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took advantage of my mistake to hack into the mess with her clippers, and tears stung my eyes in pain and sadness. The tugging hurt, but the injured vanity hurt more.
    “Ha!” She held up more than three feet of my pride and joy, a hunting trophy. It was shiny, beautiful, and the color of buttermilk, if slightly dusty and blood-streaked buttermilk. The color was unusual in Freesia and hadbeen my trademark. I grabbed for it, but she danced back, winding it around her hand and stuffing it neatly into a bag. She pocketed the pins, too.
    “It’s mine,” I said menacingly.
    “It’s going to buy your disguise. Which we can’t get until we cut off even more.”
    “No.” I felt for the cruelly snagged ends of my remaining locks. They fell just below my shoulders. It was a tragedy. My fingers played with the rough curls, and I glared at Keen, imagining her head next to Casper’s on a platter.
    “Look, lady. It’s simple. Do you want to live, or do you want to die? Somebody wants you to lie down and stuff it, and you don’t strike me as the sort of bitch that’s going to oblige. So let’s get on with it before the shops close and your type fills the streets, eh? Short hair ain’t so bad. And you’re less likely to get the nits.”
    I shuddered. Common folk and their filth had never been a consideration before. Did I see things moving in her dull, mud-brown hair, or was that just my imagination?
    She took a step toward me, scissors held out. I slapped her arm away, and quick as a snake, she slapped my arm with her free hand. It fell to my side, limp. I had never been struck before. The little beast took advantage of my shock to shove me onto Casper’s stool. I tried to stand, but her foot pinned my skirts.
    “I don’t mind stabbing you,” she said in a businesslike manner, “but you’ll look nicer if you just let me take care of it.”
    In the end, I sat there, stunned and already grieving my youth and beauty. Each snippet of ice-white hair that fluttered to the ground felt like a year of my life. Insteadof feeling lighter, my head felt weighed down by all the sorrow in the world. I was weak. I was lost. And now I was ugly.
    “There we go,” Keen said at last. “And a lovely job it is, if I do say so myself.”
    I thought about scooping up another shard of mirror to see the damage she’d done, but I knew that I was too distraught to stop myself from stabbing her, and then Casper would never help me. What was done was done.
    “Put this on.”
    Keen shoved something green and smelly into my hands. I dumped it onto the floor, where Tommy Pain batted it about.
    “You’re going to want that hat, you know,” Keen said. “Your hair stands out. You’ve got to cover it, at least until we can get some dye.”
    At the end of my emotional rope and badly in need of blood and non-Keen company, I shoved the hat onto my head. It was large and floppy and made of the itchiest substance I’d ever touched, the sort of thing an old servant man would wear to keep the rain off.
    “Couldn’t you find anything smaller than this monstrosity?” I tried to arrange it so it wouldn’t itch. “I could fit Tommy Pain in here and still have room for—”
    I looked at her, eyes wide. She grinned her evil grin again, the one that transformed her face into something beatific. And something that I wanted to destroy. I threw the hat at her instead. She caught it neatly and twirled it around a finger. Anger bubbled up in my chest.
    “I could have stuffed all my hair in here, you brat. We didn’t have to cut it off yet, or so badly. It didn’t have to hurt.”
    “Nope. We didn’t. But I think it was more fun this way. Don’t you?”
    “I’m going to see your head—”
    “On a platter. Yeah, the Maestro told me about that. Why would you even want someone’s head on a platter? It would just wobble around and leak and make a mess, and they’d be all staring at you with their dead eyes. A pike would be so much more dramatic. Or