“I’m supposed to guard you. I have orders.” When she’d spoken at the bridge her voice had been a commanding bark, iron-lined and brutal. But now her voice was soft, sweet even, at odds with her muscular frame.
Sorrow looked at her more closely then, at her clear, bright skin, her delicate nose and large, thickly lashed eyes. She couldn’t be much older than Luvian, perhaps mid-twenties. Her cheeks still had a childlike roundness to them, and again Sorrow thawed towards her. She wasn’t the battle-hardened monster Sorrow imagined all the Decorum Ward were.
“I’m sorry, Dain. I can’t tell you why you can’t come, but that’s my order. Please,” Sorrow tried.
Dain gave her a long look, and then nodded. “Very well. I’ll wait.” She sat on the bench, knees apart, hands resting atop them.
“Call me deluded, but I think Vine might have accidentally assigned me the only decent member of the Decorum Ward,” Sorrow murmured to Luvian as they approached the door to the registry.
“Miracles do occasionally occur.”
He pulled the cord that hung beside the door, releasing it when a deep bell chimed behind the thick wood. A moment later, the door swung silently open and a young Rhyllian woman stood there. Like Rasmus, she was adorned in jewellery, her ears lined with hoops, another in her left nostril, and one piercing her left eyebrow. Her paint-splattered fingers were full of rings too, and through a tear in her equally stained tunic, Sorrow spied another ring through her belly button. The girl looked from Sorrow, to Luvian, then back to Sorrow, before frowning.
“We have some paint fragments we’d like to match,” Luvian began, in Rhyllian.
“I know who you are,” the girl replied in heavily accented Rhannish. “You’re here about the portraits. Of the lost boy returned. You want to know who painted them.”
“Yes.” Luvian blinked. “But how—”
“It’s me,” the girl said, leaving Luvian gaping like a fish, and Sorrow stunned into silence. “I paint them. Well, I painted the last one, at least. You’d better come in.”
She stood back to allow Sorrow and Luvian to enter, and they did, stumbling through the doorway.
They stood in a light, airy hallway dominated by a white wooden staircase that curved like the spirals of a shell, narrowing as it joined the floor above. The floor was tiled, also white, and the girl’s bare feet made no sound as she walked past them, heading to a small door set back in the wall.
“Were you expecting us?” Sorrow asked, bewildered by the fact she’d been there, as though waiting for them.
The girl gave her a scathing look over her shoulder. “I was passing the door when you rang the bell. This way,” she said.
Sorrow and Luvian exchanged a confused glance before following.
The Rhyllian didn’t bother waiting for them as she moved silently down a corridor, turning left and vanishing around a corner. By the time they reached that bend, she was about to disappear around another, and so it continued as they chased her through a warren of identical passages, until at last they came to a corridor halted by a wall at the end, the girl nowhere to be seen. Nervous, they edged down the passage, pausing as they drew level with an open door. When they peered into the room beyond, they found the girl in there, throwing sheets over canvases.
They hovered in the doorway, something about the space forbidding them from entering without permission. It was a studio, that much was clear. But it was also a home; there was a low, narrow bed in the corner that hadn’t been made, a small table covered in dirty dishes, clothes in rainbow colours thrown over a mannequin and heaped on a chair.
“Come in,” the girl said, apparently more concerned with hiding her work than the evidence of her life. The girl lowered herself to the floor, crossing her legs under her in a smooth motion. “I don’t have any refreshments to offer,” she said bluntly.
“That’s all right,” Sorrow said. She walked over to the girl and sat opposite her, Luvian kneeling beside her, trying to remain calm. Finally they’d found the artist. Finally she’d get some answers about Mael. “So, you’re Graxal?”
“No.”
Sorrow paused. “But you said you were the artist.”
“I am. Now. But Graxal isn’t my name. It isn’t a name at all. It’s two names, made one. My name, Xalys. And my mother’s, Gralys. She was the artist, and when she died, I moved here and took over her work.”
Sorrow hadn’t been able to look at the signatures on the older portraits, back in the Winter Palace, before she’d left. She’d taken it for granted it was the same signature, same artist. Graxal. Gralys.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Sorrow said finally.
The girl – Xalys – shrugged. “It was too soon.”
Sorrow left a respectful pause before she asked her next question. “So your mother was the person who originally painted the portraits of Mael?”
“Yes.” Xalys looked at them with silver eyes. “Until this year – she died before she could finish. So I finished for her, and signed it from us both.” She paused. “I suppose your next question is who commissioned the paintings?”
“Exactly,” Sorrow said.
“Lord Vespus Corrigan,” Xalys said. “Though I suppose I can technically call him ‘Father’.”
Something Long-Term
“Your father?” Sorrow stared at the girl. She’d expected Vespus to be the answer to the question. But she hadn’t expected this. “Vespus is your father? Rasmus is your brother?”
Xalys raised her eyebrows. “Half-brother. Lord Corrigan married Rasmus’s mother when I was six. He was never married to my mother.”
Sorrow was stunned, momentarily forgetting why they were there as she stared at the Rhyllian woman before her, trying to find Rasmus, or Vespus, in her features. Rasmus had no idea this woman existed; he’d often wished for a brother or sister, despite Sorrow’s dark warnings that they could be more trouble than they were worth.
“So Lord Vespus commissioned the paintings?” Luvian’s tone was a nudge, warning Sorrow to pay attention, and she shook off her shock and focused on what Xalys was saying.
“Yes. As a gift for your father, from the people of Rhylla.” Xalys looked at Sorrow. “To express our condolences for what happened at the bridge. You didn’t know that?”
“The records of who painted it were lost,” Sorrow said. “We were curious about who did the work, year after year. And how the tradition began. It was pure luck to find you here. We thought we’d have more of a search on our hands.”
“They’re really something,” Luvian added. “The pictures. It must have been challenging to imagine him.”
“For the first one we worked from a Rhannish painting. When they’re that little, they don’t change very much.”
“What about as he got older?” Sorrow asked, following Luvian’s lead.
“A combination of guesswork and pictures of the chancellor and his wife. And a model Lord Vespus brought.”