This Woven Kingdom(This Woven Kingdom #1)(94)

“Nearly there, sire,” she said in a weathered voice. “Nearly there now. Just a few minutes more.”

Soundlessly, Kamran sighed.

Kamran loathed these fittings, and could not understand why he’d needed one, not when he owned an entire wardrobe full of clothes still unworn, any number of which would’ve been sufficient for the night’s festivities.

It was, in any case, his mother’s doing.

The princess had intercepted him the very moment he’d stepped foot inside the palace, refusing to listen to a word of reason. She’d insisted, despite Kamran’s protests to the contrary, that whatever the king and his officials needed to discuss could wait, and that being properly dressed for his guests was far more important. Besides, she’d sworn, the fitting would take only a moment. A moment.

It had been nigh on an hour.

Still, it was quite possible, Kamran considered, that the seamstress was stabbing him now in protest. The prince had neither heeded his mother upon arrival, nor had he flatly refused to accompany her. Instead, he’d parted with a vague promise to return. An enemy on the battlefield he might’ve cut down with a sword, but his mother in possession of a seamstress on the night of a ball—

He’d not been properly armed against such an adversary, and had settled for ignoring her.

Three hours he’d spent discussing the Tulanian king’s possible motivations with Hazan, his grandfather, and a select group of officials, and when, finally, he’d returned to his dressing room, his mother had thrown a lamp at him.

Miraculously, Kamran had dodged the projectile, which crashed to the floor, causing a small fire upon impact. This, the princess had ignored outright, instead approaching her son with a violent gleam in her eyes.

“Careful, darling,” she’d said softly. “You overlook your mother at great cost to yourself.”

Kamran was busy stamping out the flames. “I’m afraid I don’t follow your logic,” he’d said, scowling, “for I cannot imagine it costs me anything to avoid a parent who so often takes pleasure in trying to kill me.”

The princess had smiled at that, even as her eyes flashed with anger. “Two days ago I told you I needed to speak with you. Two days I have waited to have a simple conversation with my own son. Two days I have been ignored repeatedly, even as you made time to spend an entire morning with your dear aunt.”

Kamran frowned. “I don’t—”

“No doubt you forgot,” she said, cutting him off. “No doubt my request fell right out of your pretty head the moment it was spoken. So swiftly am I forgotten.”

To this, Kamran said nothing, for if she’d indeed asked for a moment of his time, he could not now recall such a summons.

His mother stepped closer.

“Soon,” she said, “I will be all you have left in this palace. You will walk the halls, friendless and alone, and you will search for me then. You will want your mother only when all else is lost, and I do not promise to be easily found.”

Kamran had felt an unnerving sensation move through his body at that; a foreboding he could not name. “Why do you say such things? Of what do you speak?”

The princess was already walking away, gone without another word. Kamran made to follow her and was halted by the arrival of the seamstress, Madame Nezrin, who’d entered the dressing room promptly upon his mother’s exit.

Again, Kamran flinched.

Even if he deserved it, he did not think Madame Nezrin should be allowed to stab him with impunity. Surely she knew better. The woman was the crown’s most trusted seamstress; she’d been working with the royal family since the beginning of his grandfather’s reign. In fact, Kamran often marveled that she hadn’t gone blind by now.

Then again, perhaps she had.

There seemed little other explanation for the ridiculous costumes he regularly discovered in his wardrobe. Her ideas were meticulously executed, but ancient; she dressed him always on the edge of a different century. And Kamran, who knew little of fashion and fabrics, understood only that he did not like his clothes; he possessed no alternative suggestions, and as a result felt powerless in the face of such an essential problem, which drove him near to madness. Surely the mere act of getting dressed should not inspire in a person such torment?

Even now she dressed him in layers of silk brocade, cinching the long emerald robes at his waist with more silk, this time a beaded belt so heavy with jewels it had to be pinned in place. At his throat was yet more of the awful material: a translucent, pale green scarf artfully knotted, the coarse silk netting like sandpaper against his skin.

His shirt, at least, was a familiar linen.

On a single, regrettable occasion he’d once said to his mother—distractedly—that silk sounded just fine, and now everything he owned was an abomination.

Silk, it had turned out, was not the soft, comfortable textile he’d expected; no, it was a noisy, detestable fabric that irritated his skin. The crisp, stiff collar of his robes dug into his throat now not unlike the edge of a dull knife, and he turned his head sharply away, unable to keep still any longer, paying for his impatience with yet another needle in the rib.

Kamran grimaced. The pain had at least done a great deal to distract him from his mother’s ominous parting words.

The sun had begun its descent in the sky, fracturing pink and orange light through the lattice screen windows of the dressing room, the geometric perforations generating a kaleidoscope of oblong shapes along the walls and floors, giving him somewhere to focus his eyes, and then, his thoughts. Too soon, guests would begin arriving at the palace, and too soon, he would be expected to greet them. One, in particular.