I looked at my reflection in the mirror and barely recognised the woman looking back.
Red and gold — a saree that caught the morning light and returned it richer, the gold embroidery running through the fabric in patterns that shifted as I moved. Behind me, the chamber was organised chaos: Rora working with focused attention on my hair, another maid deliberating over jewellery with the gravity of someone making genuinely important decisions, a third crouched near the wardrobe evaluating footwear options. All of them moving quickly, all of them slightly anxious.
Their anxiety was warranted. I had walked through the door only a few hours before the fair's opening ceremony, and the look they had been planning for days still needed to be constructed from scratch.
The truth was that I had intended to return before nightfall. The merchant district had other ideas.
I had not known, before last night, that the merchant district of Arpa never fully stopped. When the daytime stalls closed, the night stalls opened in their place — lamps and fire basins lit along the streets, warm light spilling onto the cobblestones, the crowds thicker in some places than they had been during the day. The people of Selon had a different relationship to the evening than the people of Draga did. In Draga, the cold and the dark drove everyone inside before long, and the streets after nightfall belonged to necessity rather than pleasure. Here, the cooler night air was a relief rather than a threat, and people treated the evening market as something worth coming out for.
I had walked through it without any particular destination, which was what you did when you were not the Empress of Selon but simply a young man from the west trying to make enough money to get home.
A fire performer had drawn a crowd in one of the wider squares — a man who poured some substance into a vessel, heated it until it moved like liquid light, and then sent it skyward in great blazing arcs that broke apart in the air and fell back as trails of sparks. Like shooting stars choosing to move upward instead of down. The crowd cheered with genuine delight, and I stood among them and cheered with them, and the image of it settled somewhere in my memory with the permanent quality of things you know you will not forget.
The food vendors had relieved me of most of my hard-earned coins. Skewered meat with a dark, sweet glaze. Pastries so full of their filling that the seams looked as though they might give way at any moment. I ate standing at the stall counters with the complete abandon of someone who has no dignity to protect and an excellent night market to explore.
When I finally thought to check the sky, the horizon was already pale with the approaching dawn.
---
Rora and the others produced the finished result in what I suspected was record time, driven by a combination of skill and the particular focused energy that comes with a deadline that cannot be moved. I had offered to simply conjure the look myself — it would have taken seconds — but the excitement in their faces when I arrived had stopped me. They had been planning this. Taking it from them would have been unkind.
So I sat still and let them work.
The final result, when they stepped back: a red saree with gold embroidery that moved with the fabric rather than sitting on top of it, my hair arranged in an updo threaded through with jasmine flowers, jewellery chosen with the particular care of people who understand that each piece either works with the whole or against it. My reflection looked, in the most honest assessment I could make, genuinely majestic.
It was also a strange thing to look at, after two days of wearing a different face entirely.
Gayathri arrived while I was still absorbing the strangeness — dressed for the occasion herself, in a saree of deep blue that had an iridescent quality to it, catching the light differently depending on how she moved, gold jewellery at her neck and ears. She looked beautiful, and she looked tired, and she was clearly running on whatever reserves had kept her going through the final days of preparation.
Her eyes lit when she saw me.
"Your Majesty," she said, with genuine feeling. "You look absolutely beautiful."
I thanked her and meant it, and we sat down together to go over the morning's programme.
It was not complicated. Open the fair with a brief address, purchase something from one of the stalls as a gesture of engagement, move through the space and speak with the noble ladies who have come. Stay as long as was appropriate and then withdraw. The ceremony was the frame; the actual purpose was the mingling — giving the noble women of Arpa the experience of being in the presence of their empress, being spoken to directly, being seen.
Simple enough.
My thoughts drifted sideways while Gayathri talked, pulled toward the question of what face I might wear next, what possibilities the shapeshifting opened that I had barely begun to explore. I had spent two days as someone entirely different and had, at certain moments, nearly forgotten who I actually was. That was both remarkable and faintly alarming.
"Your Majesty."
Gayathri's voice had acquired a different quality — careful, slightly weighted, the tone of someone approaching something they are not sure how to put down.
I brought my attention back.
"Go on," I said.
She shifted in her seat. A small hesitation, the kind that means someone is arranging words rather than simply speaking them.
"Princess Zaria of Yulia has arrived in Arpa, your Majesty." She said it steadily, and then watched my face.
I considered this. Reichert — Zaren — had received the letter from Gratina yesterday afternoon: 'I'm coming to Selon, brother.' She had moved quickly, if she was already here.
What I didn't yet understand was the particular quality of Gayathri's hesitation.
I looked at her and waited.
She continued.
"Princess Zaria has had a long and very public affection for his Majesty," she said, choosing each word with some care. "It began when his Majesty visited the Kingdom of Yulia as a child — she would have been young then as well. In the years that followed, particularly during the period his Majesty spent away from Arpa, she sent letters to him regularly. The letters were read aloud by bards — she wanted him to receive them regardless of where he was, so she made them public. Over time, they became something people looked forward to hearing. They were set to music eventually." A pause. "It became rather a well-known affair. People here have feelings about it."
She stopped there, watching me.
I absorbed this. Thought about it with the kind of deliberate care that strong emotions sometimes require to avoid simply reacting.
Arvid, at seven years old, in a foreign kingdom. A girl, probably of similar age, who had decided something in that encounter and had held onto it for years — held onto it publicly, with the particular tenacity of someone who had not been discouraged by silence or distance or the intervening complication of his marriage to someone else.
Did it bother me?
I sat with the question honestly.
Arvid had never given me reason to doubt his fidelity. Whatever his other qualities — the manipulation, the careful management of people and events, the willingness to engineer outcomes rather than simply allow them — there had been nothing in any of it that suggested his heart was elsewhere. He had told me he loved me, in a room with no audience, stripped of every other performance. I believed that, despite everything else.
An old childhood attachment from a princess in the west was not a threat I needed to arm myself against.
I let it settle, and then I let it go, and I smiled at Gayathri with something that was entirely genuine.
"That's a story for the past," I said. "The past has had enough of our attention. Let's leave it there and focus on this morning."
Gayathri looked at me for a moment — searching, perhaps, for something beneath the surface of what I had said. Whatever she found, it seemed to satisfy her.
She smiled back and opened the programme notes again.