In all the others I had seen, the women had been facing the viewer, and each had gone into motion at seeing me, waving me forward or offering something. Though this one was different from the full-on invitations of the others I had seen, spoken to, or traveled within, there was something similar in the feel—the promise of something more, something hidden beneath the crests of paint.
I touched the edge of the frame and the taste of the sea and feel of despair burst upon my senses. The tones encasing the woman were earthy and melancholic. The lost love. The earth maternal. A breeze dotted with salted tears came through the open window to her right, to the direction she had started to turn. There was the barest hint of a tormented sea beyond the Cornish field through the open frame. The curtains moved inward in the breeze, washing over the side of the woman's face in her frozen turn.
It was an odd juxtaposition—the woman moving in small twitches versus the living scene around her. Like she kept trying to turn, but was constantly being pulled back by a gravitational force acting from the exterior paint of the portrait.
There was no sign of a turn, of her holding forth a piece of paper, like the other Kinsky inhabitants—the portrait at Ganymede Station, that I hadn't had the chance to explore, and the portrait in Alexandria, that had asked me where I wanted to travel and giving me the first taste of an Origin Circuit.
This one seemed too small to travel through, though as a mage I had learned quickly that being thought constrained by non-magic physics was a disability in thinking.
But there was something about the painting that felt small. That felt...contained. Like it was specifically created, not a full experience.
Looking at the woman, I thought of my brother. Of how even though I was past the immediate grief, I was still taken by it sometimes, in the dark, when other things bled from the forefront of my thoughts. Lost love, lost family. I let the barest hint of sympathetic magic spiral through my fingers as I caressed the corner.
The woman's head tilted toward me just the smallest bit in real time, like she was checking her peripheral view, then the fingers of her turning hand reached back to the lower, opposite corner and pulled the edges of the painting around her like a cape.
I reached forward automatically as the picture changed with the swirl of oil.
In the woman's place was a chest containing a miniature portrait of the woman on the decorative latch. The background was bare as a Vermeer white-washed wall, and equally as complicated in its devious simplicity of muted tones and shadows of light.
I reached toward the latch, and the chestnut and mahogany colors started to swirl. My lips curved a tiny bit automatically. It was still thrilling to watch art come alive, even after months of doing it myself. And this was a master's work—like seeing the Mona Lisa finally open her lips to tell me her secrets. Thrilling.
I touched the oil, which turned slick beneath my fingers, then thrust them inside. The metallic latch was cold under my fingerpads, and the woman watched me in miniature—as if in this incarnation she could only be captured in small scale.
She said nothing, made no movements to help or hinder me, and offered no items, but there was an anticipation in the way she watched me—her weariness washing away with the displacement of paint. So, I lifted the latch and carefully pushed back the hood of the chest, watching as the oils shifted and moved, and as she disappeared from view.
Inside the chest was a single item, a hand-bound book. I was reaching for it as soon as I consciously understood what it was.
I pulled the volume out and as soon as it was free, the picture swirled and warped once more, and an empty table stood in its place. The woman's peasant dress flowed freely around her legs as she walked across the field toward the sea, visible through the still-open window in the stark room.
I stared at her steadily disappearing figure until she lifted her arms and was carried into the sea-swept vanishing point. Freed. Liberated. Unbound.
I turned my attention to what I held without opening it. The leather-bound volume contained twenty or so pages, each thick and uneven opposite the binding. A book made from separate but deliberate pieces, not a blank book filled in haphazardly.
Kinsky's mark—a bird in flight—was stamped into the lower right corner of the cover.
My hand shook in realization. This was likely an artist’s journal. Sergei Kinsky’s artist’s journal. Given to me in desperation, and unlocked with emotion.
I looked back at the portrait, but it was no longer a portrait—the woman was gone. The only animation in the otherwise empty room was a breeze blowing the hem of the curtain. Everything alive about the painting now came from outside the inner frame.
I carefully lifted the cover of the journal. Magic puffed from the pages, like dust from a forgotten tome on a forgotten shelf. The dust swirled and hovered above my hands.
The pages were thick, and zings of twilight magic drifted along the fibers as my fingers caressed the edge of the first page. Kinsky's magic was a world of vibrant and muted grayscale. But peeling back the layers of each picture showed a shocking amount of color hidden carefully beneath. I was looking at a full, vibrant hidden world stuffed beneath depression. The grays were rich in tone, texture, and variety, and it was hard to tell whether Kinsky was saying that it was the default state he was trying to highlight, or the secret of it.
Five of the pages lifted upright and vibrated. Paint, pastels, and charcoal flew from their canvasses and into the air in front of me, coiling together in broad and small strokes to show moving images of an event. I reached out and let the magic wrap my finger and the taste, smells, and sounds of the event swept over me, pulling me inside. I gasped as a woman with smoky eyes beckoned. I knew her. She was the woman from every portrait. I walked forward in anticipation—no, Kinsky walked forward with anticipation—I was just experiencing the memory.
The memory swirled, and the woman’s once beautiful warm skin was unnaturally blanched and sweating. Dark circles underlined her eyes as she reached up with stuttering last words…
I pushed away at the sudden realization of death, but the magic held me tight, and I saw Enton Stavros in an immaculate suit present himself at her funeral along with a man I didn’t know—Oler Mussolgranz—an imposing man with cold, dissecting eyes. Stavros could give me back what I had lost and more. He could shield me from all those who would hunt me. He knew what I had long suspected and hid about my abilities—abilities only Priyasha had encouraged. Always Priyasha.