Tessa

Tessa made costumes when there was work and helped at a theatre when there was not, and she was Zarina’s first friend outside the palace walls — the first person in her life to ask her a question without already knowing the answer. She had dark hair cut roughly at the jaw, as though she had done it herself in a hurry, and a faded coat too large for her with one button missing, which she mended with crooked stitches rather than replace, because it was good enough in the dark.

She found Zarina standing uncertain inside the curtain of a room above a side street, and invited her to the table with no insistence at all, and when Zarina gave a name that was not hers, nothing moved in Tessa’s face. Sera began in that moment. Tessa asked her what she wanted, and waited for the answer, and that small thing was the truest freedom Zarina ever had.

She took Sera, for a lark, to the masked house where the Velvet Veil first noticed her, and warned her on the way home that Karel’s lot were all right in a different way. She warned her once more, plainly, that you do not have to like everything because you like the people. Then she watched her go, by inches, into rooms she did not follow, and told her at last that she did not seem to need her any more, and Sera did not argue.

She was in the square the night a court official bowed to Sera and named her. Somebody had told her to come.

“Go home,” she told her in her dark theatre that night. “Wherever that is. Go home, and stop taking it, and then come back and tell me who you are.”