Mare goes to get made up in proper noble style by her new nameless, faceless, silent Red maids.

They don’t ask me questions either, even though they must want to. Say nothing, I remember. They’re not allowed to speak to me

And this is supposed to make the rebellious lower classes love you more…how?

They cover Mare with a paste to mask her natural flush, because Silvers with their silver blood don’t do that. Although how they expect anyone to believe that in the last 17 years Mare never blushed, I don’t know. If the differences are so readily obvious, then it should have been impossible for her to go her whole life not knowing what color her blood is.

Cal comes in to apologize, in vague terms, and Mare is properly gunshy and disbelieving of him. The actual conversation is very smalltalk and most of the words are given to describing how Mare is bitter at him for getting her into the mess and really nervous around him since he, ya know, can do the magic fire and all.

We do learn that Lucas (the chatty guard from last chapter) is going to stick around and also that Cal and Maven are only half-brothers; the queen is Maven’s mom but not Cal’s.

This…actually makes me nervous. Feels like Cal’s trying to distance himself from literally the only authoritative female we’ve seen in the book so far. (Also, I’m just really sick of evil queens, okay? Sometimes they’re done well, but mostly not, and there’s just some bad history there, you know? Makes me really shy of new evil queens. I just don’t trust that it’ll be handled well.)

Later, Lucas and the other guards escort Mare to the ballroom, all while Mare flails internally about how if she messes up at all she’ll probably end up disappeared. But…I know Mare is overwhelmed and probably not thinking clearly, but it would be nice if someone (maybe Cal?) would explain to us what constitutes “messing up.” I mean, their story is that she fully believed she was a Red her whole life so if she does something Red-ish, wouldn’t that fit in just fine? Do they want her to play this new role perfectly both in real life and in their fictional story, or is there something else she could mess up on?

Mare meets up with the queen just outside the ballroom, and the queen explains that her fake-father’s family had the power to explode things and her fake-mother’s family had the power to control storms, so added together it becomes the power to explode things with storms, ie lightning.

Wow, how convenient that there just happened to be a childless dead noble couple with exactly the right powers to make Mare’s story believable.

Also, unless there’s a hell of a lot of inbreeding going on (which…it doesn’t sound like, every pairing we’ve seen so far is from two different houses) half of each family is going to be from a different family. Wouldn’t that lead to a lot of power-mixing? They say actual melding is rare, but still, would children have a 50/50 chance of getting either parents’ powers? Or do they just always inherit powers from their dad?

Remember the person you’re supposed to be, and remember well , she continues, ignoring my question. You are pretending to be raised Red, but you’re Silver by blood. You are now Red in the head, Silver in the heart.

Okay, but, again, how does this present a problem???? Any gaffes she make would still fit with the “Red in the head” part of their story, right? She could literally be exactly herself and as long as she doesn’t say “yeah, the king and queen tots lied” then it all still fits. This should not be a problem!