When she wore white she glittered, hard and cold, like a diamond, like snow, melted and refrozen into a sheen of ice, like the glint in her own eyes when you were wrong and she was right and she knew it but you didn't and she planned to allow you to continue until she could knock your legs out from under you, trample you, and you would thank her for the honor.

They had never realized, the fools, that when you train a girl to be a weapon she might not like to settle down into the quiet life and let the adults continue to mishandle things. They hadn't realized that children's armies grow up to be adult's armies. They hadn't realized how charming she could be, not until the people, cheering, put a crown on her head and a scepter in her hand. Her white robes made a parody of the innocence they sole from her, and her diamond circlet glittered as fiercely as her eyes.

When she wore black she moved with an easy, smoky grace, like herbs burnt on the night of the new moon, like whiskey, like the twist of her lips when she was right and you were wrong and she planned on wrapping you around her finger, wrapping you up in her plans, and leaving you never the wiser.

She had always been small, but at some point she had managed to turn it from runty to fragile, from an embarrassment to a delicacy. Somewhere along the way she turned from picking fights to persuading men to fight them for her, with a tiny hand pressed to a dainty collarbone and a gentle flutter of dark lashes. Her robes were black the day she mourned the passing of the Old Guard, but the darkness in her eyes shrouded her like a cloak, like a burial cloth, like the grave.

When she wore green she teased, like the scent of a storm on a fine summer's day, like a pink tongue darting out to lick ice cream off a slender finger, like the flash of her dimples when she was right and you were wrong and she had delicious, delicious ways to let you know.

She collected the Ministry in the same way she collected everyone else—a careful combination of seemingly guileless green eyes, a tinkling laugh, and a certain ruthlessness, cultivated such that it seemed something only taken on out of necessity. That poor little girl, the Ministry wives whispered, so young and so burdened. Their saccharine sympathy still flitted in her ears and she swept the seats of power out from under their husbands and distributed it with that sweet little laugh to the other members of her children's army, remaking the world in her image.