Another exchanged glance. Then, the older woman made a circle, muttering a few terse syllables.
The girl nodded. “You will put it in...” She hesitated. “Like this.” She grasped her own long plait with her wet hands, then wrapped it about her head like a crown.
A simple effort. “That’s all?”
“Shì.”
That sound, I knew. I’d heard it from Hawke’s own lips. I frowned. “Does that mean yes?”
“Shì. Yes,” she repeated. “To say understand.”
At least I had come to recognize one word in the complex language.
I subsided, gritting my teeth when the servants scrubbed my skin clean, had me stand and poured cool water over me to wash the remnants of the grit away. They washed my face and my shoulders with cloths, gave me a brush and said nothing as the heavy lampblack in my hair turned my fingers gray. I washed them at their direction, pretended compliance, and all the while, I plotted.
The Veil had agreed that I would remain off the auction tables. He would not go back on his word easily, though I suppose he could have if he had no care for his word. Somehow, I did not suspect this was the case.
What else would the Veil have me do? Something that required bathing. Which indicated that I would be among other people.
The worst possible outcome coalesced so suddenly that pain blossomed behind my forehead. A mirrored hole opened within my belly. “What am I to wear?” I asked, striving for calm.
I prayed that I was wrong. That I leapt to a conclusion that was unfounded, impossible.
The girl glanced at the older woman, whose almond-shaped eyes wrinkled with distaste at the blackened bathwater I left behind. A short conversation ensued, so rapid that I could not separate one syllable from the next.
They wrapped me in a simple robe of shapeless design, too plain and ill-fitting to be the answer I sought, and the girl stepped behind the screen.
As the older woman cleaned the water spatters around the tub, the other returned carrying items that did not offer much clarification until she lay them out, one by one, upon the single chair.
The little voice urging its warning turned to a choking scream. I bit it back before my panic could give it words.
There are some who believe that the loss of one’s memory, the muddling of reality until it becomes little more than an absent dream, is enough to bury a fear forever. They are wrong. Opium had stolen the memories, the details, of my time in Monsieur Marceaux’s Traveling Curiosity Show, but no smoke or bitter tar could ease the lash of instinct and ingrained habit.
The things that occurred to me were this: there is an appearance, a fashion, that is uniquely ascribed to a circus. No sweet determined to seduce or entice would wear such a thing as laid out before me, because the whole was not meant to seduce. It was not overly exotic, nor was it scandalous—or, at least, scandalous in terms of the usual performing fare, though Society might consider otherwise outside the rings.
What the girl laid out began with a corset in a blue so rich as to put a peacock’s feathers to shame. Following, a cream-colored skirt whose blue-trimmed front ruffles would not reach my knees, stockings in a striped violet and green, and various accouterments designed to draw attention to—without hiding or masking—long limbs. My arms would be bare of all but cream ruffles just under the shoulder, and matching at the wrist. My throat, shoulders and décolletage bare.
The ensemble spoke for itself.
One could not bend in a full corset like that, which is why I’d made mine special and without the low hips. This indicated that one wearing such a fancy piece would not be among those required to fly upon the trapeze or silks, or bend for the admiration of a crowd. I was not convinced that the Veil even knew that I could do any of these things; a secret I intended to keep to myself.
The colors were bright enough to assure an audience’s attention, yet the material not so heavy as to hide anything from the eye.
This suggested a role that would demand awareness. Applause.
A bend to the left, a tip-toe across a narrow rope, and the whispered warning of a knife’s edge just by my left ear.
My hands shook so badly, I buried them in the too-large robe. “I see,” I said, and could not hide the tremble in my voice with equal success.
“Very beautiful,” the girl offered, her smile obscenely delighted as she fingered the blue taffeta trimming the skirt.
“Very.” It rasped.
Pretty as a colored cobra rearing to strike, more like.
The Veil would put me in its shows tonight, trapped beneath the red circus tent? I would not. I would not.
But I could not fight the Veil’s men.
I took a slow, measured breath; panic raged inside my skin, twisted and writhed as if it would tear through my constraining flesh. Everything I looked at seemed as if it came from far away. Fresh sweat erupted over my forehead, my shoulders.
The women looked at me expectantly.
I had no choice. And only one real option.
Feeling sick, I gestured to the door. “I can dress myself.” A worthless bit of modesty, for all they’d washed my body already.
The women once more looked at each other, and I wanted to scream at them to get out, to leave me alone.
“I will dress myself,” I insisted. “Thank you. Now, please.” If there was rather more emphasis on the please than I liked, I would not fault myself. I quaked beneath the robe, fear and nausea rapidly taking what control I barely maintained.
When neither woman moved—and in fact, the older began to roll up her long, wide sleeves with intent—I raised my voice. “Osoba!”
As I suspected, it only took one summons. The door opened, and if the man maintained a decent bone in his body, he did not show it, looking in with untoward interest. “Yes, Miss Black.” The tone was not one of subservience.
I did not expect it, but at least he opened the door. It was a crucial step. “I wish to dress myself,” I told him, folding my arms tightly over the front of the robe. I must have looked a sight, with my hair long, frizzed in brushed out curls and unevenly black, my robe too big, my bare toes peeping from beneath the hem.
He studied me for a long moment. “Why?”
“Because I am used to dressing myself,” I explained, pretending far more patience that I truly had. Please, please. “I know how tight to make the corset so that I do not faint in the heated atmosphere of the rings, and I prefer to maintain my own appearance.”
Such snobbery. Such fabrications.
Yet if he had any interest to argue with me, it was put to rest abruptly as Zylphia’s voice, dearly familiar and one more ragged hole punctured in my composure, interrupted the negotiations. “Ikenna,” she said, with a degree of familiarity that did not seem to sit well with the man. “Cage demands your appearance.”
That she was the one to bear the message only indicated that she had not left Hawke’s side this whole time. The panic clawing at my throat tightened.
The man turned away, the door closing partially. “Is it Cage doing the asking?” I heard, low menace. That each was so familiar with Micajah Hawke as to use the intimate shortening of his first name was a telling reveal.
Zylphia’s tone did not change. “Does it matter?”
“It matters,” he said darkly. Apparently not one for farewells, the man said nothing else. He was simply gone, no trace of footsteps or sound.
The door moved. Zylphia beckoned, shaping a few halting words with care. The servants bowed to me, collected my discarded clothes—damn and blast, not at all what I’d wanted—and left the room.