
Stop being so superficial!
The base of her neck was itching incessantly from the chafing wool. She was hot, and uncomfortable, and...
In an outburst of fury, she scratched at her body furiously and then turned her anger on the dress, grabbing it at the neckline and pulling hard.
She would have succeeded in ripping the dress in two if a bell hadn't begun ringing in the corner of the room. It was a little bell, but the sound it produced was so teeth-gratingly loud and demanding that she felt tempted to tear it off of the wall.
She didn't really know what the bell meant—did it mean that she was being summoned? Or someone else? And by whom? There were four bells hanging on the wall, but there were no labels to describe their purpose. Within ten seconds, the bell beside the first one began to ring furiously as well.
Celaena looked around the room, examining the small bed and cracked washbasin. She hadn't really noticed the place in which she had been dressing for the past ten minutes; she had been too busy fretting about her own physical appearance to take in any others.
When her eyes fell upon the windowsill and bed table, they went wide with shock and repulsion.
There were cages upon cages of trapped birds and mice—some alive, some dead—dressed in clothes fit for a tiny doll. Some of the birds had broken wings, and most of the mice seemed to be missing a limb or two or were utterly tangled and incapable of moving because of their restrictive clothing.
This was Cindrillion's room.
Celaena felt very uneasy, but she couldn't stop staring at the poor creatures. She noticed that most of the cages weren't really cages at all, but small, oval mousetraps. Celaena assumed that most of the mice had probably been found within the traps by Cindrillion and tortured for only the gods knew how long.
Should she set them free? Celaena looked at the miserable state they were in and realized that they wouldn't be able to survive in the outside world. For some odd reason, it reminded her of the court in Adarlan.
The bells were still ringing. Her temper lashing out, Celaena approached the frenzied instruments, grabbed onto the two long pieces of string attached to them, and pulled down hard. The users on the other end were clearly surprised to have the string ripped out of their hands, and the bells were silenced.