Hemm is too late...

The crowd does not thin. It packs the stones until the men at the front are against the glass, and some of them stop pretending they came to buy a hem. A few of them get a hand inside their own trousers and work themselves through the cloth while they look at your mouth and at the lace and at the probe still rolling you, and they do it in daylight because the name Sera has made them feel like the risk belongs to someone else.

Sela keeps saying Hemm’s name and he keeps not killing the frame, and then the sound of the street changes again, because a carriage that does not belong on Needle Row has had to stop. Gold on the door. Horses that are too clean. The crowd splits because it has to, and the man who gets down does not look at Hemm first. He looks at you.

He is older than the face you are wearing, dark coat, a ring that has been hit against tables. He does not raise his voice at the start.

"Open the glass."

Hemm opens it because a man who arrives in that carriage does not get a price list. The probe is still in you when the king of the town steps through his own people and sees the long blonde hair and the chest in the old lace and the figure he used to walk in to dinner, and for a moment his face is only the outrage of a husband who was left in public.

"You came back to my street to be fucked in a window."

"I—" You start it twice, quieter, and Sera’s voice comes out of you, which is the wrong voice to use on him. "I am not her. This morning I was—"

He hits you with an open hand.

The slap turns your head on the strap and the probe kicks deeper when your body jerks, and the crowd makes a noise that is not help. He hits you again, the other cheek, not wild, the way a man hits a thing he has already judged, and Hemm finally kills the frame because a king is in his shop and the machine looks like an insult.

Sela is crying without sound. Hemm talks too fast, chalk-hands up, trade talk spilling because he has nothing else.

"She walked in this morning as a village girl, Marr’s girl, I put the old set on her because I had a gap in the glass, and the face came with the cloth. The real one ran. This one is standing in her shape... a copy. I can take it off her if you—"

"If you take it off her does the face stay."

Hemm swallows. "Last time a girl stripped in my back room the face stayed. But I ain't no magician. I run pins."

The king looks at you again, at the mark his hand left on Sera’s cheek, and something in him decides that a copy he can keep is better than a wife he cannot find. He names a sum that makes Hemm go still, enough to buy the shop’s summer, and he does not ask if you agree.

"You will take that," he says to Hemm. "You will keep your mouth shut about what cloth does in this street. If I hear Sera’s name out of your door again I will board the glass with you behind it." He flicks two fingers at the straps. "Unbuckle her. If she runs, you lose the coin and the shop."

Hemm’s hands shake on the cuffs. The lingerie stays on because nobody offers you anything else. Spend from the machine is still on the inside of the old bottoms when your feet hit the shop floor, and you have no shoes, and the king takes you by the upper arm hard enough to bruise. He slaps you once more at the carriage step, not as hard, just to feel the face flinch, and then he puts you in ahead of him.

The carriage smells like leather and closed windows. He sits opposite you while Needle Row slides away, and he looks at the breasts in the worn lace as if they personally signed the letter she left.

"You will not speak in her voice unless I ask you a question," he says, and then the longer sentence comes, cold and finished. "She took a rival’s bed and a clear road south and she left me broken, so you will take the house she would not take, and you will take it without the courtesy I wasted on her."

He does not wait for the castle to begin. He opens his trousers on the bench and pulls you forward by the hair that is hers, and when you try to say you are Charlie the word dies on Sera’s tongue because he already has himself in your mouth. He is not trying to make you good at it. He uses you the way a man uses a reminder, short and angry, one hand on the back of your head, the slap-heat still in your cheek, and when he finishes he holds you there until you swallow because he does not want her spit on his coat.

The palace is stone and too much quiet after the Row. He walks you through a hall where people look and then find the floor, and nobody asks if you are the queen come home, because the mark on your face and the old lingerie have already answered them. He puts you in a room that still has her things on a chair, unused by him since she ran, and he slaps you again when you reach for a coverlet as if covering her chest is an old argument.

"You sleep here. You wear what I leave. If you put some other woman’s rag on and walk out with a different face I will find the face and I will start this over." He is already at the door. "Do not sit on the bed like a guest. You are not a guest."

The latch does not have your side of the key. Your cheek throbs. The taste of him is still in Sera’s mouth. Outside, somewhere below the window, Needle Row is still talking, and Sela is still in a wine-red dress you are no longer wearing.

**************

Author's comments
Thanks for reading my first story submitted to chyoa, there's still chapters ahead, but this is a good time to pause.

Please leave likes on the chapters you enjoy. Comments with feedback, suggestions or what you liked are really appreciated. :)