‘I’m sure lots of us want the same things in some sense,’ she replies, sweeping past my question. ‘Now, let’s just see if I can successfully pin this up first.’ She moves to sweep up a handful of my hair when I hear her gasp. ‘Look,’ she whispers, her voice hitched with excitement. ‘A raven.’

As she drops my hair entirely, I twist around and watch as she takes a step towards the window. Sure enough, on the sill is a great black bird with beady, glass-like eyes. I expect the bird to fly off as she nears it, but it doesn’t.

‘We don’t get them in the Eastern Isles.’ Her voice is still whispered awe. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever seen one. Caz would be so excited. She loves birds.’

‘They’re meant to be bad omens,’ I tell her, certain she wouldn’t be staring at it with quite such reverence if she knew how they were viewed here. ‘Very bad omens.’

She turns around. ‘Why?’

‘My father said they whisper your secrets to Mortidem so he knows the best way to take you,’ I admit. To ease the heaviness of the moment, I ask, ‘Who’s Caz? Is that your sister?’

‘My sister? No. No!’ She lets out a laugh as if I’ve said the most preposterous thing in the world. ‘Carys is my sister. Caz is my … was my … Caz was my everything, I guess. She knows all about birds.’

‘She’s still on the Eastern Isles?’ I ask. ‘Did she also try to enter the Retterheld?’

‘No. No, I haven’t seen her for four years now.’

There is something about the way Llinos speaks that implies Caz hasn’t passed away and been given to Mortidem to distribute her powers anew. Which is why I ask gently, ‘Where is she? What happened?’

With one last glance at the raven, Llinos moves back to the bed and drops down next to me with a huff.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘That’s the truth. I don’t know.’ The silence between us lingers, but eventually, she finds her voice. ‘We grew up together,’ she starts. ‘Best friends until we realised we were a lot more than that. I was twenty-one when she gave me this.’ She lifts her hand and shows me the ring on her middle finger. It’s a recognised sign of intention and is traditionally joined by two more rings on the adjacent fingers at marriage. ‘Four years. There was never a moment in my life that I could’ve envisioned her not being in it. I thought we’d do everything. Start a family. Grow old. Even have our pyres lit together. That’s how much I couldn’t imagine a life without her.’

‘So what happened?’

The saddest of smiles graces Llinos’s lips, though it does nothing to erase the pain in her eyes.

‘One day, she was gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘I don’t know. Just gone,’ she repeats, shaking her head.

I frown. ‘Do you mean she was taken?’

‘No. More … I think she was sent.’ She shakes her head again, this time with more ferocity. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have⁠—’

‘No, it’s fine. I don’t mind.’

‘No, I shouldn’t talk about it. I shouldn’t. Her power … it was … useful …’ She sighs. ‘The fact is, I don’t know where she is, and I’ll probably never see her again. And that’s just something I have to live with.’ She pauses and twists back to the window, but when I follow her line of sight, I see the raven has gone.

‘I know what I need my gifting to be,’ she says quietly, ‘but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if maybe, if I win, the Goddess will bring her back to me. As a gift of my own, you know?’

Silence descends, and I’m faced with a reality I don’t want to think about. Only one of us can win the gifting, so do I really want to get close to these people when me getting my dream means them missing out on theirs?

It’s a question I don’t have an answer for.

‘Come on.’ Llinos breaks the silence as she grabs a handful of my hair and begins to separate it into strands. ‘The sooner we can get your hair done, the sooner we can decide what dress you’re going to wear.’

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter 14

‘You know what you said about putting a slit in my dress? How would you feel about doing it to yours? I think it would be the perfect final touch.’

I haven’t yet been allowed to see my reflection, though I know the dress Llinos finally decided on is black at the bottom and red on top.

‘These dresses are incredible,’ she said as she rummaged through the wardrobe. ‘They need a bit of updating, but still, the fabrics are so on point.’

‘Feel free to borrow them,’ I replied, assuming ‘a bit of updating’ was a major understatement and Llinos was just being kind.

‘Really?’ Her eyes bugged with delight before her face fell. ‘My little sister Carys chose my first couple of ball dresses, so I feel like I have to wear them first, you know? But maybe I could wear one to one of the later balls?’

‘Absolutely.’

While I put on the dress she’s picked out, she heads back downstairs to her room to get yet another item: an actual garter sheath. She returns with the leather in her hands.

‘There’s no way I’ll cope, knowing there’s a grubby old belt strapped around your thigh,’ she says, handing it to me before twisting me around to take hold of the corset ribbons on my dress. Only when she’s yanked so hard it feels like she’s cracked a couple of ribs does she spin me back around to face her. ‘Now, what do you say about that slit?’

I can’t imagine anyone choosing the Cotillion ball as an opportunity to attack each other, but who knows? And there’s not much point to having my dagger sheathed on my thigh if I’ve got to hoist up my entire dress to reach it.

‘Go for it,’ I say and watch the grin spread across Llinos’s face. It’s worth desecrating the dress for that alone.

Without waiting for me to change my mind, she grabs her own dagger and slices the fabric of the dress all the way to the top of my thigh. Standing, she looks me up and down. ‘Do you have any fighting shorts?’ she asks.

‘Fighting shorts?’

‘Just plain black leather. I’ve got an idea.’

‘Okay …’

‘Do you need me to get you a pair?’

‘No, I’ve got some.’

Leather shorts are one of the few items of clothing I have left from my mother, and they were among the first things I packed to come here. I slip some on under my dress, then turn back to Llinos, who has her dagger waiting. She slides it up the other side of the skirt, then along the stitches of my waistband. A large swath of the dress’s skirt comes away in her hand.

‘I like it. Really like it.’ She grins. ‘Go. Have a look.’

With an unexpected flutter of nerves, I head into the bathroom, only to do a double take at my image.

There’s still that element of weariness in my face that Llinos mentioned earlier, but the way she styled my hair does a good job of hiding it. My gaze quickly trails down the rest of my body. The top of the dress is a deep burgundy velvet corset that’s been pulled so tight that, for the first time in my life, I’ve actually got curves. And while the leather skirt balloons out, the panel that’s been taken from the centre reveals more than just a glimpse of my shorts and garter sheath. It is by far the most striking thing I’ve ever seen, let alone worn.

‘You’re not going to go unnoticed like that.’ She smirks, and I can’t help but agree. She was right about fixing the dagger in my hair. Combined with the leather of the shorts and the dagger on my thigh, I don’t look like someone you’d want to fuck with. Though hopefully the incident with Zara has already confirmed that.

‘Can I help you get ready?’ I ask Llinos, aware of just how unconfident I sound. Neither my hair nor my clothing skills are half as good as hers, and I get the feeling she knows it.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘It won’t take me long, though I’ll probably need to hurry the guys. You know how they like to preen and pamper themselves. Well, Benny does, at least. See you in the dining room in twenty?’