Wolves at the Door - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,80

and some of them were round like portholes, and tilted open. I gotta be honest, it looked pretty ramshackle, like the whole thing could collapse into the swamp.

I could already hear the other girls chattering through the windows. Lady Melis opened the door and I was greeted by a flurry of laughter, fabrics and girls messing with their hair and accessories. All of them wore beautiful gowns, although the styles varied from light and frilly to dark and dramatic. I assumed the dressmaker was the very short, squat, elderly fae woman with blue frilled fins around her face like a collar. She immediately hurried over to me.

“Lady Daisy! You’re the last one, then! I’m the dressmaker, Yami. Let’s get you into something! Hurry up, it’s almost time for dinner and I don’t want you to keep Queen Morgana waiting. The ready-made gowns are all around you, so please choose whatever you like.”

They all paused and looked at me expectantly.

There were my twelve fellow faery brides. I had recruited them all at the Haven in order to fulfill the contract with Queen Morgana to save my own ass, and they were not a very choice lot if I’m being honest. Who do you think signs on to leave their home and family forever and marry a man they’ve never met?

Some messed up bitches, that’s who.

I didn’t remember half their names.

Worse, I had lied to a lot of them and told them about all this cool stuff that would happen in the faery realm, when I didn’t actually know the first thing about life here. Luckily, they all seemed pretty happy with the clothes, and the glasses of sparkling wine they were drinking probably didn’t hurt either. Maybe it wasn’t a lie so much as a prophecy. Yeah.

“Do any of them appeal to you, Daisy?” Polly asked.

“Give a girl a minute to actually look,” I said.

Polly was a gator shifter. She had a sturdy brow, sharp teeth, and her body was big boned and squarish. She looked ready for a street brawl, except that her personality was completely at odds. She wore her hair in a soft bun with a few curls escaping and a hair ornament made of tiny pearls, and I wasn’t surprised that she had chosen a long, sort of cutesy dress made of white cotton and lace with silk flower trimmings. Polly was a Jane Austen fan girl. You would learn that if you talked to her for two minutes. Jane Austen novels were very popular with hedge/cottage/kitchen witch types. That class of witches were everyone’s favorite kind, with all the feminine virtues down to a tee.

“Be careful which you choose,” Rowena said, with a slow smile.

“Why?”

“Every gown has meaning.”

I reached for a rack of fabrics, enjoying the caress of silk, fine cotton, wool and linen on my skin. They were all gorgeous but most of them were definitely not my style.

“Daisy, I thought we were going to throw off the shackles of conformity here,” Lucinda said. “You told me that faery life is free but now I am being told that faery noblemen are going to make their choices among us and we’re going to be trained to be faery ladies. Trained. Like dogs. This is not the sort of life that is good for my spirit or mental health.”

“Well, I’m in the same boat, so just chill,” I said. “I thought I was going to marry Lord Orson and now I just found out that one of these high lords is going to get to pick me too, so none of us are getting exactly what we want, but it’s better than wizard prison, right?”

“I don’t know. I was not some man’s object at the Haven.”

“Girl, they murder people at the Haven, and if you really think that’s better than getting married, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t think the faery men like us either so fair’s fair. This is what’s called a strategic agreement.”

Yeah, so in contrast to Polly were Lucinda and Rowena.

Witch society was pretty strict, so a lot of the witches at the Haven were rebellious types that I guess roused too much rabble at some point.

Lucinda described herself as a ‘non-conformist’ when I met her. Have you ever met a person who describes themselves that way who is also fun? Yeah, exactly. Lucinda went by the name ‘Persona’, which was just like, ugh. Was she a girl or a bad college poem? She was tall and slender, dark-skinned with