Page 30 of The Stolen Heir
Oak raises his eyebrows at me, as though he intends me to answer.
Fine, if that’s what he wants. “Suren, whose garb has been deemed inadequate by an obnoxious prince, despite the fact I’ve seen people gonakedto revels.”
Rather than be insulted, Oak laughs delightedly.
The door opens to reveal a woman with frog-green skin, a wide lower lip, and wild eyebrows. Dressed in a black garment large enough to swallow up her body, she’s bent so far over that her fingers nearly touch the ground.
She looks at me and blinks wet black eyes. “Come, come,” she calls.
“I’ll leave you to it,” says Oak with a departing bow.
I bite my lip against snarling and follow the faerie into a tunnel that’s so low-ceilinged that I have to stoop.
When we emerge, it is into a chamber filled with bolts of cloth resting on shelves that go up high enough to be shrouded in darkness. What light there is comes from candles set in sconces around the room, covered in globes of cloudy glass.
“You know what they say about me?” Habetrot whispers. “That instead of sewing garments, I pluck them out of dreams. Raiments such as I create have never been seen before, or since. So, what do you dream of?”
I frown down at my tattered dress in confusion.
“Forest girl, is that what you were? One of the solitary fey brought to Court?”
I nod, because that’s true enough, in a way.
“Perhaps you want something of bark and furs?” she asks, walking around me, squinting a little as though seeing some vision of what she will put me in.
“If that’s appropriate,” I say, unsure.
She grabs hold of my arm, encircling it with her fingers to measure. “Surely you would not insult me with such a lack of extravagance?”
I am at a loss. Even if she could see into my dreams, she would find no garment of the sort she would have me imagine. “I don’t know what I want.” The words come out a whisper, too true by half.
“Destruction and ruin,” she says with a clack of her tongue. “I can practically smell it on you.”
I shake my head, but I can’t help thinking of the satisfaction I felt wrecking the glaistig’s spells. Sometimes it feels as though there’s a knot inside me, and were it to come apart, whatever emerged would be all teeth.
Habetrot regards me with her bead-black eyes, unsmiling. Then starts searching among her bolts of cloth.
Once, the thing I am wearing was a sundress, with fluttery sleeves. A diaphanous white gown that flowed around me when I spun. I found it in a shop late one night. I’d stripped off the clothes given to me in the Court of Teeth, left them behind, and put that on instead.
I liked the dress so much that I wove myself a crown of hellebores and danced through the night streets. I stared at myself in puddles, convinced that so long as I didn’t smile, I might even be pretty. I know it doesn’t look like that anymore, but I can no longer picture myself in anything else.
I wish Oak could have seen the dress as it was, even though it hasn’t looked that way in a long time.
A few minutes later, Habetrot comes over with a fabric in a soft, deep gray that seems to shift in her hands between brown and blue when she turns it in the light. My fingers stray to the cloth, petting the nap of the velvet. It is as soft as the cloak that the prince draped over my shoulders.
“Yes, yes,” she says. “This will do. Arms out like a bird. There.”
As I stand there, letting her drape me in fabric, my gaze goes to her collections of buttons and fiber and cloth. To the spindle resting in one corner and the shimmer of the thread in it, bright as starlight.
“You,” Habetrot says, poking me in the side. “Shoulders back. Don’t crouch like an animal.”
I do what she tells me but bare my teeth at her. She bares her teeth in return. They are blunt, blackened along the gums.
“I have dressed queens and knights, giants and hags. I will dress you, too, and give that for which you were too afraid to ask.”
I don’t see how that is possible, but I do not argue. I think instead of the way we came. I counted the passages, and I am almost certain I know the way back to the fog-shrouded hole in the ground. I go over them again and again to fix them in my memory in case I have to run. In case we all have to run.
When she has my measurements and perhaps my measure, she goes to her table and begins to rip and stitch, leaving me to awkwardly wander the room, peering at ribbons, some of which seem to be made of woven hair, others of toad skin. I pocket a pair of sharp-looking scissors with a handle in the shape of a swan. They are lighter than my knives and much easier to conceal.