The next morning, my paint and supplies arrived from wherever Phoebus or the servants had dug them up, but before Phoebus let me see them, he brought me down hall after hall until we were in a wing of a house I'd never been to, even in my nocturnal exploring. I knew where we were going without his having to say. The marble floors shone so brightly that they had to have been freshly mopped, and that rose-scented breeze floated in through the opened windows. All this—he'd done this for me. As if I would have cared about cobwebs or dust.
When he paused before a set of wooden doors, the slight smile he gave me was enough to make me blurt, "Why do anything—anything this kind?"
The smile faltered. "It's been a long time since there was anyone here who appreciated these things. I like seeing them used again." Especially when there was such blood and death in every other part of his life—of both our lives.
He opened the gallery doors, and the breath was knocked from me.
The pale wooden floors gleamed in the clean, bright light pouring in from the windows. The room was empty save for a few large chairs and benches for viewing the ... the ...
I barely registered moving into the long gallery, one hand absentmindedly wrapping around my throat as I looked up at the paintings.
So many, so different, yet all arranged to flow together seamlessly ... Such different views and snippets and angles of the world. Pastorals, portraits, still lifes ... each a story and an experience, each a voice shouting or whispering or singing about what that moment, that feeling, had been like, each a cry into the void of time that they had been here, had existed. Some had been painted through eyes like mine, artists who saw in colours and shapes I understood. Some showcased colours I had not considered; these had a bend to the world that told me a different set of eyes had painted them. A portal into the mind of a creature so unlike me, and yet ... and yet I looked at its work and understood, and felt, and cared.
"I never knew," Phoebus said from behind me, "that humans were capable of ..." He trailed off as I turned, the hand I'd put on my throat sliding down to my chest, where my heart roared with a fierce sort of joy and grief and overwhelming humility—humility before that magnificent art.
He stood by the doors, head cocked in that animalistic way, the words still lost on his tongue.
I wiped at my damp cheeks. "It's ..." Perfect, wonderful, beyond my wildest imaginings didn't cover it. I kept my hand over my heart. "Thank you," I said. It was all I could find to show him what these paintings—to be allowed into this room—meant.
"Come here whenever you want."
I smiled at him, hardly able to contain the brightness in my heart. His returning smile was tentative but shining, and then he left me to admire the gallery at my own leisure.
I stayed for hours—stayed until I was drunk on the art, until I was dizzy with hunger and wandered out to find food.
After lunch, Willodean showed me to an empty room on the first floor with a table full of canvases of various sizes, brushes whose wooden handles gleamed in the perfect, clear light, and paints—so, so many paints, beyond the four basic ones I'd hoped for, that the breath was knocked from me again.
And when Willodean was gone and the room was quiet and waiting and utterly mine ...
Then I began to paint.
.____________________.
Weeks passed, the days melting together. I painted and painted, most of it awful and useless.
I never let anyone see it, no matter how much Phoebus prodded and Kallistê smirked at my paint-splattered clothes; I never felt satisfied that my work matched the images burning in my mind. Often I painted from dawn until dusk, sometimes in that room, sometimes out in the garden. Occasionally I'd take a break to explore Elanor's lands with Phoebus as my guide, hopeful to find anything which may aid me in my quest. But there had been nothing since that day in the House of Dreams and so I'd been left with coming back with fresh ideas that had me leaping out of bed the next morning to sketch or scribble down the scenes or colours as I'd glimpsed them.
But there were the days when Phoebus was called away to face the latest threat to his borders by the attacks with Oberon and Nolan, and even painting couldn't distract me until he returned, covered in blood that wasn't his own, sometimes with a wild look in his eyes, sometimes as the Imperial Lord. He never gave me details, and I didn't presume to ask about them; his safe return was enough.
Around the manor itself, there was no sign of creatures like the Sephtis or the Water Baphomet, but I stayed well away from the western woods, even though I painted them often enough from memory. And though my dreams were plagued by the deaths I'd witnessed, the deaths I'd caused—all watched over by a shadow I could never quite glimpse—I slowly stopped being so afraid. Stay with the Imperial Lord. You will be safe. So I did.
Elanor was a land of rolling green hills and lush forests and clear, bottomless lakes. Magic didn't just abound in the bumps and the hollows—it grew there. Try as I might to paint it, I could never capture it—the feel of it. So sometimes I dared to paint the Imperial Lord, who rode at my side when we wandered his grounds on lazy days—the Imperial Lord, whom I was happy to talk to or spend hours in comfortable silence with who would I have to soon betray.
It was probably the lulling of magic that clouded my thoughts, and I didn't think of my family until I passed the outer hedge wall one morning, scouting for a new spot to paint. A breeze from the south ruffled my hair—fresh and warm. Summer was now dawning on the mortal world.
My family, cared for, safe, still had no idea where I was—still under the belief that I was aiding the Elders in a mission. They were right of course but hadn't known it would've come with a price. The mortal world ... it had moved on without me, as if I had never existed. A whisper of a miserable life—gone, unremembered by anyone whom I'd known or cared for except for the Elders.
I didn't paint, nor did I go riding with Phoebus that day. Instead, I sat before a blank canvas, no colours at all in my mind.
No one would remember me back home eventually—I was as good as dead to them. And Phoebus had let me forget them. Maybe the paints had even been a distraction—a way to get me to stop complaining, to stop being a pain in his ass about wanting to see my family. Or maybe they were a distraction from whatever was happening with the attacks and Asteria. I'd stopped asking, just as the Alger had ordered—like a stupid, useless, obedient human.
It was an effort of stubborn will to make it through dinner. Phoebus and Kallistê noticed my mood and kept conversation between themselves. It didn't do much for my growing rage, and when I had eaten my fill, I stalked into the moonlit garden and lost myself in its labyrinth of hedges and flower beds.
I didn't care where I was going yet at some point I found myself facing the entrance of the Imperial Lord's maze. It was stupid. So, so stupid to have these conflicted feelings for the faeries which prevented me from completing my task. Why couldn't I have succeeded my kind right after I'd gained the knowledge of the location of the faevenom?
I squeezed my eyes shut. It's no use dwelling on the past now anyway. It wouldn't do me any good in reliving my past mistakes. Perhaps I could regain my honour for my people another day ... just not now.
After a while, I paused once more in the rose garden—my train of thoughts fading into the back of my mind. The moonlight stained the red petals a deep purple and cast a silvery sheen on the white blooms.
"My father had this garden planted for my mother," Phoebus said from behind me. I didn't bother to face him. I dug my nails into my palms as he stopped by my side. "It was a mating present."
I stared at the flowers without seeing anything. The roses I'd painted on the table at home were probably crumbling or gone by now. Alistair might even have scraped them off.
My nails pricked the skin of my palms. Phoebus providing for them or no, doomed to live in Asteria for the rest of my meaningless life or no, I'd been ... erased from their lives. Forgotten. I'd let him erase him. He'd offered me paints and space and time to practice; he'd shown me pools of starlight; he'd saved my life like some kind of feral knight in a legend, and I'd gulped it down like faerie wine. I was no better than those zealot faerie-lovers back in the village.
His skin was bronze in the darkness, and the emerald silk of his tunic glittered. "You seem ... upset."
I stalked to the nearest rosebush and ripped off a rose, my fingers tearing on the thorns. I ignored the pain, the warmth of the blood that trickled down. I could never paint it accurately—never render it the way those artists had in the gallery pieces. I would never be able to paint Theodore's little garden outside the cottage the way I remembered it, even if my family didn't remember me.
He didn't reprimand me for taking one of his parents' roses—parents who were as absent as my own, but who had probably loved each other and loved him better than mine cared for me. A family that would have offered to go in his place if someone had come to steal him away.
My fingers stung and ached, but I still held on to the rose as I said, "I don't know why I feel so tremendously ashamed of myself for leaving them. Why it feels so selfish and horrible to paint. I shouldn't—shouldn't feel that way, should I? I know I shouldn't but I can't help it." The rose hung limply from my fingers. "All those years, what I did and went through for them ... And they didn't try to stop you from taking me." There it was, the giant pain that cracked me in two if I thought about it too long. "I don't know why I expected them to—why I believed that the Water Eidolon's illusion was real that night. I don't know why I bother still thinking about it. Or still caring." He was silent long enough that I added, "Compared to you—to your borders and magic being weakened—I suppose my self-pity is absurd."
"If it grieves you," he said, the words caressing my bones, "then I don't think it's absurd at all."
"Why?" A flat question, and I chucked the rose into the bushes.
He took my hands. His callused fingers, strong and sturdy, were gentle as he lifted my bleeding hand to his mouth and kissed my palm. As if that were answer enough.
His lips were smooth against my skin, his breath warm, and my knees buckled as he lifted my other hand to his mouth and kissed it, too. Kissed it carefully—in a way that made heat rise to my neck, my face.
When he withdrew, my blood shone on his mouth. I glanced at my hands, which he still held, and found the wounds gone. I looked at his face again, at his gilded mask, the tanness of his skin, the red of his blood-covered lips as he murmured, "Don't feel bad for one moment about doing what brings you joy." He stepped closer, releasing one of my hands to tuck the rose I'd plucked behind my ear. I didn't know how it had gotten into his hand, or where the thorns had gone.
I couldn't stop myself from pushing. "Why—why do any of this?"
He leaned in closer, so close that I had to tip my head back to see him. "Because your human joy fascinates me—the way you experience things, in your life span, so wildly and deeply and all at once, is ... entrancing. I'm drawn to it, even when I know I shouldn't be, even when I try not to be."
Because I was human, and I would grow old and—I didn't let myself get that far as he came closer still. Slowly, as if giving me time to pull away, he brushed his lips against my cheek. Soft and warm and heartbreakingly gentle. It was hardly more than a caress before he straightened. I hadn't moved from the moment his mouth met my skin.
"One day—one day there will be answers for everything," he said, releasing my hand and stepping away. "But not until the time is right. Until it's safe." In the dark, his tone was enough to know that his eyes were flecked with bitterness.
He left me, and I took a gasping breath, not realising I'd been holding it.
Not realising that I craved his warmth, his nearness, until he was gone.