Free Vincalis the Agitator by Holly Lisle

door, studied them, and shook her head.
    “Oh, gods! They look even thinner wrapped in towels,” she said. “We’ll have to hide them here until they put on a bit of weight.”
    Jess looked from that girl’s sleek, rounded body to her own sharp angles, and felt her cheeks go hot with shame. Her thighs
     were thinner than her knees, her upper arms thinner than her elbows. She could clearly make out every bone in her own ribcage,
     and could clearly see both the bones and the tendons outlined on the backs of her hands. Wraith was the same. But the white
     Warrener robes hid a lot of that— not even she had noticed how very thin they were until she compared them to Solander’s cousin
     Velyn.
    “We got food,” Solander told Velyn. “They’ll look a little better soon.”
    “They’ll have to. I don’t think we can pass two starvelings off as the children of colonists—not even colonists from Ynjarval.”
    Wraith sighed.
    Velyn said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll manage. In the meantime, Solander and I found the two of you some clothes. These
     are guaranteed to fit—they’re spelled, so that no matter which of you wears them, they’ll look like they were tailored just
     for you.
    “Tomorrow,” she continued, “I’ll come back here and take you to different salons to get your hair cut and styled, your skin
     colored, and your hands manicured.” She turned to Solander. “You can find your own way home unless you’re coming with me now.
     I have things I have to do.”
    Solander and Wraith conferred for a moment, and then, with a slight nod of the head to all of them, Solander and Velyn left.
    Jess was relieved when they were gone. She’d liked Solander well enough, but she hadn’t liked Velyn at all. She’d seen the
     way Wraith looked at the other girl—with his eyes all wide and wondering. That was the way she wanted him to look at her.
     But he didn’t. She was too scrawny, she thought. To skinny, too plain, too young—and he had saved her from the Way-fare twilight,
     from being a horrible fat lifeless slug. How could he ever see her as anyone but someone he had rescued?
    Velyn would never look like that to him. He would see her perfect, as she was the first time he met her, and not hideous,
     helpless, someone who needed to be saved.
    Jess, in that moment, decided that she hated Velyn—for everything Velyn was, for everything that Jess could never be.

    A week of searching for someone to make papers for them. A month beyond that to learn to speak with a bit of the accent of
     the colony from whence they supposedly came—one carefully obscure, with few ties to Oel Artis, a colony clear across the Bregian
     Ocean, in the southern hemisphere, on the Strithian continent, in lands only held with difficulty by the Hars. Beyond that,
     another two months for the Warreners to fill out to a point that Velyn announced was acceptable.
    And then the move; the day Wraith and Jess had come to both yearn for and dread, when, carrying their false Letter of Presentation
     sealed with the signet of a real, if very minor, Dragon from the far city of Cachrim, they appeared on the front porch of
     the great house in the Aboves at Oel Artis. They brought carefully collected bags filled with clothes meant to look like styles
     from a colony behind the times—a bit shabby around the edges but still respectable; and they offered their papers to the Master
     of the House, an old patriarch who still maintained his Dragon ties, even though he had for all purposes given over all responsibility
     except for the greeting of newcomers to the house and the verification of their status to younger and stronger men.
    Solander greeted Wraith and Jess as cousins whom he had met and was expecting, with an enthusiasm greater than he usually
     displayed, and the old patriarch, who knew Solander as the son of a major Dragon of the Council, gave their papers a polite,
     perfunctory glance and filed them, giving them not another