Elena, who had been fiddling with the star ball from the other house, now put the slightly cloudy orb down and said, “All right. Let’s brainstorm.”
“May I storm, too?” a low, modulated voice asked from the doorway. The girls all turned, rising at the same time to greet a smiling Lady Ulma.
Before taking a chair, she gave Elena a particularly heartfelt hug and kiss on the cheek and Elena couldn’t help herself from comparing the woman as they had seen her at Dr. Meggar’s to the elegant lady she was now. Then, she had been hardly more than skin over bones, with the eyes of a timid wild creature under great strain, wearing a common housecoat, with men’s bedroom slippers. Now, she reminded Elena of a Roman matron, with her face tranquil and beginning to fill out under a crown of glossy dark braids held back by jeweled combs. Her body was filling out, too, especially her belly, although she retained her natural grace as she took a seat on a velvet couch. She was wearing a saffron-colored gown of raw silk, with an underskirt of fringed and shimmering apricot.
“We’re so excited about the fitting tonight,” Elena said, with a nod toward the sketchbook.
“I am as excited as a child, myself,” Lady Ulma admitted. “I only wish I could do for you a tenth of what you have done for me.”
“You have already,” Elena said. “And if we can find the fox keys — it will only be because you helped us so much. And that — I can’t tell you how much that means to me,” she finished almost in a whisper.
“But you never thought I could help you when you defied the law for a ravaged slave. You simply wanted to save me — and you have suffered much for it,” Ulma responded quietly.
Elena shifted uncomfortably. The cut running down her face had left only a thin white scar along the cheekbone. Once — when she had first returned to Earth from the afterlife — she would have been able to wave the scar away with a simple wash of Power. But now, although she could channel her Power through her body, and use it to enhance her senses, she couldn’t make it obey her will in any other way.
And once, she thought, imagining the Elena who had stood in Robert E. Lee High School’s parking lot and drooled over a Porsche, she would have considered the marring of her face the greatest calamity of her life. But with all the accolades she had received, with Damon calling it her “white wound of honor,” and her certainty that it would mean as little to Stefan as a scar on his cheekbone would mean to her, she had found she just couldn’t take it very seriously.
I am not the same person I once was, she thought. And I’m glad.
“Never mind,” she said, ignoring the pain down her leg that still throbbed at times. “Let’s talk about the Silver Nightingale and her gala.”
“Right,” Meredith said. “What do we know about her? How did the clue go again, Elena?”
“Misao said, ‘If I said that one of the halves was inside the silver nightingale’s instrument, would that even give you an idea?’—or something like that,” Elena repeated obediently. They all knew the words by heart but it was part of the ritual, every time they discussed it.
“And the ‘Silver Nightingale’ is the nickname for Lady Fazina
Darley and everyone in the Dark Dimension knows it!” cried Bonnie, clapping her small hands in sheer delight.
“Indeed, that has long been her sobriquet, given to her when she first came here and began to sing and play on her harps strung with silver,” Lady Ulma put in gravely.
“And harp strings need to be tuned, and they’re tuned with keys,” Bonnie continued excitedly.
“Yes.” Meredith, in contrast, spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “But it’s not a harp-tuning key we’re looking for. They look like this.” She put down on a table beside her an object made of smooth pale maple that looked like a very short T or, if held on its side, like a gracefully waving tree with one short horizontal branch. “I got that from one of the minstrels Damon hired.”
Bonnie eyed the tuning key loftily. “It
“I don’t see how,” Meredith said doggedly. “Unless somehow they change shape when the two halves come together.”
“Oh, my, yes,” Lady Ulma said, as if Meredith had just made an obvious proposition. “If they are magical halves of a single key they will almost certainly change when the two halves come together.”
“You see?” Bonnie said.
“But if they can be any sort of shape, then how the hell will we even know when we’ve found them?” Elena asked impatiently. All she cared about was finding what it took to save Stefan.
Lady Ulma fell silent, and Elena felt badly. She hated to use harsh language or even appear distressed in front of the woman who had lived a life of such subjection and horror since her early teens. Elena wanted Lady Ulma to feel safe, to be happy.
“Anyway,” she said quickly, “we know one thing. It’s
“Oh, but—” Lady Ulma began, and then she stopped herself almost before the words were out.
“What is it?” Elena asked gently.
“Oh, nothing at all,” Lady Ulma said hastily. “I mean, would you like to see your dresses now? This last fitting is really just to make sure every stitch is perfect.”
“Oh, we’d love to!” Bonnie cried, at the same time making a dive for the sketchbook, while Meredith rung a bell pull that brought a servant hurrying in and hurrying away again to the sewing room.
“I only wish Master Damon and Lord Sage had agreed to let me create something for them to wear,” Lady Ulma said mournfully to Elena.
“Oh, Sage is not going. And I’m sure Damon wouldn’t have minded — as long as you designed him a black leather jacket, a black shirt, black jeans, and black boots all exactly like the ones he wears every day. He’d have been happy to wear it then.”
Lady Ulma laughed. “I see. Well, there will be enough fantastical styles worn tonight that he may change his mind for the future. Now let’s draw the curtains on the windows all around. This gala is to be indoors, with gaslight only, so colors will show true.”
“I wondered why it said ‘indoors’ on the invitations,” Bonnie said. “I thought maybe it was because of rain.”
“It’s because of the sun,” Lady Ulma said soberly. “That hateful crimson light, changing every blue to purple, every yellow to brown. You see, no one would wear aqua or green to an outdoor soiree — no, not even you, with that strawberry hair that cries out for it.”
“I get it. I can see how having that sun hanging there every day would really get you down after a while.”
“I wonder if you can,” murmured Lady Ulma, and then she added hastily, “While we wait shall I show you what I have created for your tall friend who doubts me?”
“Oh, please, yes!” Bonnie held out the sketchbook.
Lady Ulma thumbed through it until she came to a page that seemed to please her. She took up pens and coloring pencils like a child eager to play with beloved toys again. “Here it is,” she said, using the colored pencils to add a line here and a curve there, but holding the book so that the three girls could see the design.
“Oh, my God!” cried Bonnie in genuine astonishment, and even
Elena felt her eyes widening.
The girl in the sketch was definitely Meredith, with her hair half up and half down, but wearing a dress — such a dress! Black as ebony, strapless, it clung to the long slim figure perfectly sketched in the picture, emphasizing the curves, enhancing them on top by what Elena learned was called a “sweetheart” neckline: one that made Meredith’s front look like a Valentine’s Day heart. It kept close to the body all the way to the knees where it suddenly flared out again, dramatically wide. “A ‘mermaid’ dress,” Lady Ulma explained, satisfied with her sketch at last. “And here it is,” she added as several sewing women entered, reverently holding the miraculous gown between them. Now the girls could see that the material was of plush black velvet dotted with tiny rectangular metallic golden flecks. It looked like midnight back home, Elena thought, with a thousand falling stars in the sky.
“And with it, you will wear these very large black onyx and gold earrings, these black onyx and gold combs to hold your hair up, and some lovely matching bracelets and rings Lucen has made just for this outfit,” Lady Ulma
