The next evening found him cooped up in his chamber, trying to figure out a way to get a letter to his mother, when a folded note slowly floated down in front of his face and landed squarely before him. He jumped up from his desk, whirled, and reached into the empty space around him, but there was nothing except a fluttering of the curtain near his window. Whoever had been there a moment ago — and Dash thought he knew who it was — was gone now. With shaking fingers, he picked up the note, which was addressed to him in messy handwriting that made his heart beat twice in one go. He fumbled to get it open.
Dash,
I know this is a risk I shouldn’t take, and I won’t do it again. But just this once, I had to tell you.
I shared our business proposal with my dad and stepmum, and they listened. It took some doing, but they listened. They’re not going to fix everything all at once, but they’re going to let me inspect the workshop here in Quintessential and help them see what’s wrong. Real changes will happen, and I’ll make sure they happen right away. It’s such a good start. It will change people’s lives. I can’t wait to begin.
Thank you so much for everything. For hearing me. You’ve changed me too, you know. I was so angry, and I felt so lost here. Now I understand what I have, and I know what I need to do. I don’t want to run from this city anymore, because my work is here. Just like yours. Even if we can’t be together, we can still work toward the same things. In that way, at least, we can always be near each other.
Your loyal friend always,
Ella
He ran a fingertip over her name. Had he really helped her? Given her something? He was glad if he had. She had given him so much.
And she was really doing it. Inspecting workshops, making people listen. Changing lives. She was doing more without a crown than he had ever tried to do with one.
He tucked the letter under his waistcoat, close to his heart, and he went to his father’s office, determined.
“I want to participate in the Assembly,” he said before his father had even looked up from his desk. King Clement raised his head.
“Concentrate on the wedding,” he replied. “You have enough to do.”
“You’re the one who wants me married,” said Dash. “You plan the wedding. I want to do something useful. I’m attending the next session with you. There are things I want to discuss with the House of Mortals.”
His father smiled faintly. “You want to bring up your labor questions.”
Dash lifted his chin. “What if I do?”
“You’ll have a riot on your hands,” said his father. “The issue is volatile, and you have no experience with politics. I can’t let you have the floor.”
“Maybe not right away,” said Dash. “But eventually, I will have the floor.”
“When I die and you take the throne, you mean.”
“I’m coming with you, Father. I’m not going through with this wedding if I can’t have something out of it.”
“It’s a little late for demands, son. You’re already betrothed.” The king considered him. “Still, it’s true, you ought to see how it’s all managed. When you finish your studies at Coterie, you can begin attending sessions with me.”
“I’m not going back to Coterie,” said Dash. “I want tutors here at home. And I’m not waiting. I want to see how things work now —”
“All right, all right,” said his father, waving him off. “Tutors, Assembly sessions. Make of your youth an endless parade of isolation and aggravation, if that’s what you wish — just go and be angry and passionate somewhere else, would you? I’m busy.”
Dash left him, satisfied.
HER dad and Sharlyn kept their word. A few days after their meeting, Ella rode with them to Practical Elegance on the Avenue. Her dad showed her every new product in the store and told her which ones she could expect to see in progress at the Ragg Row workshop. Reversible coats with detachable sleeves, adjustable boots that went from thigh to ankle height, scarves that doubled as hunting nets — even a bright yellow children’s jumpsuit that had been treated with a secret compound sourced from the mines of Crimson, to make it glow.
“So parents can find their children more easily in crowds,” said her dad proudly. “Part of our new line of gear for the All-Tyme Championships this summer.”
Ella fingered the paper tag that was pinned to the little suit. Seven hundred nauts. And they’d have to raise it to nine hundred, according to her business proposal. For a moment, looking down at the price, Ella doubted that her plan would ever work.
But the quints around here could pay anything.
Ella gazed around the shop at the words that were painted above the various sections. The Authentic Equestrian. The Authentic Sailor. The Authentic Mountaineer.
“What’s all that about?” she asked Sharlyn. “The authentic stuff?”
“It’s important to give customers something more than a product,” said Sharlyn, obviously pleased to be asked the question. “When they shop at Practical Elegance, they’re not just buying quality goods. They’re buying an identity.”
“An identity?”
“Wearing our clothes, they can imagine themselves as true athletes — true survivalists. If we can give them that feeling, then we’ll have customers for life.”
Ella looked down at the paper tag. “So … what if we shifted our identity a little bit?”
“In what way?”
“What if we tried making people feel like they’re not just athletes and survivalists — they’re also good?”
“Good at what?”
“No, you know,” said Ella. “Kind. Virtuous. That sort of good. What if we could make them feel like every time they spend money with us, they’re saving people’s lives?”
Sharlyn looked curious. “Go on.”
“We’re using Shantung now,” said Ella as the idea began to flesh itself out in her head. “It’s costing us more, so we want customers to pay more for it, right?”
“Yes …”
“So we could sew a tag or sear a stamp onto all of our products that include Shantung silk. A symbol that shows that this silk is made by fair labor, so it’s special. Then everyone would be able to see, when the customers are wearing it, that they’re the sort of people who really care about the poor. Basically, we give them bragging rights. Let them show off how generous they are.”
“Interesting.” Sharlyn tilted her head. “That’s very, very interesting.”
Upstairs in the privy, Ella changed her clothes and let her hair down. When she emerged, Sharlyn looked with surprise at her faded old traveling outfit.
“You changed,” she said, failing to keep the disapproval out of her voice.
“It’s to wear in the garment district. I’ll catch a public carriage from here — there’s one in twenty minutes. How’ll I get into the workshop? The manager won’t recognize me. Can you write me a letter?”
“We’ll visit the workshop together.”
Ella rejected this. “If I show up in a plush carriage with you, nobody in that workshop will talk to me. I mean, they’ll talk to me, but only ’cause they’re scared. They’ll think I’m just a quint.” She paused. “I mean, I’ll be intimidating. I need to look like I belong.”
“You may have a point,” said Sharlyn. “But you can’t go to Ragg Row alone. Quintessential is not Fulcrum. You’ll be targeted and robbed.”
Ella held up rough fingertips to silence her. “I memorized the carriage route last night. I know what I’m doing.”
When Sharlyn would not give in, Ella appealed to her dad and he backed her. But Sharlyn looked unsettled as she wrote Ella a letter of admittance to the workshop.
“Be careful,” she insisted. “I don’t care how experienced you are — you go straight there, you come straight back. I want you here again by noon.”
“It’s nearly an hour’s ride,” said Ella. “I’ll need time for the inspection, and to interview the employees, and to ride back. I’ll be here by the time you close at
six.”
Reluctantly, Sharlyn agreed. Ella was off.
THAT morning, Lavaliere stayed behind from school, and he took her to Farthingale’s to let her choose her wedding jewels. Scribes followed their carriage like a pack of starved hounds, but Dash’s new bodyguards kept them well back. The one benefit of this despicable betrothal was that the king’s guards no longer followed him, and Dash was allowed to choose his own protectors. He selected the guards who had cared for his mother, and chose Tanner as his footman.
In the carriage, Lavaliere leaned back against the cushion beside him, eyes closed. She still looked wrong to him, Dash thought. He couldn’t understand how a person’s face could be so different, out of nowhere.
He sat up at the sensation of the carriage coming to a halt. Tanner opened the door; the guards blockaded a path into Farthingale’s. The scribes shouted from beyond them.
“When is the wedding, Your Highness?”
“Will you be married at sea, like King Phillip? End the curse the way it began?”
Tanner went before them to open the door into Farthingale’s, and the guards shut the scribes out to wait on the Avenue. Lavaliere reviewed the offered jewels listlessly. Every few moments, she winced and pressed her fingertips to her temples.
“Are you ill, my lady?” asked the clerk who attended her. “May I get you anything?”
“No,” she said with a glance at Dash. “It’s only the scribes. I suppose I’ll have to get used to their shouting.” She turned her attention to a sapphire cluster.
A small girl who was in Farthingale’s with her mother approached the royal couple with a flower. She curtsied prettily and offered the flower to Lavaliere. “I want to be a princess just like you,” she said.
Lavaliere took the flower and kissed the child’s head, and the little girl grew rosy and ran back across the shop to her mother. The lady bowed her head to Dash, and he felt sick. This was just the start of it. Little girls all over Blue, rich and poor alike, would want to be Lavaliere. They’d admire her. Love her. Copy her.
Ella came into his head with sudden force. They copy you, you mean.
She was right. They would copy Lavaliere not because she was a Jacquard, but because she was his betrothed. He was giving her the stage. He could choose what kind of role she would play.
He could choose his own role too, he realized slowly. He could lead the scribes in any direction. He didn’t have to be just Dash the Betrothed while he waited for his father to give him a chance in the Assembly — he could do more. He could start the fight now. Just as Ella was doing.
He leaned against one of the jewelry counters, watching Lavaliere and thinking.
Once she selected her jewels, they returned to the carriage, scribes shouting at them all the way. Lavaliere waved, giving them a glimpse of a lavish ring that she had chosen, and then she held out her hand for assistance at the carriage door. She leaned heavily on Tanner while Dash studied the scene before him.
Lavaliere and her jewels did not matter. But there were things that did. People didn’t hear about those things because the scribes paid no attention to them.
But they would. If he led them to things that mattered, then they would attend.
He beckoned for Tanner as an idea began to take shape.
ELLA disembarked from the carriage and looked quickly around to get her bearings. This part of the city reminded her of Fulcrum; all dingy gray buildings with few windows, like prisons. The people going into them wore patched clothing and tired expressions; their postures suggested they had long since given up dreaming about another life.
The Practical Elegance workshop on Ragg Row was not far from the riverfront. Ella made her way down the docks and past the cargo boats, where laborers unloaded great boxes of raw wool and live Prism-silk pupas that still had to be boiled. Ella cut up Knot Street and across Cobbler’s Alley, toward her destination.
When she reached Ragg Row, her heart began to pound. She walked along the squalid street, packed from end to end with workshops, each one butting up on the next, four and six stories high. She saw Shantung Silkworks, smaller than some of the others but with more windows, and then Garter Woolmakers, vast and soot-blackened, eating up almost the rest of the block.
There, across from Garter, was the smallest building on the street, with the newest bricks. PRACTICAL ELEGANCE read the sign above the narrow front door, and Ella hurried toward it, digging into her bag for her letter from Sharlyn.
THE carriage left the Avenue but did not go west to the Jacquard Estate. Instead, it went east toward Arras Wood and the Thread River.
“Why are we going this way?” asked Lavaliere, frowning as they came to the northeastern edge of the wealthy neighborhoods of Quintessential.
“It’s a surprise,” Dash said.
They rode through the wood and over a bridge, passing the old bulwarks that had been built around western Quintessential during the time of the Pink wars. Beyond these military walls, the city landscape changed dramatically. Stainless, impressive grandeur gave way to seedy hovels. Moth-eaten rags were tacked over the windows like curtains; the windows themselves were just empty holes in the walls. The carriage traveled up onto the rutted embankment, and the wheels struck hard against every bump in the earth, rattling them.
Lavaliere sat flat against her seat, wearing an expression of terror.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded.
“Just wait,” said Dash, but he too was repulsed. He had never traveled to this side of the river except on journeys out of the city, and then the curtains of the carriage had almost always been pulled to spare him the view. The gutters flowed with filth, and the people who walked along them looked sinister to him. They bowed as the carriage passed them, but in spite of their show of deference, Dash feared them and the desperation with which they eyed the silver wheel spokes and the jeweled carriage door. His reaction embarrassed him — was he really afraid of his impoverished subjects? He imagined what Ella would think of him if she knew.
“I want to turn around,” said Lavaliere.
“Why?” said Dash. “What’s wrong?”
“Look outside,” said Lavaliere. “That’s what’s wrong.”
“This is for the wedding,” said Dash.
At the mention of their union, Lavaliere calmed somewhat. She pulled the carriage curtains closed with two sharp jerks. “Tell me when we get there,” she said, and she leaned back again with her eyes closed, wincing.
THE door of the Practical Elegance workshop stood open. A thin, gray-haired woman in a long apron guarded it, holding a charcoal stick in one hand and a ragged scroll in the other.
“Name?” said the woman without looking up. “You’re late.”
“Ella Coach,” said Ella. “Earnest Coach’s daughter.”
The woman looked up, eyes sharp and fearful. “My lady,” she said uncertainly.
“It’s just Ella.” She handed over Sharlyn’s letter. “No one’s in trouble, I promise — I just want to look around.”
“I swear we follow every rule, my lady.”
“Really, it’s all right,” said Ella warmly. “I’m not inspecting the people. I’m looking at the shop itself. I want to make improvements to it.”
“Improvements?”
“The kind that might help people, I hope,” said Ella. “It’s for a school project,” she added, to make herself sound less threatening.
The woman relaxed an inch and slid her charcoal stick into the pocket of her apron. She handed back the letter. “I’m Amice, my lady,” she said. “I’ll show you around the workrooms.”
They visited a small room on the ground floor first, where laborers were busy at cobbling benches. It was nothing like Jacquard had been — the products Practical Elegance made were intricate and technical; they required a variety of materials and many kinds of skill. The tools and workstations were unfamiliar to her. Ella went into the room and smiled at the workers who glanced up. A few smiled back. She did not, after all,
look particularly out of place, and they had no idea who she was.
She followed Amice between two rows of benches down to the far end of the room, counting the windows as she went. The space was small but not stuffy; it would be worse in summer, of course, but a breeze moved freely through the room, making it more comfortable than she remembered Jacquard being.
The stools the workers sat on, however, were wobbly and appeared uncomfortable. That could be remedied. She took out her papers and made a note, aware that heads turned surreptitiously toward her as she did so.
“Is that glove protecting your hand properly?” she asked a woman in the corner. “Do you need a new one?”
“Can’t afford a new one,” said the woman.
“Then you were asked to buy your own work gloves?”
The woman shrugged. “No one asked,” she said, “but no one gave me any either.”
Ella noted this too. “Tell me a little about the tools you’re using,” she said to one of the young men who was bent over a boot, struggling with an implement that looked a bit dull to Ella’s eye. “Are they sharp enough? Strong enough?”
The young man looked suspiciously at her. “I’m doing the best I can,” he said.
“I know.” Ella pointed to the tool in his hand. “What’s this? And does it work as well as you want it to?” The young man hesitated, then briefly named the things on his table and admitted that there were better tools available.
On her way back through the room, Ella moved slowly, studying each employee and trying to determine their ages. There were men and women both, cutting and hammering, most of them of an age to be at work. But there were a few, Ella thought, who were too young to be spending their days inside, making boots.
“How old are the youngest workers?” she asked Amice as they left the room.
Disenchanted: The Trials of Cinderella Page 29