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When I’d finished, I glanced down at my dress, searching for a place to put the comb. There were no pockets—why did women’s dresses not have pockets? Everyone had shit to carry, if just snacks.

“Here.” Namir offered a hand.

The prisoner in me tightened my fingers around the comb. Giving back something I had been given, something that was useful, that I needed, felt absolutely insane.

But Ididtrust Namir.

Mostly.

And I wasn’t chained anymore, despite my struggle with my emotions and everything else.

I slowly peeled my fingers off the comb, and then handed it to the king. He tucked it into his pants’ pocket—damned reasonable men’s clothing.

My fingers lifted to my hair, and I struggled to wrestle the strands into a braid while also walking. It turned out strange-looking, and loose, and I didn’t have anything to wrap around the end—dammit.

Huffing, I stopped walking and reached up to the nearest tree, grabbing a long, thin leaf as the braid unraveled itself without me holding it together.

“I can do it, if you’ll let me,” Namir offered, leaning up against a tree. “I used to have long hair, years ago. I can braid well.”

I scowled at him. “I want to be able to do it myself.”

He nodded. “We can buy some fabric in the market, so you can practice more easily. This time, I could do it for you.”

That… wasn’t a terrible suggestion.

He was offering to teach me, I thought. Or at least to make it easier for me to learn.

Though my pride disagreed, I reluctantly nodded, turning my back to him. I assumed his braid would start at the base of my neck, like the ones Akari had taught me. But instead, he deftly gathered a small bit of hair from the top of my head, and parted it into three. His fingers moved rapidly but gently as he added bits of hair, moving down my head as he went. He was only working on one side of my head, but when he got to the ends of it, he fished a hair tie from his pocket and pulled it out to finish off the braid.

“Lavee is good with hair. We could stop by the castle one day, and she could trim the ends of yours, if you’d like. It wouldn’t tangle as easily if she did, so it would be more manageable for you,” he explained, as he began a second braid.

Akari had told me that people usually got their hair cut every few months—that it kept their hair healthier, and softer.

“Does my hair feel gross?” I asked him, abruptly.

“Not in the slightest.” He didn’t hesitate with that answer.

“You’d better not be lying to me,” I warned.

He chuckled. “You thanked me for my honesty in the forest, Diora. Clearly, honesty is important to you, so I haven’t lied to you. And I won’t.”

That made my shoulders relax slightly. “But my hair would be softer if I got it cut?”

“A bit. If you want to make it softer, you’ll need to use shampoo and conditioner. Have you heard of them?”

The words were strange, but I forced myself to try to recall them. I finally shook my head a bit. “No.”

“Shampoo is a soap that cleans dirt and grease from hair. Conditioner is a combination of oils and other things that you let sit on the strands, to soften and smooth them,” he explained. There was no judgment behind his explanation; I didn’t think he thought less of me for not knowing what they were.

“Oh.” I bit my lip a bit. There were many things I didn’t know about—and I wanted to learn all of them, but doing so while I was living in the forest wasn’t exactly going to be easy.

Namir had offered to let me live in the castle, but I had been afraid, then. I was still afraid, but now I trusted him a bit. And… I didn’t want to live in the forest.

I didn’t want to ask him to let me live in his castle either, though. My pride wasn’tcompletelydestroyed.

I decided I’d ask if we could stop there and look at the castle after I picked a dress out, and maybe he would invite me to live there again while we were looking.

Namir finished the second braid, and tied it off with another tie he pulled from his pocket. I didn’t ask how he’d known he’d need them—he had seen the state of my hair before, and it had been an absolute wreck.