Agatha has already had a terrible trip, so a pre-arrival breakfast with Vanessa where she feels too unwell to eat anything is not making her feel any better.
It seems that absolutely nothing to do with sea travel agrees with her; she developed raging seasickness overnight, and spent most of yesterday being sick.
Maybe she'll outlaw boats when she's Queen.
"What happened to your face?" Demands Vanessa the second Agatha slumps in her chair.
At least spending all of yesterday being sick meant that she hadn't had to see her mother.
"Fell and smacked my head on a chest of drawers." Mutters Agatha, scanning the food for something she could stomach. She doesn't think Vanessa much cares what actually happened to her, so a vague answer ought to suffice.
"Well, be more careful." Snaps Vanessa, proving Agatha's theory.
"Not like I did it on purpose." Mumbles Agatha.
"Stop neglecting your veil." Vanessa tells her sharply, by way of reply, then turns back to her plate of fruit.
Agatha glares at the pastries she feels too sick to eat. The pastries do nothing.
She decides that they're mocking her and sinks down in her chair, messily pouring a cup of over-brewed tea and waving away Callis's offerings of milk.
Vanessa glares at the spilled tea seeping into the tablecloth. Agatha blots it half-heartedly with a napkin and sits back to take tiny sips from the mug, resenting that it would hurt too much to chug the entire thing in one go. It would be worth it, to see Vanessa's face, but she'd rather not spend the next hour passed out.
Not, obviously, because it's too hot; but more because drinking too much at once is painful. She's never tested the theory that she can go without water entirely- mainly because Callis won't let her try- but she certainly doesn't need it in the same way everyone else does. But she likes tea, and coffee, and those fruit juices that the girls at the market sell, so she drinks anyway, albeit incredibly slowly.
Sophie is slicing an apple into tiny pieces opposite her, and Callis isn't eating anything, presumably in solidarity.
"How long until we get there?" Asks Sophie brightly, cutting into the awkward silence. Vanessa smiles at her.
"The city should be coming into view around now, according to the captain. We'll be docked in an hour or so. Isn't it exciting-?"
Agatha stands up abruptly.
"I'm going to look." She says. Vanessa frowns.
"Your veil-"
"Who's going to see me? We're an hour away. Besides, I'd like to look with unobscured eyes, thanks."
Agatha turns and makes for the stairs before Vanessa can stop her.
It's so early that the sun's not properly breached the mountains to the east, yet.
Agatha leans against the mast in the cool, dim morning and watches Camelot come into view, slowly being unveiled by the early morning mist.
It's bigger than Gavaldon, is her first realisation. Far bigger. Sprawling masses of mismatched buildings stretch in every direction, tumbling over each other in crooked stacks of brick until they trail off into the distance and disappear. Occasionally a church spire or higher roof interrupts the uniform mess, a landmark in what must be a labyrinth of twisting streets. There are a huge variety of ships in the harbour, too, all flying different colours; Jaunt Jolie, Foxwood, Hamelin…
It makes sense, Agatha supposes. Camelot is a massive trading hub, and has a surplus of natural resources, which is why it's so rich. But it's a shock, given Gavaldon is a tiny kingdom in the middle of nowhere, paid little attention by anyone.
However Vanessa had secured a marriage alliance, she had to have put something very important on the table.
The thought makes Agatha grimace- what had she offered?- but her musings are interrupted as she realises Callis is stood behind her.
"No coughing this morning?" She asks.
Agatha shakes her head slowly.
"Nothing since the other night. I think it's getting less frequent, but it's getting worse."
Callis doesn't say anything, for a minute. Agatha knows she's right. It used to be just clearing her throat, the occasional cinder, when she was younger.
Not exactly life-threatening level, like it had just been.
"When you turned over, right before I got you in the bath…" begins Callis slowly. Then she stops. Agatha raises her eyebrows at her.
"What?"
Callis hesitates, then touches a finger briefly to Agatha's neck.
"Your windpipe was glowing. It's never done that before."
Agatha frowns.
"My veins-"
"I know your veins do it. The ones in your neck and shoulders do it a lot when you cough. But this time, it was your windpipe, not just the veins around it."
Agatha decides not to comment on how weird that must have looked.
"Doesn't make sense." She murmurs, turning her eyes back to Camelot on the horizon. "Usually it only affects veins."
"I know-" Callis stops whatever she was about to say.
"What?" Presses Agatha.
Callis points.
Agatha follows her gaze.
At first, she thinks she's pointing at the palace emerging from the mist. It's certainly nothing to sniff at; twice the size and twice as elaborate as Vanessa's, it's a cluster of spearing turrets and-
Agatha realises that Callis isn't looking there.
Slowly, she follows her gaze down. Down… down...
To the crowd at the harbour.
For a minute, she wonders if they're just passers-by. Sailors. Traders. That sort of thing. But no. It's a huge crowd, stretching from the very edge of the docks, all the way back to the buildings lining the harbour.
It's all too obvious what they're there for.
Callis starts to say something, but Agatha has already turned and lunged for the stairs belowdecks, panic crushing her insides-
She runs into straight into Vanessa, who holds out a piece of fabric.
Agatha's veil.
Agatha snatches it from her and barges past her, bursting into her cabin and slamming the door shut. She leans against it, breathing hard. That old hag. She had to have known. No wonder she'd let her go up. Hell, she'd probably made their arrival time public knowledge, so Agatha couldn't even get up to the palace unnoticed.
Vanessa starts talking outside;
"Did you see the size of the crowds, Sophie? It's so lovely that so many people have come to greet us…"
Oh. Right.
How could she have been so vain as to think that Vanessa would have considered her likes or dislikes? Vanessa loves the attention to be in her. She flounces and flutters and waves and simpers. This isn't about Agatha. Agatha had been an afterthought, if she'd been a thought at all. No, this is all about the Radiant Queen herself. (God, how Agatha loathes that moniker. She sneers every time they say it, and the veil means she can get away with it. It's a small comfort.)
They'll probably think she's the one marrying Tedros, thinks Agatha wryly. Well, maybe they'd be a good fit for each other, if Tedros was as handsome as they said. Hah.
Still, there's no changing the fact that Tedros is betrothed to Agatha. Vanessa can wave and smile and kiss babies all she wants.
She'll never be their Queen.
They've got Agatha, for better or for worse.
So when she emerges to cheering, she's somewhat confused.
Having people actually enthusiastic to see her is something of a novel prospect for Agatha.
At home, her public appearances are usually limited to the New Year's Ball (everyone gets drunk, forgets she's there, and talks about her in front of her) her birthday, (the less said about that, the better) Vanessa's birthdays (official and personal, both unbearable) and the Midsummer Parade (she's overheated and fainted three times now. That damned veil.)
The people of Gavaldon are used to her. It does not mean that they like her. Obviously, they're unsettled by the whole never getting to see their Princess's face thing; they can't tell whether she's smiling at them or not, they don't know where she's looking, and they don't know what she looks like.
Of course, they'd never think ill of Vanessa (apart from the small number of conspiracy theorists who decided Agatha has died / been kidnapped and subsequently replaced), so the vast majority of the public have decided that it's her choice to wear the veil, and have developed two elaborate theories about it-
The cheering goes up in volume as she reaches the gangplank, and she jerks out of her thoughts, startled. This is new. She's not sure she likes it.
Anxiously, she peers down at the throng, who stare back at her. People are smiling, but there's also a good percentage of people frowning, confused, and some people are turning to whisper to neighbours-
Agatha anxiously casts around for something else to look at- what's taking Vanessa so long?
There's a carriage just where they'll disembark, open top, oh, god, they'll be stared at the whole way there, she'd not stopped to consider this, and-
"Wave."
Agatha jumps and turns to see Callis stood behind her.
"Wha-"
"Wave." repeats Callis as Vanessa comes marching up the stairs in a garish yellow dress. "To the people. They'll love it." she leans in slightly. "And Vanessa will hate it."
Agatha would usually laugh, but she feels too ill to, this time. And she doesn't think it's the seasickness.
Shakily, she lifts a hand and offers the crowd a tentative wave.
Cheering. People wave back.
Relieved, Agatha waves a little more enthusiastically-
Vanessa bustles up to her, puts out an arm, clamps Agatha to her side, and beams. Waving regally, she practically frog-marches Agatha down the gangplank to the cobbles, probably blinding the people at the front with the force of her smile.
A footman in blue and gold livery leaps down from the back of the carriage and offers her a hand. Agatha stares at him, confused, until he indicates the carriage.
"A hand, my lady?"
Agatha blinks.
"Oh! Thank you."
No one's ever bothered to help her into a carriage before.
Feeling slightly smug that she'd been the priority, not Vanessa, Agatha clambers into the carriage and peers out the other side at the cluster of faces staring up at her, careful to make sure she didn't lean too far. People being able to see under her veil is one of Vanessa's biggest fears. She's forever pulling her backwards.
"Princess! Princess Agatha!"
Agatha turns to see a chubby hand emerge from the throng, clutching a few spindly blue flowers. One has a broken stem.
Agatha follows the arm down to an eager little face in the crowd; a girl, probably only five or six beaming with gappy teeth and scrunched eyes. She's being held up by an older girl, probably thirteen, presumably her older sister, who's eyes are big and interested.
"Agatha." Hisses Vanessa, arriving in a cloud of yellow tulle. "Don't you dare lean-"
Agatha leans over the side to take them from her.
"Thank you."
The girl squeals excitedly and grabs her hand. Agatha's heart flounders, but she's wearing her gloves, so it'll be fine, it'll be fine...
Agatha squeezes her hand lightly, and carefully pries her hand from her grip. The girl doesn't look bothered, just grins and allows her sister to return her to the ground.
Suddenly, Agatha finds herself bombarded with people offering flowers, plants and…
"Wow, thanks-" Agatha eagerly takes a packet of some odd pink sweets, turns, and finds Vanessa staring at her with a very fixed smile.
"Stop accepting gifts." She hisses through her teeth. "They might be dangerous."
Yeah, Agatha's sure that's why she doesn't want her to have them.
"Right." She says, still waving vaguely, and noticing the conspicuously empty seats opposite them. "Who's coming with us?"
"The servants will travel separately." Says Vanessa.
"Even-"
"Lady Netherwood is still a servant, and she is not related to you." Says Vanessa tightly.
Agatha casts around desperately, and sees Callis stood with Sophie by the ships, watching her.
She has to go without Callis-?
Callis smiles at her, but Agatha can tell it's forced.
Agatha would be biting her nails if she wasn't gloved and veiled. Anxiety giving way to actual panic, she turns back to stare at the gifts in her lap. She miraculously hasn't crushed any flowers.
Vanessa ignores her distress, and turns expectantly to the driver.
"To the palace. My daughter needs to be presented to the King."
Except she's not.
Not right away.
Agatha swears loudly as the remains of her leg hair is torn off in one go. Beatrix, the first of the two maids, looks rather apologetic. She's blonde and tall and handsome, and has already accidentally scratched Agatha twice with her perfect manicure.
"Sorry. Orders from your mother."
"My mother told you to pluck me like a chicken to be roasted?" Snaps Agatha, then regrets the choice of simile when her stomach rumbles. She wishes she could have eaten those sweets, but Vanessa had snatched them off her before she'd got the chance.
Beatrix nods, rosebud lips pursed in concentration.
"Yes, she gave these really detailed instructions- can you be a bit less hot, please?- and said if we didn't follow them she'd be displeased."
She snatches a pair of tweezers from a box and squints at Agatha's leg for any stray hairs. Agatha can't see the point, given she's probably going to be wearing stockings, but she's too tired and stressed to argue. She attempts to lower her body temperature and watches the second maid re-enter, arms stacked high with bottles and boxes and pots. This one, Dot, is short and plump and infinitely enthusiastic, with curly brown hair bullied into a topknot and chocolate concealed in every pocket.
They've been appointed by King Tedros to be her personal maids, apparently, and therefore Vanessa has briefed them extensively on Agatha's… condition. Agatha doesn't know exactly what she told them, but based on their faces before and after she took her veil off, they'd expected much worse.
Naturally.
Damn her.
Beatrix yanks Agatha to her feet and squints at her. Agatha tries not to feel awkward, but considering she's naked in a strange bathroom with two strangers staring at her, it's hard.
Still, they'd had the sense to let her wash her own hair and run her a very shallow, very hot, bath, so they couldn't be so bad.
"You're ever so tall." Says Dot appreciatively, eyeing her in the mirror. "So angular."
Agatha, who had tended to favour words like scrawny, reluctantly stares at herself in the mirror and tries to work out whether Dot is making fun of her or not. Angular is generous; her knobbly knees, bony hips and skinny arms make her look scrawny and pinched. She's also remarkably sallow for someone so heavily involved with fire, and her blunt, badly cut hair makes her chin stick out and her eyes look protuberant.
Not to mention the scars.
"Mm." She says vaguely, eyeing the side of her mouth that drags down and the dint across her crooked nose and cheek. There's more, but she lets her fringe grow long to cover them.
Dot looks disappointed, as if she hadn't received the reaction she was expecting, and turns to rifle through the pile she'd brought in.
"Don't suppose we need to do your face or hair…" muses Beatrix, eyes surprisingly not lingering on the twisted side of Agatha's mouth as she examines her. "Maybe a haircut anyway?"
Agatha finds herself staring hopefully at Beatrix's pixie cut. Neither she nor Callis are exactly hairdressers. They just try and keep it short, and Agatha gives her fringe a wobbly, uneven trim when she starts not being able to see.
Beatrix grins.
Dot does her nails whilst Beatrix does her hair.
"What's the point of a pedicure?" Demands Agatha, staring warily as Dot grabs one of her feet. "Shoes are a thing."
"It's nice." Protests Dot. "Like a spa thing."
"Hmm."
Dot ignores her scepticism.
"So!" She says brightly. "Are you excited to meet the King and get married?"
"Er." Says Agatha, trying to work out if saying no would offend them or not. "Well. That's a… um, a big question."
"I suppose it is." Muses Dot, doing something mildly painful to Agatha's toenails. "Well, you shouldn't be worried, we love Teddy, don't we Bea?"
Oh, god, they've got a nickname for him.
Beatrix snorts.
"I had a huge crush on him for a bit."
Dot raises her eyebrows.
"Didn't you say, at the time, that you wanted to kill his betrothed?"
Agatha suddenly wishes Beatrix wasn't holding scissors right next to her neck, but Beatrix just laughs.
"Well, I was thirteen, and that was before I was with Reena. It was an obligatory forced crush. Can you tip your head a bit, please?"
Relieved, Agatha does as she's told. Dot nods slowly.
"We've been appointed to you, but we work for Teddy too. Similar stuff."
So he's vain, is he? thinks Agatha glumly. This is not making her feel better. If he's very bothered about his own appearance, it feels highly unlikely he won't care about what his wife looks like.
By the time they're finished, Agatha thinks she can understand why perfumed princesses spend all day lounging. Being prepped this extensively feels like an extreme sport. She's been shaved, waxed, and plucked, had her nails and nail beds bullied and shaped until they look even vaguely uniform, slathered in all sorts of soaps and creams and lotions, and had half her hair cut off.
And almost all of it isn't even going to be visible.
She'd pointed this out, but they'd just muttered something about orders from Vanessa and carried on.
Well, Agatha entertains herself with visions of drowning Vanessa, possibly in a vat of perfume, whilst Beatrix and Dot lace her into whatever dress the King has ordered her. She hadn't focused at all on what people were wearing when she arrived, too busy worrying about a million other things. Now she wishes she had. There's always a possibility she could be forced to wear something ridiculous-
"There!" Dot stops wrestling with the laces and steps back, beaming. "Do you like it?"
Agatha reluctantly turns her eyes to the mirror.
She's greeted with black velvet.
High-necked and wide sleeved, the skirt is sweeping and far fuller than she usually opts for, but she finds she can't bring herself to care. Hundreds of strings of tiny pearls wrap around the high neckline and fall to the waist, where they secure as a kind of belt, and then drop in thinner lines to rest on the line of of the skirt. There's slits in the puffed top of the sleeves and the skirt, where silver silk peeks through the velvet, and similar silver embroidery adorns the sides of the bodice. When she shifts, so does the amount of silver you can see, so the light flashes and dances and shifts as she moves.
Agatha stares, enchanted. She's never seen anything like it before. The fashion at home is sleek and simple and stylish. Something so elaborate is practically unheard of.
Sophie will be lime with jealousy.
"Yes." She says faintly, running her hand across the velvet absently. "I do."
"Great!" Dot comes bounding forwards, holding a headpiece. "They redesigned your veil to go with it, try it on-"
Oh. She's got a new veil.
Agatha takes it and squints at it. The actual veil is the same- heavy silk, enchanted to be impossible to see through- but the headpiece is raised and angled, and made of the same kind of velvet as her dress, with pearls along the bottom and top edge. The veil falls on both sides.
"It means we don't have to do your makeup." Says Beatrix, helping her secure it on her head. "Which is a shame, because the makeup here is really interesting. You'll see some when you meet the King, he and his court all favour the latest fashions…"
Agatha, face now covered, grimaces freely.
Then she notices the implication.
"Aren't you from here?" She asks, confused. Beatrix shakes her head.
"Jaunt Jolie. I was offered a job in the King's court when I was fifteen."
"Why?"
Beatrix smiles.
"I was very good with cosmetics, and they needed me for… certain things. Dot too, she's from Sherwood, originally. There!"
Agatha doesn't have time to dwell on that, because Beatrix steps back and Dot snatches Agatha's gloves from the side table. Agatha pulls them on, relieved they haven't done anything to the familiarity of her gloves.
"Ooh, don't forget your ring-" Dot holds out the dragon ring that Agatha had been trying very hard to forget about.
"Oh. Yeah." She says. She shoves it on at random on her middle finger, and turns to find Dot staring at her.
"What?" She says.
"Don't you dare ask her." Mutters Beatrix.
"Ask me what?"
Agatha, anticipating a tentative what happened to your face, desperately tries to think of a way to explain it-
"Can you do a tiny bit of magic before you go?" Peeps Dot.
"Dot." Hisses Beatrix.
Agatha stares at her. Dot twiddles her thumbs sheepishly.
"Just because you won't be able to do it in public or in court, if it's such a big secret. I just wanted to see, I think it's ever so interesting-"
"You can't just ask her that!" Barks Beatrix. "It might be dangerous, or hurt her, or something, you know that-"
They turn to find Agatha with only one glove on, plucking the flames from the candelabra and rolling them around in her palm like marbles.
Dot stares, eyes so wide it's a wonder they don't fall out.
"Wow." She says, reverently. Beatrix considers the glowing veins in her hand with interest.
"I know." Says Agatha, following her gaze and replacing the tiny flames on their wicks. "It's weird."
"Not really." Says Beatrix. She sounds oddly sincere. Agatha shrugs and replaces her glove.
It's her most common trick, too. The one she'd done the other night. Flames which already exist and are already restricted are far easier to control. Summoning something up herself is more dangerous, and a lot harder to do in the first place.
"Well," she says. "If it wasn't, I wouldn't wear these."
As if on cue, the door bashes open, and Vanessa is stood there, still in her garish yellow gown.
"Ready?" She demands. She makes no comment on Agatha's appearance, obviously.
Agatha goes to say yes, but nothing comes out. The answer is very much no. All this stalling and dithering has made her feel worse, instead of more prepared.
Panicked, she casts a glance back at her two new maids, who beam at her. How can they be so calm?
"You'll like him!" Says Dot brightly. "He's nice, I promise."
Beatrix doesn't comment, but she doesn't look as if she disagrees.
Agatha can't say she believes them.
"Well?" Demands Vanessa. Agatha turns reluctantly back to her.
"Yes." She says hoarsely. "Shall we go?"
As they leave, Dot and Beatrix curtseying in their wake, the veins in her wrist are still glowing faintly.