The first time I attended court after everything changed, I wore the wrong shoes.
Not wrong in any dramatic sense. They were perfectly appropriate court shoes — dark silk, modest heel, embroidered along the toe in the fashion that Lady Yue had approved three seasons ago. But they were the shoes I had always worn to court. The shoes I had selected based on a calculation of how to be forgettable and unthreatening and easy to overlook.
I stood in front of my dressing table that morning, staring at them, and realized I no longer had a reason to make that calculation.
It was such a small thing. And it undid me completely for about four minutes.
Kaien found me still standing there when he came to check if I was ready. He looked at the shoes. He looked at me. He didn't ask.
"There are the red ones," he said instead. "The ones your mother sent from the south last spring."
"I never wore those."
"I know."
