3-6
Sara paced back and forth in Juniper’s tailor shop, casting her eyes back and forth between the curtain in front of her and the glass shopfront over her shoulder. It was a little bit before 6 o’clock, well after closing time, and there were big curtains hung up by the front to make sure nobody could see in, but she could still be afraid. Not that it was that aspect of it that she was actually afraid of.
Five days. Five days Sara had complained, cajoled, reasoned, and otherwise desperately tried to steer Juniper and Gilead away from this insane plan. Hopefully it wouldn’t be long before this first test failed miserably and the team could begin working on something that stood an actual chance of getting her sister back. She’d had that thought a thousand times: and like a sorcerer repeating the same chant over and over again in a children’s story, the thousandth time called them forth.
Juniper came first, pushing through the curtains blocking off the fitting rooms and looking mildly exhausted.
“I think we’re really onto something here.”
“Are you fucking kidding me right now? This isn’t an art project, it's an infiltration mission.”
“As a matter of fact,” Juniper replied, “it’s an art project for an infiltration mission. You can come out, now!”
There was a gulf before Juniper’s words were met with any kind of action. A gulf just long enough that Sara began to believe that maybe this was how she’d be swayed, that maybe it was a lack of will. But no. There came a heavy clacking, then the rustle of cloth on cloth as the curtain was moved aside. And from the fitting room, out stepped… Elaine.
Sara had expected that she would look embarrassed, or maybe even annoyed. That thin-lipped, brow-furrowed expression that men make when they want to make it clear they’re doing this under duress. But Elaine’s face didn’t hold any kind of emotion at all. Nor did her body, for that matter: her spine was ramrod-straight, shoulders back, her hands clasped demurely on top of her cream-yellow petticoats. The outfit, of course, was perfect, but that was only to be expected when the designer could transmute raw cloth into fashion with a flick of the wrist.
Sara stepped closer. There had to be something wrong with this, some lethal flaw that demanded the entire crossdressing plan be thrown out and replaced with something sensible. The face, maybe? No: Elaine’s face looked fine enough. She was a bit on the square-jawed end of things, and if Sara looked closely she could tell that the frilly collar was hiding massive trapezius muscles, but that was bias. That face had never been overtly masculine, and with Juniper’s skill at makeup, it was even quite attractive in a specific kind of way. The same was true of the wig: it was weird, seeing Elaine with brown hair, but there was nothing visibly fake about the wavy tresses that spilled artfully over her right shoulder.
There was really only one problem with the getup. Or, to be more precise, two problems. They were the first things Sara had noticed, but she’d tried very hard to avoid bringing it up.
“Alright, but why are they so—”
Juniper cleared her throat loudly. Sara didn’t need to say what she was referring to: her eyes hadn’t been able to avoid them.
“It’s a simple matter of proportion. Gilead here has very broad shoulders,” Juniper drifted behind her, measuring their width with her fingertips for demonstration, “and considering they’re solid slabs of muscle, there’s really nothing I can do for reduction. So, in order to make Elaine look well-proportioned, I have to add lots and lots of material up top.”
“’Tis… Rather, it is quite comfortable,” Elaine said. “Juniper bade me to—dammit—had me wear them for two hours yesterday and I was…”
She stared pointedly at Juniper.
“It didn’t hurt, is what you would say. He has very strong back muscles.”
“Thank you,” Elaine replied, and did a little curtsey.
There were two layers to what Juniper had been trying to do with Elaine’s voice. The first was the obvious one, coaching her to sound even a little bit passable whenever she opened her mouth; but the second was, if anything, even more important: making her sound like someone who was born after the year 1800. Compared to those two problems, her consistent sort-of-Welsh accent had been decided to be not of any concern. In either case, both her timbre and her vocabulary had progressed in much the same way: patchy and inconsistent, but noticeably improved.
Sara’s squinting gaze flicked up and down the length of the picture before her searching for any flaws. This should have been farcical, ridiculous, easily picked apart. That it wasn’t was deeply unsettling
She finally settled on something that wouldn’t be a complete nitpick. “They’re too high up.”
“What?”
“They’re too high up on his chest, they should really be…”
Sara had to really work her hands and arms in order to get a decent grasp on Elaine’s breasts through all that fabric, and trying to shift that much mass downward drew a grunt of exertion from between her lips. They shifted down five centimeters, maybe six, mostly held in place by elastic. But they did shift, and the new position did look better.
Not that she paid much attention, considering Elaine’s response, which was for her face to turn bright red, and for her hands to clap over her lips in a failed attempt to stifle a shrill, breathy whimper. Sara’s eyes went wide at the sound, and she immediately looked to Juniper in terror.
“He can’t feel through them, can he?”
She shook her head. “The magic is mostly in creating them, and making them more comfortable to wear than any ordinary material. They’re still just stretchy cloth and cotton stuffing…”
Said stretchy cloth and cotton stuffing was swaying quite vigorously as Elaine panted for breath, the flush spreading down her shoulders as her eyes went totally unfocused. Sara didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, considering she’d had at least twenty centimeters of material between herself and skin, but whatever. Maybe this was the straw that broke the camel’s back on Gilead’s male pride.
“Anyway,” Juniper continued, “what do you think?”
Sara bit her bottom lip. “As much as I am loath to admit it… this might actually work. I just hope that Ruthven isn’t too weird about tall women.”
“I don’t think he is, one of his wives is described as being fairly… well, you get what I mean. Alright, Gilead, would you like to get changed back?”
Elaine blinked several times as she remembered where she was. “Erm. No… I would… prefer… to remain in these clothes for… a while longer so that I may…”
“Get some practice? Adjust to them?”
“Adjust to them.”
“That was very good, you did really good! Sure, you can have an hour or two to get used to actually moving around and sitting, that might be a really good idea actually. Sara and I will go to the back to discuss some other things?”
Elaine simply nodded, and Sara and Juniper quickly retreated into a back room. Once she was sure that Elaine couldn’t hear her, Sara leaned over and whispered into Juniper’s ear.
“Is it just me or is he acting a little bit weird?”
“Well you did grab his tits without asking, that’s not exactly—”
Disgusting. Never say that again. That’s what Sara wanted to say, but she had more important things to actually talk about. “That’s not what I mean. He’s all quiet and still, that’s not like himself at all.”
Juniper shrugged. “He’s getting into character, is all. And from what we talked about while I was preparing him, he wasn’t exactly sequestered away from the fairer sex in his old life, he was quite opinionated on the way ladies are supposed to act.”
That sort of made sense; the slow, soft way that Elaine had been moving certainly lined up with Sara’s idea of proper, ladylike behavior. It was just odd to see it coming from him: Gilead wasn’t an actress, nor the sort of person who could change affect at will. Sara squeezed her eyes hard and turned her thoughts elsewhere: what, after all, was she going to do about it?
“Alright. So, does this mean it’s time to start working on my disguise?”
“Naaaah,” Juniper said, and waved her hand as though it were an unwanted dinner suggestion. “Listen, everybody knows that it's easier to disguise a woman as a man than the other way around, so the way I see it I can get you done in two days. You’re already tall and sort of gangly, so all I’ll need is some padding on the torso, a bit of light compression at the chest, and painted-on facial hair and you could easily pass for a fashionably exotic manservant.”
Sara groaned. “You’re going to have to put a fake beard on me, aren’t you?”
“Just a fake mustache, I think.”
“Right. And the voice?”
“Servants,” Juniper said, putting on her poshest accent, “are meant to be seen, not heard. And also your voice isn’t that high-pitched anyways.”
“Are you saying that I already look like a man anyways so you don’t need to work that hard on a disguise?”
Juniper made a very awkward grin. “You aren’t exactly what they call a ‘lipstick lesbian’, honey.”
It was to Sara’s great shame that that dusty quip managed to get an actual laugh out of her, even if only a single barking chuckle. She still wasn’t sure how it was that Juniper had pegged her as being attracted to women when they’d first met, but she had, and as soon as they were alone a few days after first crossing paths she’d steered the conversation towards her own bisexual inclinations. It was the first time in a very long time that Sara had had the chance to come out to anybody.
“We’re rescuing my sister! This is not the time for jokes! Okay, let’s go over this one more time. We’re leaving for Leeds…?”
“Four PM. That gives us over an hour to go through customs at the border, even with Wes taking Shati at a fairly relaxed pace. Then, once we arrive at the palace, he stays outside, hopefully able to find a place close by. I think there’s some actual parks near the palace, it’s on the edge of the city.”
“Then we have to hope that you and Gilead have enough combined hotness to get all three of us inside.” Sara’s tone made it clear how unlikely she found that proposition.
“It will work! The accent just means she’s an exotic beauty.”
“She?”
Juniper rolled her eyes. “Right. Once we’re all inside, I find somewhere private to orb up and start flying around looking for where Zahra is being kept. You two can… I guess search around for any rumors about there being a little Furati girl being kept captive in the palace? Maybe look and see where Ruthven is so you know how best to avoid him?”
“I’m going to be honest, I don’t foresee myself being able to devote my energies to anything other than acting as Gilead’s minder to make sure he doesn’t blow our cover.”
“Right. Then, once I get back and tell you where Zahra is, the three of us slip off of the ballroom floor together, find Zahra, and then… erm. Well I guess we escape somehow.”
“Somehow?” Sara asked. “Isn’t that what Shati has been idling in the park for?”
“Well, yes, but we have to get from wherever Zahra is being held to where Shati is without being seen. Unless we want to go loud… Shati is armor-plated, completely bulletproof. I suppose it could just ram through the front gate to make the run shorter, but that means we’re dealing with Ruthven from minute one. You see the problem?”
Sara saw the problem. She saw every problem. She’d done a good enough job, over the last five days, of keeping herself from slipping, keeping her heart going slowly, focusing on the plan and the present moment. But her sister was still being held captive, and she had no way of knowing what kind of horrors were being visited upon her on a regular basis.
And now it was looking increasingly like the best possible plan they could put together was a slapdash improvisation that was just as likely to get everyone killed as it was to actually rescue Zahra. The next nine days were going to be hell, absolute hell. But Sara had lived through worse. All she had to do was live.