“Is there a proper way to address you as prince?” I deferred, crossing the room to start sorting through the fabrics for a backdrop that would complement his wardrobe.
“We don’t observe such formalities,” he said, and glanced at me. “I would have thought you already knew that.” How? I wondered. It wasn’t as though I had fairy royalty over for dinner. “In any case, my name is Rook.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “That’s fitting, sir.”
His eyes moved, searching my face, and it seemed to me his own smile grew even more familiar, confidential in a way I hadn’t known a fair one could manage. Standing next to him, I became aware that the top of my head only reached to his chest. My cheeks warmed.
Good lord! I had a job to do.
“I think this brocade would suit you,” I said, lifting a heavy rust-colored silk with copper embroidery.
He paused to look at it, almost impatiently. I always found this part interesting. One could learn precious little about fair folk, but occasionally their aesthetic choices opened windows into their souls (if they had them, that is—always a controversial matter at church). Gadfly enjoyed stuffing his frames full of as many expensive-looking trifles as possible. Another patron, Swallowtail, preferred only functional objects that had been used before: half-burnt candles, books with cracked spines and feathered corners.
Rook shook his head at the brocade and bent to inspect a row of blown-glass vases. He examined statuettes and mirrors, baskets full of wax fruit, chemistry bottles, quill pens, strangely arresting in his silence and grave concentration. I couldn’t begin to imagine what he was thinking. Finally he came back to the birdcage and looked up to find me watching him. His mercurial smile returned.
“I’ve decided I don’t want anything in my portrait,” he declared, and went over to the settee. He sat down with one arm stretched across the back and a knowing regard that told me he’d figured out exactly why I’d been watching him. “If you must stare at something for hours on end, I’d prefer it to be me alone.”
I struggled to keep my expression serious. “How gracious of you, sir. It will take me far less time to finish your portrait with you as the sole subject.”
He sat a little straighter and frowned, a trace of petulance darkening his aristocratic features.
What was I doing? It was easy—so easy—for a fair one’s pique to turn to dangerous ire. This wasn’t like me. So many years of being cautious, and in a matter of minutes I’d started slipping up. Swallowing my words, I went over to my chair, arranged my skirts, and selected a stick of charcoal. I pushed every other thought aside.
It’s difficult to explain what happens when I pick up a charcoal stick or a paintbrush. I can tell you the world changes. I see things one way when I’m not working, and an entirely different way when I am. Faces become not-faces, structures composed of light and shadow, shapes and angles and texture. The deep luminous glow of an iris where the light hits it from the window becomes exquisitely compelling. I hunger for the shadow that falls diagonally across my subject’s collar, the fine lighter filaments in his hair ablaze like thread-of-gold. My mind and hand become possessed. I paint not because I want to, not because I’m good at it, but because it is what I must do, what I live and breathe, what I was made for.
My concerns fell away along with the scrape of charcoal across paper. I didn’t notice the soft black flakes sifting down, dusting my lap. First a circle, loose, energetic, capturing the shape of Rook’s face. Then vigorous wider lines sketching in the ensnaring tousle of his hair, his crown.
No.
I tore the paper off my easel, let it fall to the ground, and started in on a new one. Face, hair, crown. Eyebrows, dark and arching. A crooked half-smile. The blocky frame of his shoulders. Good. Better. There were two Rooks in the room now, both watching me. Neither was more real than the other.
Beyond my easel, the living Rook tilted his head. He shifted where he sat. I felt him observing me and didn’t care, lost in the fever of my Craft. But with the small portion of my mind reserved for other thoughts I noted he was getting restless, and remembered what Gadfly had said to me the day before—something about Rook having trouble sitting still.
“Wait,” he said, and my charcoal scraped to a halt. I looked at him, looked at him, my eyes adjusting back to the living world as though I’d just stared too hard at an optical illusion. Something about him seemed troubled. Briefly, I worried he was about to cancel his session.
“Is it”—he frowned, grasping for words—“fixed? The portrait? Can you make a change to it?”
I let go of the breath I’d been holding. So that was all. “I can make any change you’d like at this stage. Once I begin painting it will become more difficult, but I’ll still be able to make alterations up until the end.”
For a moment Rook didn’t say anything. He looked at me, looked away, and then unfastened the raven pin and put it in his pocket. “Excellent,” he said. “That’s all.”
I would be lying if I claimed I wasn’t curious. The pin was, of course, an item of human Craft, like everything else he wore. Long ago, Rook had been well known in Whimsy. And one day, to all accounts, he’d simply stopped visiting. Fair folk coveted Craft above all other things. What calamity might shake one of the habit, and did it have anything to do with the article he’d just removed?
Or perhaps—more likely, almost certainly—the pin was simply out of fashion, or he was tired of wearing it, or he’d just decided it clashed with the color of his buttons and wanted it remade. He was a fair one, not a mortal boy. I couldn’t fall into the trap of sympathizing with him. It was his kind’s oldest, favorite, and most dangerous trick.
I fell back into my work. His likeness was filling in well, yet a flaw began bothering me as I refined the sketch. Somehow, his eyes were wrong. I dabbed charcoal from the paper with the lump of moistened bread I kept on my side table and started over, but each time I redid them they grew no closer to perfection. From the folds of his eyelids to the curve of his eyelashes, every detail was exactly true to his image—but the sum of them failed to capture his . . . well, his soul. I’d never encountered this problem with a fair one before. What on earth was wrong with me today?
My charcoal stick broke. One half rolled across the floorboards and vanished under the settee. I started to get up, but Rook bent and retrieved it for me. Before he returned to his seat he paused and looked at my work. I thought I heard a barely audible intake of breath.
He leaned forward to look at it more closely. “Is that how you see me?” he asked, in a quiet and marveling tone.