The Stolen Heir by Holly Black

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.

I cannot deny that though I have avoided the Folk, I am fascinated by them. Despite them being deceivers, and dangerous.

My gaze alights on a button the exact shining golden bronze of Oak’s hair. Then another the purple of Hyacinthe’s eyes.

I think of him in the dungeons. Hyacinthe, half-cursed, wearing that awful bridle, so desperate that he would seek help even from me.

“Come and try this on,” says Habetrot, surprising me out of my thoughts.

“But it’s only been a few moments,” I say, puzzled.

“Magic,” she reminds me with a flourish, then ushers me behind a screen. “And give me that dress you’re wearing. I want to burn it.”

I pull the worn fabric over my head, letting it fall to the floor between us and fixing her with a look that dares her to wrest it from me. I feel as vulnerable as a selkie taking off her skin.

Habetrot pushes the soft blue-purple-gray garment into my hands. I put it on carefully, feeling the slide of the lining smooth against my skin, feeling the comforting weight of fabric.

It is a gown, but one such as I have never seen before. It is composed mostly of the cloth she showed me, but there are strips of other material running through it, some diaphanous and others satiny, some patterned in butterfly wings, some felted wool. Dangling threads hang from torn edges, and a few pieces of thin fabric have been wadded up to give them a new texture. The swirling patchwork she has created is at once tattered and beautiful.

As I look at it, I am not sure what to think. It is mockery that makes her dress me thus, in rags and scraps, no matter how deftly put together?

But perhaps that’s what she thought would best suit me. Perhaps it is Oak who is the fool, who caught a wolf and thought that by putting it in a gown and speaking to it as though it were a girl, it would become one.

At least the hem of the skirt doesn’t drag impractically on the floor. I can still run in it as I howl at the moon.

“Come out, come out,” she says.

I step from behind the screen, taking a sharp breath as I do so, dreading seeing myself in the mirror and feeling the burn of further humiliation.

The little seamstress pushes me toward a polished bronze thing that looks like a shield. My reflection stares back at me.

I am taller than I remembered. My hair is a wild tangle despite my attempts at finger-combing and washing it back at the motel. I never got out all the knots. My clavicle shows at the top of the collar, and I know I am too thin. But the dress clings to my chest and waist, skirt flaring over my hips. The tattered edges give it a haunting elegance, as though I am wrapped in the shadows of dusk. I look the picture of a mysterious courtier, rather than someone who sleeps in dirt.