Oriane had made the dress months ago. She told me this without ceremony, in the small room off the main corridor where she had taken me to dress, with the same directness she brought to everything.
‘I had it made when you healed me,’ she said. ‘I hoped.’
I looked at it. Pale silver, which was either the most perfect choice anyone had ever made on my behalf or a coincidence so extraordinary it amounted to the same thing. The fabric had the particular weight of something well-made, and the moonlight coming through the room’s single window hit it, and it shimmered in a way that had nothing to do with the material and everything to do with the fact that the moon-born gift in my blood was responding to it.
I could not speak for a moment.
Oriane did not press me. She simply waited, the way s
