Page 79 of The Dandelion Princess
“Is there a bottom to that dress?” I growl.
Alix rolls her eyes. “Marc, you are being elderly.”
“Queen Helena will have something to say about this,” I insist. “One little breeze and you’re going to launch another succession crisis.”
Ella glares at me. “We can weight the hem.”
Alix taps her lips. “No. That will drag the shape out of it.” She gives a throaty sound of irritation. “I hate it when he has a point.”
“Truly the worst,” Ella agrees.
Alix snaps her fingers. “So let’s give this look to Dahlia,” she directs the dressmaker, “and reverse the effect for Ella. It’ll be full-length but low-cut and we’ll give you something strappy up here.” Alix’s hand flutters in a way I consider wildly irresponsible.
“She’s a princess of the blood,” I say. “For the dignity of the nation, she ought to be covered.”
Alix’s brows gather. “Now he sounds like Noah. Honestly, Marc, you’d think Sondmark was on the brink of collapse. Our country won’t rise or fall with her neckline.” She sweeps her hands at me. “Turn around while I get Ella out of this.”
The sound of fabric dropping bores into my brain, but the dressmaker works quickly, creating a quick mock-up of the traditional silhouette married with a summer dress.
“You want to know what else I hate? How much I love this,” Alix says. “You can turn, Marc. Dearest, you almost look tall.”
Ella twists a strand of hair, tucking it into a loose updo. “Sold,” she laughs.
“Not sold. Not. Sold. Nobody is selling anything.” I shake my head. How is this better? The skirt is long, but the crisscross topshould be a dozen centimeters higher. I drag air into my lungs. Where in the Sondish Sea have the sleeves disappeared to? I want to pound my head against some antique woodwork.
Ella’s eyes linger on my face. “I’ve always wanted to be tall.” Has she missed me as much as I’ve missed her? I try to detect a trace of it.
“Let’s have a pair of narrow straps tie right at the point of her shoulders,” Alix murmurs to the dressmaker, her focus elsewhere.
Why doesn’t anyone care that Ella is brewing a national scandal? “This is so much worse. It exposes—”
Alix lifts her head, nailing me with a lookAmmawould surely recognize. “This is my best friend, Marc, and I won’t have your loyalty to Noah ruining this for her. She has to dress like a middle-aged public health minister when she’s doing her job, but thisisn’ta job. It’s a wedding, and it’s completely reasonable. It just is. I refuse to send her down the aisle looking like she’s wearing a sack.”
I take an unsteady breath, and Dahlia pokes her head around the door. “Is this where the party is?” She gets one look at Ella and whistles.
“Come in, come in,” Alix gestures, swinging her gaze to Ella, her hands pressed in supplication. “Be the best maid of honor and take him off my hands for a few hours before he shrouds all my bridesmaids in shapeless bedsheets? I’ll sort it out with the dressmaker. I’m so sorry to inflict him on you,” she adds, glaring at me with narrowed eyes.
Ella smiles. “Anything to make you happy.”
After a few tucks and measurements, she’s sent to change, and she emerges from a curtained-off area in a pair of jeans and a Lao Hu Zone t-shirt. The members of the eternally youthful boy band look out at me from the graphic t, each dripping with jewelry, each sporting a different hair color.
I am hit with a wave of emotion—a tsunami.
I have a memory of how Ella turned from an awkward fifteen-year old with a posture problem into an unhinged Lao Hu Zone Lioness with a posture problem. I remember the slide deck she forced me to watch so I’d understand each nuance between her bias, her bias wrecker, the main visual, and rap line. “They’re so pretty, Marc. So pretty.” I still can’t keep the members straight.
“Is it June 28th already?” I ask, remembering the anniversary of their debut. “Were you up when they went live?”
“So early,” she smiles, “sitting up in bed, waving my lightstick in the dark like a maniac.”
I am hit with another wave of wishing I had been there, arm hooked around her waist, face buried in a pillow, trying to sleep while she watched on her laptop.
My time in Seong taught me something about tsunamis. They aren’t just a rush of water. When they roll in from the ocean, they thicken at the leading edge, the wave frequency stacking and building up layers while picking up debris. Everyone has been knocked over by a wave at the beach, but when seismic conditions alter the sea floor, the wave carries all the flotsam it encounters—the past piggybacking on the present, everything arriving at once. When a thing like that smashes into you, there’s no coming back.
That damned shirt.
Vede. I have to get out of here because Alix isn’t blind.
“The weather is gorgeous,” I manage. “Wanna inspect some fences?”
