This Woven Kingdom(This Woven Kingdom #1)(99)

Miss Huda frowned.

It was a moment before she said, “Do you know, I’ve thought from the first that you speak uncommonly well for a snoda. Still, I thought it snobbish to look down on you for your attempt to educate yourself. And yet—all that time you were measuring me with your pins and needles, I never quite had the measure of you, did I?”

Alizeh exhaled, the action loosening something in her bones, some essential tension responsible for securing in place her deferential facade. She didn’t see the point in being compliant any longer.

Indeed, she was tired of it.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” she said to Miss Huda. “If you were unable to take the measure of me, it was because I’d not wanted you to.”

“And why, pray, is that?”

“I cannot say.”

“You cannot?” Miss Huda narrowed her eyes. “Or you will not?”

“I cannot.”

“Whyever not?” She laughed. “Why would you not want anyone to know who you are? Don’t say you’re on the run from assassins?”

When Alizeh said nothing, Miss Huda quickly sobered. “You can’t be serious,” she said. “Are you in fact acquainted with assassins?”

“In my experience, one does not make the acquaintance of assassins.”

“But it’s true, then? Your life is in danger?”

Alizeh lowered her eyes. “Miss, will you not please bring me the package?”

“Oh,” she said, waving a hand. “There’s little point in the package. The parcel was empty.”

Alizeh’s eyes widened. “You opened it?”

“Of course I opened it. You think I believed a girl with silver eyes would come looking for a mysterious package? Naturally I assumed the box would contain bloody goat brains, or even a small family of dead birds. Instead, it was empty.”

“But that can’t be right.” Alizeh frowned. “Will you not bring it to me anyway, so that I might inspect it?”

Miss Huda didn’t appear to hear her.

“Tell me,” she was saying, “why would you bother taking work as a seamstress if your life is in danger? Would it not be difficult to meet the demands of your customers if you needed, for example, to flee with little notice?”

Suddenly, Miss Huda gasped.

“Is that why you weren’t able to finish my gown?” she asked. “Are you running for your life this very moment?”

“Yes.”

Miss Huda gasped again, this time lifting a hand to her cheek. “Oh, how terribly thrilling.”

“It’s nothing of the sort.”

“Perhaps not for you. I think I wouldn’t mind running for my life. Or running away, generally.”

Alizeh felt the nosta glow warm against her skin and stilled, surprised to discover the young woman did not exaggerate.

“I do nothing but avoid Mother most days,” Miss Huda was saying. “The rest of my time I spend hiding from the governess. Or a series of grotesque suitors interested only in my dowry.”

“Surely you have other interests,” said Alizeh, who was growing vaguely concerned for the girl. “You must have friends—social obligations—”

Miss Huda dismissed this with a flick of her hand. “I often feel as if I live in a corridor; I’m neither genteel enough for nobility, nor common enough to mix with the baseborn. I’m a well fed, poorly dressed leper. My own sisters resist being seen with me in public.”

“That’s awful,” Alizeh said with feeling. “I’m truly sorry to hear it.”

“Are you really?” Miss Huda looked up. She studied Alizeh’s face a moment before she smiled. It was a real smile, something earnest. “How strange you are. How very glad I am for your strangeness.”

Surprised, Alizeh ventured a tentative smile back.

The girls were briefly silent after that, both assessing the fragile shoots of an unexpected friendship.

“Miss?” Alizeh said finally.

“Yes?”

“The package?”

“Right.” Miss Huda nodded and, without another word, retrieved from inside her wardrobe a pale yellow box. Alizeh recognized the details right away; it appeared to be a cousin of the box that housed her gown, a perfect match in color and ornamentation, but a quarter of the size.

“So—you’re not really a snoda, then?”

Alizeh looked up to meet the eyes of Miss Huda, who’d yet to relinquish the parcel.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re not really a servant,” she said. “You never were, I think. Your speech is too refined, you’re on the run for your life, and now you receive mysterious packages by way of strangers? You’re also rather beautiful, but in an old-fashioned way, as if from another time—”

“Old-fashioned?”

“—and your skin is too nice, yes, I see that now, and your hair too glossy. I’m quite certain you’ve never had scurvy, or even a touch of the plague, and by the looks of the rest of you I suspect you’ve never spent time in a poorhouse. And your eyes are so unusual—they keep changing color, you know—in fact, they’re so unusual it almost makes one think you might’ve worn the snoda on purpose, to hide your—