A small bell rang above the door as Mary opened the door to a boutique stuffed with white, glamourous dresses. The streets of the noble district were still littered with torches the citizens must have left behind, and it all felt kind of deserted, but that didn´t stop this particular shop to open its doors.
“Welcome … Miss White and the young Saint? It is a pleasure to see you.” The seamstress who also did my last dress said with a friendly smile on her lips.
“Olivia, we are here for a rather peculiar request.” Mary said slowly.
“I am always at your service.” The seamstress said and curtsied elegantly.
“Lucy needs a wedding dress.” Mary stated and placed her warm hands on my shoulder. Sadly, I wore winter clothing, making it very hard for me to feel anything.
“A …” Even for this country, marrying at ten years old is rather … early. Usually, the girls are married away at thirteen the earliest, with most of them marrying around fifteen or sixteen, so it wasn’t entirely surprising she would repine a few seconds before her sense of business took over again. “That’s wonderful news! Who is the lucky guy, if I may ask?”
“The king proposed this marriage.” Mary stated, still a bit bitter about the whole ordeal.
“The king? But he is not some …” Someone who would marry a child? Yeah, his women were around his age which made him a bit more decent than some other nobles were. “Sorry, that was inconsiderate of me.” She said and showed me a nearby chair to sit down. I directly walked there, gave Olivia my mantle and gloves which she promptly stored away somewhere.
“So, what are you two imagining?” asked Olivia.
“Something plain.” I said while looking in the mirror, questioning myself if the normal white dresses I wore weren’t already fine enough.
“No, Lucy, this is the only day where you can dress up how much you want. We need something extravagant.” And like always, Mary had a completely different approach to clothing than I had. She wanted me to look good, but in my honest opinion, I looked good in black clothing, smeared in a bit of red here and there, while she wanted to draw out my innocent figure as much as possible.
“… something extravagant it is.” I relented and already imagined the horror I would have to wear. “But I want it to go up towards my throat.” I said. Last time I wanted to impress nobles, which worked somewhat apparently, but this time there would be a lot more people invited, from peasants to nobles. I was sure the king would puke when he noticed who those people were I was going to invite, which made wearing this horrible dress slightly better.
“Hmm, alright. And it needs to be long at the back.” Mary said happily. I knew exactly what she meant, which made me shudder involuntarily.
“Mum?” I asked, slightly worried about the threat of some bandit coming up to me. How should I defend myself in this dress, now that Hannah wasn’t by my side anymore? Right, there was no way! I would die!
“And something magical! How about we sow runes into the fabric and make parts of the dress glow?” Glow? Why … why?
“Oh, that is a really good idea … but I would need a mage for that.” Olivia said and tapped her chin, which gave me a bit of hope.
“Oh, don’t worry. I will take care of that. What kind of motives though …” Mary mumbled, making me grip the chair just a tad tighter.
“An olive branch? How about two rings interlocked in each other?” It was supposed to be a dress, not a piece of art! And how much did Mary want to spend on this attire I would wear one day anyway? Her whole fortune or whatever was left of it? She still needed to pay for the reconstruction of the mansion, but she seemingly didn´t care at all.
“… Miss White, I just got a brilliant idea. Durability won´t be a problem with this dress, so we can sew a few spells into this dress. What to do think about …” And it went on and on, while I could only sit there on the chair pitifully. If Olivia really managed to do everything Mary and she talked about, I would straight up die out of shame.
“Mum …” I muttered after half an hour of pure discussion, in which Mary even proposed impossible magics like flight, which certainly showed me her lack of understanding about magic once and for all.
“One weak spell will be the maximum. We would need powdered mana stones as a source and they somehow need to be integrated into the dress. Whatever material you take to make these magical circles, will be visible if we use too many. And additionally, I don’t want my dress to go up in flames because the fabric couldn’t deal with the mana flow.” I explained and gesticulated with my hands wildly.
“Oh … the lights then.” Mary said and nodded towards Olivia who looked at me with interest. Well, my knowledge about magic was weird, especially because I never used magic, but I needed to know against what I would be fighting eventually, even though I managed to avoid conflicts with mages for the most part.
“Great … I think I will need to use another dress as a basis though because two weeks will be gone by in no time.” Yeah, I feared that as well. Especially when I was happy, time seemed to go by in a flash. But two weeks was also quite a long time. Fourteen days, 366 hours, around 20 thousand minutes or around one million two hundred thousand seconds. It looked like much, but I knew that the time the gods gave me was far too short.
