The Black Prism(103)

“I already do.” Liv felt deflated. “Get out. Get out before I kill you with my bare hands.”

Aglaia stood, grabbed the money sticks, and said, “I’ll take these for my troubles. After you’ve reconsidered, you know where to find me.”

“Get out!”

Aglaia walked out.

Liv was left trembling. Not thirty seconds later, there was a knock on the door. That was it. Liv was going to kill her. She strode to the door and threw it open.

It wasn’t Aglaia. A beautiful woman stood there. A Blood Forester, with the oddly pale, freckled skin that still seemed strange to Liv even after years at the Chromeria, and red hair like a flame. The woman was dressed in a slave’s dress, but it was tailored to her lean figure, and a finer cotton than Liv had ever seen any slave wear. A nobleman’s slave?

The slave handed Liv a note. “Mistress,” she said. “From the High Lord Prism.”

Liv Danavis stared at the note, feeling stupid, off balance. It read, “Please come see me at your earliest convenience.” Her heart leapt into her throat. A summons from the Prism. So here it was, the beginning of her paying her debt to Gavin Guile. She didn’t fool herself by hoping it would be the end of it, too. When you owed a luxlord, you owed them forever.

She just hadn’t thought he’d ask for her so soon.

Oddly, the first thing she thought of was, What do you wear for an audience with the Prism? Liv didn’t usually pay much attention to her choice of clothing. Maybe that was because when you only have a few changes of clothes, you wear what’s clean and despair of ever wearing what’s fashionable. That, of course, had changed instantly. Gavin had ordered that she be kept in an equivalent fashion to a Ruthgari bichrome, and that meant lots of clothes, a few jewels, and this huge apartment—literally five times larger than the one she’d lived in for the last three years. And though she might not have any money, now she had makeup. Now she had options, and she wasn’t sure she liked it. The idea of turning into a prissy girl like Ana made Liv’s stomach turn.

The slave was still standing at the door, waiting to be dismissed with the pleasant, neutral expression of a woman ignoring the cluelessness of her superior.

“Pardon me, caleen,” Liv said, “but would you help me?” Liv always felt awkward when it came to dealing with slaves. No one in Rekton had been rich enough to afford one, and the few slaves that came through working with the caravans were treated the same as other servants. Things were more formal at the Chromeria, and most of the other students had grown up having slaves or at least being around them, so Liv always felt like everyone else knew what to do, while she was all thumbs. She still felt weird calling a woman ten years her senior by the diminutive “caleen.”

Of course, now that Liv was a bichrome, she was going to have to get used to it fast, or she was going to look like an idiot even more often than usual.

The slave cocked an eyebrow like any twenty-eight-year-old would at any seventeen-year-old being foolish.

“I don’t know what to wear,” Liv said in a rush. “I don’t even know what ‘at your earliest convenience’ means. Does that mean actually at my earliest convenience, or does it mean go right this moment, even if I were just wearing a towel?”

“You can take a few minutes to dress appropriately,” the slave said.

Liv stood paralyzed. Was what she was wearing now appropriate?

“Most women called to the Prism’s room wear something more… elegant,” the slave said, eyeing Liv’s plain skirt and blouse.

Maybe the fitted blue dress, then. Or that odd Ilytian black silk sheath. But that was more of an evening dress, wasn’t it? Or should she wear the shockingly small… Liv wrinkled her nose. There was something about the slave’s statement that made her nervous. She could just imagine a procession of beautiful women queued up outside the Prism’s door. Liv had never heard any gossip about who the Prism took to his bed, but she wasn’t exactly in the middle of the juicy gossip circles, and she could certainly imagine more than a few girls willing to dress or undress any way the Prism wanted. In addition to basically being the center of the universe, he was gorgeous, commanding, witty, smart, young, rich, and unmarried.

Whoever had packed her drawers with cosmetics had bought mostly skin lighteners or darkeners. But with Liv’s kopi-and-cream-colored skin, she didn’t have a hope of looking as light as a west Atashian. Her eyes were too dark anyway. And with wavy hair, even with a darkener on her skin, she wasn’t going to look Parian. There was no hiding that she was Tyrean.