loving her despite her lack of interest in me. I had cauterized it ages ago.
Proper ladies of Demeine did not cry.
They endured.
She didn’t look back, and then, she was gone.
I wandered to the cherry trees. My eyes burned, tears pooling. It wasn’t fair; she left me here so easily, without even a second thought. It wasn’t fair how much it hurt, and worse, she would have chided me for my tears. I grasped a tree branch and ripped it free. Bark dusted my arm.
“What did that tree ever do to you?” a sharp voice asked.
The girl stepped over a thicket of blackberries, cheap dress snagging, and stopped before me. She didn’t frown, but she paused before giving the worst curtsy I had ever seen.
“Sorry, Madame,” she said.
I laughed. “I am a terrible noble, but at the very least, I must teach you how to curtsy.”
Given my past, Mademoiselle Gardinier would be lenient with “my” manners. I hoped.
Mine were doomed; I hadn’t even asked for this girl’s name.
“Who are you, exactly?” I asked.
“Annette Boucher of Vaser,” she said. “They let me in like you said.” She tapped the wooden leaf pin on her shoulder. “The guard said Mademoiselle Charron can use this to scry whoever’s wearing it, so be sure to give it back when you leave.”
“Annette Boucher,” I said slowly, the old Deme word a comfort. If I used her family name, I would be one of dozens and harder to find. “Thank you for doing this. Again, if you are caught, I will protect you and make sure you are not punished.”
One of her eyebrows twitched. “Thank you, Madame.”
She didn’t believe me at all.
Well, I could only remedy that by proving it.
“Now,” I said, clapping my hands. “We will change clothes, you will go up to school, I’ll wait long enough to make sure you’re not arrested immediately, and then I shall send your family what you bought today, yes?”
“Yes, or else they’ll think I stole it. Shouldn’t cost much to send, and you can take the money I have.” She pulled out a small purse and handed it to me. “Can I send you money to Delest?”
“You can and you will.” I weighed her coin purse—hardly enough to do anything with—in my hand. She had embroidered a crooked moon on either side. Or it was one very rotund cat. I couldn’t tell. “If you do not, I will be caught swiftly, and I doubt I’ll have time to send you a warning.”
If she robbed me outright? Well, there was nothing gained without taking a risk.
“You don’t mind me asking,” she said, fiddling with the silver trinket around her neck. “Why do you want to do this? You’ve got everything.”
“I don’t want everything.” I clawed at the lace scratching my neck. “I want one thing, and that is to be a physician.”
“Here.” She gestured for me to turn around, and her fingers skimmed the back of my neck, my necklaces bunching up as she lifted them free. She hung them from a tree branch. “You sure our clothes will fit?”
“There’s only one way to find out, and you cannot walk into the school in what you have,” I said.
She nodded. “Where do we start?”
“Help me remove this overdress, and then we may deal with this new contraption from Vertgana my mother insists is a corset.”
She had imported it from the nation to our north as soon as she heard it was in fashion. It was wasted on me.
“You don’t want to keep it?” she asked. The overdress she helped me pull over my head and hung from another branch. Her fingers lingered on the gauzy fabric. “How can you not want this?”
“I don’t like the way it makes me look or the way it feels. It makes me feel as if I’m lying about who I am.” Admittedly, the corset was much more supportive than the stays I normally wore under my clothes, but the pinch of it along my ribs made my skin crawl. “I have never been the lady my mother wishes me to be, tastes in clothes included.”
Unlike her dress, mine was laced in the back—surely to keep me from getting out of it—and she took such care with undoing the ribbon that it took far longer to untie than it had to lace up.
“Like your parents assumed wrong at birth?” she asked.
A curious turn of phrase I hadn’t heard before.
“I can’t say my dislike for what my mother prefers has been since birth, but it’s