“And you think that will work?” I tried not to sound skeptical and failed miserably.

“Of course it will work. You’ll find conversation between the two of you easy. All you have to do is commiserate about how you’ve been unfairly matched with an idiot who is unfit to rule the kingdom, and you’ll be instant best friends, I assure you. By the time dinner is over, he’ll see that you’re much too clever of a woman to be stuck with someone as simple-minded as his son. He’ll feel pity for you, since he’s also stuck with me, in his own way. By dessert, you’ll be back with your parents doing…whatever it is that delights your mortal heart, I assure you.”

I chewed my lip. “You’re sure it will work?”

“I know my father. It’ll work. Just play up the glassblowing entrepreneur thing. He’ll like that. He thinks I’m entitled,” he said, rising from the bed and strolling to the door. When he turned around to face me, I tried to catch a glimmer of sadness in his eyes, but all I could find was that self-possessed mask of a smirk. “I’d tell you to wear something pretty tonight, but I figure that would just offend you.”

CHAPTER 9

ELLIE

“When Evander was sulking about his accidental betrothed, he forgot to mention you were a goddess.”

Blaise, my other lady’s maid, the one with whom Imogen had been agitated for skirting her duties, leaned against my bedpost.

She and Imogen had arrived at my quarters to help me ready myself for dinner, but the latter had left to retrieve my gown, which the tailor had only just finished due to the late notice.

Blaise lingered behind, claiming she would start on my paint, though she hadn’t yet made a move for the ornate wooden palette that rested top of the white oak vanity.

After a heavy internal debate regarding whether to inquire about Blaise’s religious beliefs—she’d mentioned a goddess rather than the Fates—or about her casual nature with Evander, I settled on the latter. “You call him by his given name?”

Blaise shrugged, a common mannerism though it came so naturally to her, she made it look as if she’d invented it. “Not usually. Most of the time I call him Andy, but I thought I’d be considerate and not leave you wondering who I was talking about.”

“Ah.” Andy. How endearing.

I fought the urge to roll my eyes and determined that I’d probably need to do my own paint if I didn’t want to end up looking like a circus clown tonight.

My guess was that Andy rarely befriended his female servants out of a good-natured desire to understand the viewpoints of the working class, and as the prince’s betrothed, I wasn’t keen on letting one of his bedmates near my eyes with something long and pokey.

I reached for the palette and brush, but Blaise abandoned her sedentary station beside my bedpost and waved me away from the paint.

“I can do it myself. I’ve been doing it myself my entire life,” I protested.

Blaise shrugged, taking the brush and opening the palette anyway. “Usually I’d take you up on the offer to do my work for me, but this is the only part of this promotion I’ve actually been looking forward to.”

When she lifted the lid, I couldn’t help but note that the palette differed from any I’d bought in town. Where most of the paints I’d purchased included a variety of shades that needed to be hand mixed to match one’s skin tone, this palette contained only one shade—a sickly gray that I’d only ever seen on faeries and light-skinned humans…who happened to be dead.

She really was intending to ruin my paint.

Blaise smirked, reading my expression. “Relax. I thought it looked disgusting the first time I saw it, too. But it’s some sort of special faerie paint.” I must have not looked like I believed her, because she dipped the brush in the paint and swiped it across her own cheek. The paint instantly melded with Blaise’s pale white skin, cloaking any blemishes and highlighting the cool undertones so that her face retained a delicate shimmer. “See?”

“You’d think that would have found its way into the human markets by now,” I said, nodding toward the paint.

Blaise made an exaggerated swoop of her neck. “Yes, but can you imagine the lines? Besides, I think they have to boil human kidneys to make it, so I can see how that might impact sales.”

I jerked back from the brush she was bringing to my forehead, but Blaise only laughed. “Kidding.”

She applied the paint all over, but before I could catch a glance of myself in the mirror to be certain it didn’t look as though I was wearing a nighttime clay mask, she swiveled my chair to face away from the mirror.

“It’s more fun if you wait until the end. More dramatic that way,” she explained with a flourish of her hands.

I wiggled uncomfortably in my chair, but she went back to work, applying paint from a different palette to my eyelids, biting her protruding tongue as she concentrated. “This part is more fun,” she explained, nodding toward the eyelid paint. “I guess even faerie magic hasn’t figured out how to experiment with this many hues yet. I hope they don’t figure it out.”

I couldn’t help the smile that tugged at my lips. While my first impression of Blaise was that she was a jealous lover of the prince’s, she seemed earnest, and while she certainly wasn’t demure and sweet like Imogen, I could appreciate her frankness. That, and the way she spoke about the paint like it was art. It reminded me of my glass, and it had my hands aching for something to do, something to create.

“How long have you been a lady’s maid?” I asked, not sure what topics to broach. My family had never employed any servants. That was more of an “old money” thing in Dwellen, but I was pretty sure decorum stated they weren’t supposed to talk much about themselves.

Something gave me the impression that Blaise didn’t give a frog’s butt about decorum.

“About…” She glanced intently up at the looming grandfather clock in the corner of my room. “Twenty-six hours now.”

“Oh,” I said, unable to hide my surprise.

“I’ve served in the palace since I was a child.” Blaise opened her mouth, as if to say more, but then she shook her head, moving on to what I assumed was something considerably less personal. “But before the ball, Andy decided to promote me to lady’s maid, so I could attend to whoever he picked to be his wife at the ball.”

There it was. That pet name again.

“I think he meant for it to be a promotion, but really, I’m still required to complete all my other tasks, so it’s more of a nuisance than anything.”

I waited for the aftertaste of her words to sting like bile, to turn bitter in the air, but they didn’t. Blaise went on applying my paint, and if she was aware of how her words could be interpreted as resentful, she didn’t show it on her face.

“But it could be much worse,” she said.

I had a difficult time believing that. “How so?”

“Andy has awful taste in women. I was prepared to spend the rest of my existence waiting hand and foot on a princess who expects rose petals garnishing her iced water and for her baths to be heated to the exact temperature of Paradise Cove at sundown on Summer Solstice.”

My laugh came forth so abruptly, it sent Blaise’s careful brushstrokes off-course. Her brown eyes went wide, and she clamped her hand over her mouth to stifle the giggles. When I attempted to turn toward the mirror to examine the damage, she grabbed me by the shoulder and shook her head. “It’s better if you don’t look. Trust me.”

By the time Imogen returned with the gown, Blaise had declared that she’d be leaving servitude to explore her options as a cosmetologist, given what she’d accomplished with my face as the canvas—which she still wouldn’t allow me to sneak a glance at.

“You look stunning,” Imogen whispered in a breathy voice, though I couldn’t help but notice the way her lips pursed when she glanced back and forth between Blaise and me.

Both maids helped me into my gown, and when Blaise finally spun me around to look at myself in the mirror, I practically gasped.

“I think you’re right about that career change, Blaise,” I whispered, catching sight of her smug grin as I examined my reflection in the mirror.

I had to admit. The gown wasn’t exactly unflattering.

My family had never wanted for fine clothing, at least not since I was old enough to remember. But our wealth hadn’t changed the fact that most of our neighbors still considered us a working-class family. It hadn’t mattered that my father had accrued his wealth from the business of practically every house in town, that we’d had enough money to buy our beautiful cottage on two acres of land within the city limits. Father had earned his money, rather than inheriting it, which meant while our neighbors had been careful to be polite, we had always lived on the outskirts of fine society.

I had never attended a dinner party, a ball, or any other gathering that would require me to wear a gown this fine.

Not that my family could have afforded a gown this fine.

The gown was a deep cobalt blue, the color of the slivers of sky that outlined the glow of the stars at night. And stars were an appropriate description, for the entire dress was embedded with tiny gemstones that sparkled in the chandelier light. When I moved, the skirt of the dress moved beyond me, fluttering and swaying as if it had its own life about it. The dress had a scooped neck that brushed the edges of my shoulders before descending in a small “v” that skirted just below my shoulder blades.

“This is…” I couldn’t find the words for the beauty of the garment that hugged my waist. Or for how I looked in it. With my curls pulled back into a low braided updo, a string of pearls crowning my head, and a matching set of a necklace and earrings, I looked, well, regal.