"Hey, you!" Marien barked, her voice cutting through the humid air like a serrated blade. She didn't look at the woman she was speaking to, an elderly seamstress named Agnes whose fingers were gnarled from forty years of needlework. "The bust is sagging and I look like a common milkmaid. Do you want me to be a laughingstock at the party? Is that your goal, you old bat?"
Marien Vernhardt, the youngest, also spoiled, daughter of Vernhardt.
She was currently perched on a velvet-covered dais, draped in a shimmering monstrosity of chartreuse silk and seed pearls that looked heavy enough to crush a smaller woman. Around her, a frantic "army" of five seamstresses and two lead designers scurried about on their knees. They looked less like artisans and more like survivors of a shipwreck, their mouths full of pins and their eyes wide with a very specific, well-earned terror.
