Alphonse and Viola decided to stay with us for the rest of our visit, never once returning to their own estate. I made sure to give them a generous dose of healing magic—no more aching joints, no more blurry vision clouding their days. If I hadn’t already won them over, I certainly had now.
Normally, today would be my turn to wrangle the little ones again, but something more pressing was waiting for me. In just two days, there would be a grand welcoming party—one of those events where 'everyone' is required to show up, not by choice but by royal decree. It would be my first real step into the spotlight, the moment when everyone would learn that Janus and I were already married, and that we had children. I could almost hear the whispers starting already, the rumor mill grinding away behind closed doors. Some of the nobles must have caught wind of me by now, so I needed to make the best impression I could, to quiet the gossip before it grew teeth. For that, I’d need a dress that could make even the most jaded courtier pause.
There were many places where one could get a dress in the capital, but there was only one place in the capital where you could hope for a dress worthy of legends: Madam Marigold’s atelier.
Not everyone could just waltz into Marigold’s and walk out with a dress. Even the ducal houses sometimes had to settle for ready-made gowns or, worse, go to one of Marigold’s rivals. But through the true owner herself, Rika and I, along with most of the Yuwen family, managed to secure appointments. Tomorrow would be the men’s turn, but today belonged to the women—except for Anna, who, in her own words, 'would rather be seen dead than wearing gnome clothes.' Weirdly, however, she kept Rosalia’s secret safe, despite her obvious distaste. Small mercies.
All the women piled into carriages once more, except for Sera, who was mercifully exempt—children under five didn’t have to attend, and there was no way I’d bring her and Alex along anyway. They were far too young to understand any of it, and I could already imagine them wailing in protest, disrupting the whole affair.
There were eight of us in total. Julia and Fiona rode with Emilia and Maggie, while I found myself sharing a carriage with Olivia, Maria, and Martha. Maria, true to form, barely said a word—her nose buried in what I first thought was another book, but turned out to be the script of a play that had taken the capital by storm. The title nagged at me, oddly familiar, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d heard it before. I made a quiet promise to myself to ask her about it later, once she’d finished reading.
Maria’s silence was more than made up for by Martha, who filled the carriage with stories of her husband’s voyages—Zayr Nisa Al-tajir, the great merchant. Sometimes, she said, she even sailed with him, her eyes shining with the memory.
“But aren't you scared?” asked Olivia, who had never left the country before, whose biggest body of water she had conquered was her bathtub.
“Of course. But once I was on the sea, I just couldn't go back. Never have I felt so free in life.”
“Have you ever been on the sea before?” asked Martha, with sparkles in her eyes.
“Only once.” That was true, though it belonged to another life—a school trip spent looking at seals.
“And how was it?” Martha leaned in so far she nearly toppled from her seat, swept up in her own excitement. My answer, short and careful, didn’t quite spark the same joy in Olivia, who still believed I’d once been an Ibasan slave, taken from one of their surrounding islands. She looked at Martha with a kind of secondhand embarrassment, ready to rein her in, but I spoke up before she could.
“It wasn’t so bad. It was strange, having nothing solid beneath my feet, and a little frightening, but I was lucky—I didn’t get seasick. I liked it, though, mostly because I got to see some cute seals up close.”
Olivia let out a quiet sigh of relief, glad I hadn’t taken offense, but she still steered the conversation elsewhere.
“What about the countries you have been to?”
After that, the rest of the journey slipped away in a haze of stories—endless red deserts, marine leviathans with whole merman cities on their backs, mountains of ice, and the rare dragon soaring above the waves. Martha couldn’t stop talking about the dragons, insisting that sailing was the closest a human could ever come to being like them, gliding free over the world.
When we finally arrived at Madam Marigold’s atelier, a long line of carriages already snaked down the street, noble ladies and their servants waiting outside the closed doors. The atelier itself towered over the neighboring shops, four times their size, guarded by two burly men with steel at their sides, deciding who was worthy to enter.
But unlike everyone else waiting, we didn’t have to stand in line or argue with the guards. The moment we stepped down from the carriage, they parted for us, earning us a chorus of protests and more than a few envious stares. Inside, the shop was nothing like the small store Rosalia was manning in Roots. This place was vast, overflowing with dresses—so many that it reminded me of the grandest boutiques back on earth. Rosalia must employ hundreds, maybe even thousands, of seamstresses to keep up with the demand. Even if she didn’t sew every dress herself, most of the designs were hers, each one unique. No noblewoman wanted to risk looking like anyone else.
It wasn’t Rosalia who greeted us, though. Instead, her friend and business partner, Rosa, met us at the door, her husband, Bernard, at her side. Both were commoners, without a family name. Whenever someone asked about the name Marigold, Bernard would just shrug and say his wife liked the flower. It was hardly a secret who really owned the place, but still, Rosalia had to hide, which made me sad no matter how often I heard about it.
Rosa and Bernard didn’t linger, just led us to a hidden room where the real owner waited, her smile a little crazed and dark circles the size of bruised plums beneath her eyes. Close behind her was Rika, already waiting inside with her mother.