Thankfully she'd used the time since the full moon to create her gift for the soon-to-be Emperor and Empress. Initially, she'd found the crawling, seething mass of spiders doing her bidding to be grotesque but now she understood their particular beauty better. Skilled weavers when left to their delicate webs, Emberlee had found a way to turn their skills into weaving a filigree of silver into a matched pair of crowns. The strands of silver were so fragile individually as to make it almost an actual spider's web, but her darling little spinners had woven and braided it together with some of the pearls collected off the coast of Ortaga as an accessory. Stussica's coast was farther North and produced white, yellow, and pink pearls, but Ortaga's coast provided a differing bounty to theirs. She'd selected the darkest pearls to line the base; near black, smoky grey, and glittering blue. Lighter colours crested the next layers; from shimmering gold to a teal that looked like the ocean in a bubble. Finally, the palest, most perfect silver and white pearls capped the top. It was intended to look ethereal and succeeded at representing her March's luxury resources.
Her first trip to the Capital as Marchioness was complicated by grief and boredom. The wagon trains went as plodding show as anticipated, and Emberlee couldn't read in a carriage without feeling sick. And she had gotten used to tending her own needs, so hadn't hired a personal maid to come with her and tend to her needs. The guards and carriage hands were all polite professionals, but Emberlee had nothing to distract herself from the memories of what it'd been like to travel with her Mother for Aubin's Blessing. Or how she'd have to stay in the home Mother has spent her final days quarantined in before dying. Before they'd reached the Capital, Emberlee was tormented by nightmares induced by stress and grief. 
All the Mirrors were carefully packed tight, and Emberlee hadn't brought a reflective surface with her for her Fairy Godmother to appear in. The moonstone pendant allowed them to communicate, but Emberlee had discovered that her Fairy Godmother was nocturnal. She might not be bound to the full moon, but from sunset to midnight were the only hours she'd ever been present, so Emberlee had to endure in solitude. 
Until she accidentally discovered what her familiar Fairy Godmother meant about charming the birds. Emberlee had read in some medical literature that humming could help dispel the endlessly churning nausea in her belly, so out of necessity she'd attempted to hum familiar songs to herself to pass the time. Like all noble children, she'd been raised to play an instrument, dance, and sing. Emberlee was passable at violin, could dance from start to end of a ball, and had a huskier singing voice than most girls her age. So first she hummed, waltzes that lead to arias, all of which seemed to spark the birds around their convoy into acrobatic flights. They swarmed and churned out beautiful aerial ballets mid sky until Emberlee stopped signing in astonishment and the moment was broken. But at least none of the birds had plummeted to the ground; her experiments with spiders had been a learning curve of piled corpses. She viewed it as a chance to learn the boundaries of her Blessing, and maybe a little as a way to pass the time. It certainly made the last few days of travel more pleasant than the first. 
Uncle Albert was there to meet her, having been waiting for her arrival rather eagerly. She'd sent him a letter confirming her successful Summoning, and nothing else. He'd had to wait upon her arrival to receive any detailed answers to his questions and they both knew it. But it seemed that staying at the house his elder sister had died in was a bit beyond her rapscallion Uncle; he intercepted her carriage at the gate. "You've grown so much since this city last beheld your splendour firecracker," he gushed with excessive flattery.
She'd left her mourning black back in the Ortaga Match, wearing one of Mother's dark blue travel dresses. It wasn't funereal, but as close to it as Emberlee dared for now. Not only was it not in her nature to don the more incandescent colours, it hadn't been in her Mother's taste either. She'd packed lighter colours as a precaution, but jewel tones dominated the majority of them. And the Capital wardrobe would provide a few staples she could modify as needed. But as her Uncle had deliberately stopped her before she entered her own house, she knew he wanted to discuss something important somewhere unheard.