Chapter 138: — "Operational Necessity"

The rule was established at the door of the first shop and never revisited.

“Good quality only.”

“That’s not what the brief—”

“Good quality only, Mira. Nothing that falls apart. Nothing that’s only meant to look like something.” Seraphina was already inside. “Because in eleven days this is over and I am not throwing away a coat.”

Mira stood in the doorway.

“You want to keep them.”

“I want the option.”

“You want to keep them.”

“It’s a budget, Mira, budgets are spent, the question is only whether you spend them stupidly—”

“You want to keep the coat.”

“I want to keep the coat,” said Seraphina, “and I would like you to stop saying it out loud.”

Eren discovered within about four minutes that he had been included in the good-quality rule for exactly none of his own clothing, and objected.

“Why does the prince get wool.”

“Because the prince has money.”

“I have money. In the story I don’t have money, but I have money, I’m standing here with money—”

“You’re a girl alone in a market square.”

“I’m a girl alone in a market square in whatever this is—”

“That’s linen.”

“It’s thin.”

“It’s supposed to be thin—”

“It’s a rumour of a garment,” said Eren, holding it up. “It’s the idea of a dress. I could read through this.”

The prince took two hours.

Seraphina did not hurry any part of it.

She went through the coats first, because the coat was the thing people would see from thirty feet and decide about before he opened his mouth — dark grey wool, cut narrow, high collar, silver at the fastenings but not much of it, because too much silver read as new money and the whole point of Seraphel was that nobody had ever told him no because nobody ever had, going back generations.

She found it on the third rack.

She knew before she’d taken it off the hook.

“That one.”

“You’ve had it in your hand for four seconds.”

“That one.”

Mira looked at the price.

Mira looked at Seraphina.

Mira did not say anything, which was Mira’s version of an extended argument.

Then shirts. Then boots — good ones, hard-wearing, because the boots were the one thing on the entire list that would still be doing a job in the pass next winter and she was not pretending otherwise.

Then gloves.

Then a second pair of gloves.

“You’ve got gloves.”

“These are different.”

“They’re gloves.”

“These are evening gloves, Mira—”

“Where is the prince going in the evening—”

“He’s a young man of quality, he goes wherever he likes, that’s the point of him—”

Then a third coat, lighter, for indoors.

Then a fourth.

“Seraphina.”

“It’s cold in that region—”

“It’s the same region we’re in.”

“It’s colder in the narrative.”

She put the first one on behind a curtain and came out and stopped in front of the glass.

And then said nothing for some time.

Mira watched her not say anything for some time.

Four years of the same coat. Four years of the same boots, resoled twice. Four years of gloves lost in rivers and gloves split at the knuckle and a wardrobe that consisted entirely of things that were warm enough and things that weren’t.

And before that — a mansion with a room in it, and a competition in a city, and a woman named Marianne Voss telling her to think bigger.

Seraphina turned sideways at the glass. Looked at the shoulder line.

Adjusted the collar by about a quarter of an inch.

“It’s not sitting,” she said. “Here. It wants taking in about that much and then it’ll sit.”

The shopkeeper, who had been observing all of this with the expression of a professional recognising another professional, said: “That is exactly where it wants taking in.”

“I know, I said—”

“Nobody says that. In eleven years nobody has said that.”

Seraphina looked at the shoulder for another moment.

Then said, very quietly, mostly to herself:

“…I used to be good at this.”

Mira, from the corner, without looking up:

“You’re still good at it. You just haven’t been allowed.”

The girl’s clothes took forty minutes and were considerably more fun.

Not for Eren.

“This one,” said Seraphina, holding up something grey.

“That’s not a colour.”

“It’s the absence of a colour, which is what we want, we want people’s eyes to slide straight off you until the moment they don’t—”

“It’s a sack—”

“It’s a shift, Eren.”

“It’s a sack with an opinion about my arms—”

Then, at the back of the shop, she found the rack.

Second-hand. Third-hand. The kind of rack that exists in every market in every country, where clothes go after they have been worn by a great many people in sequence, and she went along it with total focus and pulled one out and held it up to the light.

“This.”

The shopkeeper came over and looked at it.

“That’s been through a lot of hands.”

“How many.”

“…I couldn’t say.”

“Guess.”

“Sixty? Eighty?”

“More,” said Seraphina, with enormous satisfaction. “Look at the hem. Look where it’s been let out and taken in and let out again — that’s four different bodies at least, and that’s just the ones who bothered altering it. That’s a hundred. That’s a hundred people’s worth of dress.”

She turned to Eren.

“This is the one.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“That’s perfect.”

“That’s disgusting and perfect, I can hold both—”

“Nobody looks at a dress like this and wonders where you came from,” said Seraphina. “They look at it and they already know, and they’re wrong, and that’s the entire job.”

Eren took it.

Held it at arm’s length.

“…It’s soft, actually.”

“That’s a hundred people.”

“I’m putting it down.”

They had it cleaned. Twice. Seraphina insisted, on the grounds that being convincing and being unwell were two different objectives.

The last shop had the padding.

Eren discovered this and did not recover for the remainder of the afternoon.

“Do you want to see my—”

“No.”

“You haven’t heard the end of the—”

“I have heard the end of the sentence.”

“Mira hasn’t heard—”

“I’ve heard it,” said Mira. “You said it in the last shop. To a shopkeeper.”

“He was interested—”

“He was frightened—”

“He asked what they were for and I told him,” said Eren, “which is more honesty than that man has received in his entire professional life, and I don’t think he appreciated it.”

Seraphina had her forehead against a shelf.

“Four days,” she said. “We’ve had this for four hours and there are eleven days—”

“Do you want to see my boobs.”

“EREN.”

“They’re new.”

They finished at dusk and walked back through the lower market with more parcels than three people should reasonably carry.

Eren was still in the shift under his coat, because he had put it on to check the length and had, somewhere in the following two hours, not taken it off. Nobody had commented. He had not offered an explanation.

He shifted the parcels to his other arm.

“It’s warmer than trousers,” he said, to nobody.

“What.”

“Nothing.”

“You said—”

“I said nothing, Mira—”

“You said it’s warmer than—”

“It is not warmer than trousers,” said Eren, with great dignity, “and I want that on the record, and I would like the record to show that I said it first, before anyone accused me of anything.”

Mira wrote nothing down.

She simply looked at him for a while, and then looked ahead, and the not-writing was substantially worse than the writing would have been.

That night Seraphina laid all of it out.

Not to check it. To look at it.

The grey coat over the back of a chair. The boots. The gloves, both pairs. The shirts folded in the order she’d wear them. The dress with a hundred people in it, cleaned twice, hanging by itself on the far side of the room like something being kept apart.

And she stood in the middle of it with her arms folded and something moving through her that she hadn’t felt in four years and did not have a name for any more.

“You’re doing a face,” said Eren from the doorway.

“I’m looking at a coat.”

“You’re looking at a coat—”

“That’s what I said.”

He came and stood next to her and looked at it too.

“It’s a good coat,” he said.

“It’s a very good coat.”

“You’d have picked it even without the budget.”

“I’d have picked it first, and then worked backwards until I’d justified it,” said Seraphina, “which is a completely different process and produces the same result, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t repeat that anywhere.”

“Mira already knows.”

“Mira has always known.”

“Mira knew in the doorway of the first shop.”

“Mira knew before we left the academy,” said Seraphina.

And then, without particularly meaning to, and to the coat rather than to him:

“They’ll be sorry.”

“…What.”

“Halven’s people. Whoever’s in that house. Whoever’s been sitting six years behind a beloved man moving other people’s money—” She had her hand up. She was not aware of her hand being up. “They’ve never once had to worry about anything, and in eleven days a boy is going to walk into their square and be so appallingly unpleasant that they will have no choice but to invite the problem straight into their own home. And they will thank him for leaving. Ahaha—”

She stopped.

The hand was still up.

She looked at the hand.

Eren was not moving at all.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re going to.”

“I’m processing,” said Eren. “Give me a second. This is the second time in two days and I’m not built for the frequency.”