This Woven Kingdom(This Woven Kingdom #1)(93)

“But—perhaps I could climb out the window?”

Miss Huda glared. “You will do no such thing. Not only is the idea preposterous, but I want my gown. I have nothing else to wear, and you, by your own admission, have nothing else to do. Is that not what you said? That you were discharged from your position?”

Alizeh squeezed her eyes shut. “Yes.”

“So you’ve no one waiting for you, and no warm place to go on this winter evening?”

Alizeh opened her eyes. “No.”

“Then I do not understand your reticence. Now remove that godforsaken monstrosity from your face at once,” Miss Huda said, lifting her chin an inch. “You’re not a snoda anymore; you’re a seamstress.”

Alizeh looked up at that, felt the pilot light in her heart flicker. She appreciated the young woman’s attempt to raise her spirits, but Miss Huda did not understand. If Alizeh had to wait until the whole of Follad Place departed for the ball, she herself would be terribly late. She’d no choice but to arrive to the event on foot, and had planned, as a result, to leave a good deal early. Even with preternatural speed she couldn’t move quite as fast as a carriage, and would certainly not dare move too quickly in such a delicate gown.

Omid would wonder whether she’d abandoned him. Hazan would wonder whether she’d been able to secure safe passage to the ball.

She couldn’t be late. She simply couldn’t. There was too much at stake.

“Please, miss. I really must go. I am— I am in fact a Jinn,” Alizeh said nervously, employing now the only tactic she had left. “You need not worry that I will be seen, as I can make myself invisible upon my exi—”

Miss Huda eyes widened in astonishment. “Your audacity shocks me. Do you even know to whom you are speaking? Yes, I am a bastard child, but I am the bastard child of an Ardunian ambassador,” she said, growing visibly angry. “Or did you forget that you stand now in the home of an official hand selected by the crown? How you gather the nerve to even dare suggest—in my presence—doing something so patently illegal, I cannot fathom—”

“Forgive me,” Alizeh said, panicked. Only now that she was being condemned for it did she realize the weight of her error; a different person might’ve already called for the magistrates. “I merely— I wasn’t thinking clearly— I only hoped to provide a solution to the obvious problem and I—”

“The most obvious problem, I think, is that you made me a promise you’ve now unceremoniously broken.” Miss Huda narrowed her eyes. “You’ve no good excuse for not finishing the work, and I demand you do it now.”

Alizeh tried to breathe. Her heart was racing at a dangerous speed in her chest.

“Well? Go on, then,” said Miss Huda, her anger slowly abating. She gestured limply at the girl’s mask. “Consider this the dawn of a new age. A new beginning.”

Alizeh closed her eyes.

She wondered whether the snoda even mattered now. One way or another, she’d be gone from Setar at the end of the night. She’d never see Miss Huda again, and Alizeh doubted the girl would go gossiping about the strange color of her eyes—something she more than likely would not understand, as most Clay were uneducated in Jinn history and would not know the weight of what they saw.

It had never been for fear of the masses that Alizeh hid her face; it was for fear of a single, careful eye. Exposure to the wrong stranger and she knew her life was forfeit; indeed, her precarious position in that very moment was proof. Somehow, impossibly, Kamran had seen through her guile, had seen through even her snoda.

In all these years, he’d been the only one.

She took a deep breath and cleared her head of him, spared her heart of him. She thought instead, without warning, of her parents, who’d always worried about her eyes, always worried for her life. They’d never given up hope of her taking back the land—and the crown—they believed to be rightfully hers.

Alizeh had been raised from infancy to reclaim it.

What would they think if they saw her now? Jobless, homeless, at the mercy of some miss. Alizeh felt quietly ashamed of herself, of her impotence in that moment.

Without a word, she untied the snoda from around her eyes, and, reluctantly, let the scrap of silk slip through her fingers. When Alizeh finally looked up to meet the young woman’s gaze, Miss Huda went rigid with fear.

“Heavens,” she gasped. “It’s you.”





Thirty-Three





KAMRAN FLINCHED.

The seamstress stuck him with yet another pin, humming quietly to herself as she worked, pulling here, tucking there. The woman was either oblivious or heartless, he’d not yet decided. She never seemed to care that she was maiming him, not even when he’d asked her, several times, to desist from these nonessential acts of cruelty.

He looked at the seamstress, the ancient woman in a velvet bowler so diminutive in stature she hardly reached his waist, and who tottered over him now on a small wooden stool. She smelled like caramelized eggplant.

“Madame,” he said tersely. “Are we not yet finished?”

She started at the sound of his voice and stabbed him yet again, causing Kamran to draw a sharp breath. The older woman blinked big, owlish eyes at him; eyes he’d always found disconcerting.