“Hold still, my lady,” Lira says, poking another pin into my hair. “If you keep making that face, your crown will slide right off.”
“I’m not making a face,” I say. “This is just my face. It does that when it’s under duress.”
Nyre snorts from where she’s straightening my sleeves. “You faced the Hollow itself with less complaining,” she says.
“The Hollow wasn’t trying to balance metal on my skull,” I mutter.
The crown isn’t huge, but it’s still a crown—silver worked with little ice crystals that don’t melt and the occasional flicker of faint blue light. The first time they put it on me, I flinched. Today is… maybe the fourth? Fifth? I’ve lost count. The Twelve Nights are blurring together. I look up at a calendar on the wall. It is themed for the Twelve Nights balls. 6 of them are marked
