Madame Abdelnour’s eyebrows hung somewhere near her hairline. “Military background, you say? Unity, you say? Of course, Your Highness. It will take some time to design and test pieces, but we can make some simple ones immediately.” The modiste studied Touraine as if she could size the woman right there, in her seat. She probably could. Still, she gave Touraine a small bow and beckoned with one crook of her finger. She strode to the center of the room without waiting for Touraine to follow.
At the modiste’s shrill whistle, a few young women appeared from a back room. One of them had the same thick dark hair and bold nose as the modiste, plus a vivid scar on her chin. A measuring tape hung across her shoulders.
“And, madame—she’ll need something formal. Appropriate for a ball.”
Touraine stumbled as she walked to a stool. “A ball.”
Luca drank her tea. It was light and sweet. Saturated with mint. “In two days. I know it’s soon, and I’d rather we didn’t have it at all, but…” She was the first of the royals to visit the colony in too long. It would have to be celebrated with the proper pomp and preening and ingratiating, and as a member of Luca’s staff and household, Touraine would have to be there.
“Your Highness, I’ve never—”
Madame Abdelnour snatched Touraine’s left arm up to run the measuring tape down from Touraine’s armpit.
“I don’t know—” Panic was writ clear on the other woman’s face. It was the closest she’d come to outright dissent. Like each time before, she stopped herself. The fear vanished, replaced with that impassive wall again. “Of course, Your Highness.”
Luca turned the cup in her hands. Her grief rings clinked against the fine clay. The gold band inset with onyx for her father, the thinner gold band with a black diamond for her mother. Make those you would lead depend on you. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you’re ready. Can you dance?”
“No, Your Highness. It wasn’t—” Touraine yelped as the modiste’s daughter pushed her legs wider to measure the inseam of her trousers. She blushed and cleared her throat. “It wasn’t considered a training priority for us, even by Tailleurist standards.”
Luca perked up. “You study the theorists?”
That blank expression. Again. Luca was beginning to recognize the topics that sent her new assistant into stony obedience.
“I don’t know if study is the right word for it, Your Highness.”
And yet—here was a change. A hint of wryness in the other woman’s voice this time.
“If not study, what would you call it?”
“Only living, Your Highness.” Touraine grunted as she was pricked by a pin.
For almost an hour, Madame Abdelnour and her daughter molded Touraine up and down like one of the miniature wooden figurines that stood posed around the shop. They held bolts of cloth up to her body, discarding some and draping others across her shoulders. For almost an hour, they all looked to Luca for approval.
Make those you would lead want you.
As Touraine stood there, it grew easier for Luca to understand why Touraine admired Cantic so. Touraine was a soldier. It was written in the straight lines of her, the breadth of her shoulders, the steady strength of her legs at attention. The same steel that held up Cantic and Gil—and Guérin and Lanquette, for that matter. Rigid as a rifle.
Luca, on the other hand, had a leg with a tendency to give out at inopportune moments and a cane to keep it from showing.
But Luca wasn’t weak. She also had a rapier inside the cane, thin and flexible but strong.
She would pull Touraine to her, her own way. Something else from Yverte: know a person’s desires, and you have leverage—give a person their desires, and you have an extension of your own will.
Touraine wanted a place. She wanted respect from Balladaire’s powerful—why else chase after Cantic’s approval?
Luca could give her both and much more.
CHAPTER 12
THE BALL
On the day of the ball, Luca woke up swearing, her bad leg cramped and burning.
Auspicious beginnings.
Luckily, she had spent the last two days ironing out every detail of her welcome ball so that she wouldn’t have to rely on the auspices of fate. She wasn’t nervous at all. She had prepared for everything.
A knock on the door.
“Come in,” she said, gritting her teeth against the pain.
Touraine opened the main door, not the door connecting Luca’s room to the guards’ room. She bowed, eyes averted. She’d taken to the formalities of interacting with Luca easily enough. Her manners irritated Luca this morning. She’d seen the way the soldier’s eyes had flicked immediately to Luca’s legs and now looked studiously everywhere else.