Dragon Rose(20)

Sar seemed less than pleased with the havoc I created in my rooms, but as they were mine and not hers, she said nothing, instead settling for a few carefully timed raised eyebrows.

“And you don’t mind sleeping in here with the smell?” she asked, after I had opened one of the jars of linseed oil and began mixing the first of the pigments for my study of the valley. I would need a careful combination of verdigris and umber to get the correct tint for the warm hues of the late-summer grass.

I knew that was her way of criticizing the enterprise, and smothered a smile. I had been in the castle for less than a fortnight, but I already knew she thought of Black’s Keep as her place to rule, Dragon Lord or no. It wasn’t that far off from the truth; I had yet to see Theran Blackmoor order anything more than another flagon of wine for our dinner table.

“It smells sweet as roses to me,” I said. “Just having the pigments I need, and all that canvas! I daresay Mat brought back enough for me to make a hundred paintings.”

I had thought she might raise an eyebrow again, or perhaps smile at my grandiosity, but for some reason a shadow passed over her face at my words. Then she shook her head, as if to clear it of an unpleasant vision.

“Paint as many as you like. But be sure to have Mat make the canvases for you. I can only imagine what his lordship would say if he discovered you were out in the workshops, hammering nails together for a frame.”

“Well, I had to show Mat how to do it properly,” I protested.

No, Sar had not been exactly pleased to find me out in the workshop, sleeves untied and tossed to the side, as I showed Mat, who seemed to be the keep’s general handyman and dogsbody, how to stretch the canvas over the frame so it would be equally taut on all sides and not bunch or sag. But really, the best way to learn is by example. That was how Lindell had taught me to do it, and my first few attempts were quite pathetic. Mat did far better at it on his first try, but then, he had longer arms and was much stronger than I.

“Hmm,” was Sar’s response to my remark.

“Anyway,” I went on, sprinkling a little more verdigris into the mixture on the thin wooden board I used for preparing my paints, “Mat is doing very well at it, so no need to trouble his lordship with tales of me sawing boards or stretching canvas.”

“Thank goodness.”

She left me then, stating some pressing need in the kitchens, but I really think her haste to leave stemmed more from her distaste of the scent of the linseed oil than any culinary emergency. The smell was so familiar to me that I didn’t think twice about it. Besides, I had the windows open to let in the fine summer air, but I didn’t mind her leaving. I had work to do.





“Sar tells me that you are quite consumed in a painting,” Theran Blackmoor said to me over dinner several days later.

I wondered how often the two of them discussed me but decided, again, that there was no way for me to ask without sounding too forward. “I’m painting the valley. The hues on the hillsides are quite lovely this time of year; I want to catch them before autumn comes upon us in earnest.”

“It must be quite a gift, to see things as you do.”

His words made me start a little, until I realized he spoke only of my artist’s eye, and not that far more troublesome one, the one which brought images to me in dreams. Since that first night, none of my dreams had been particularly vivid or memorable, and even the one that had troubled me so had faded almost completely. If it meant anything—which I doubted—most likely it had been my way of saying goodbye to any hopes of marriage to someone more suitable.

“Oh, well.” Deprecating my talents came as naturally to me as breathing, and I did it without thought. Lindell had praised my work, and said it was a shame I was a girl, for I should have been plying my trade in Lystare and beyond. My family, though, tended to ignore it, save when they could use it for their own gain. No, that was not fair. I’d felt glad to be of some use, dull as the work might have been. Far better that I should have been gifted with a needle, or in the kitchens, for at least then I could have made a contribution they didn’t have to hide from the world, but that was not my fate.

“Rhianne.”

Although I still found myself thrilling to the sound of my name in that dark-honey voice of Theran’s, I couldn’t help but detect a note of reproof. To my surprise, he drew a piece of paper from somewhere within the folds of his robes and then laid it flat on the table between us, smoothing it with a gloved hand. Although the one candle sitting next to my plate did not provide much illumination, I could still see the piece of paper was one I had discarded earlier that day, a sketch of two roses clustered together. I hadn’t been entirely satisfied with the shading, and so I had thrown the scrap into the waste bin in my room.

How he had come by it, I had no idea, although I guessed either Sar or Melynne, the girl tasked with keeping my rooms tidy, must have fished it out and given it to him.

“It was wasteful, I suppose. I should have used the back of the paper before I put it in the waste bin, but—”

“That is not what I was about to say.” A black-clad finger traced the lines of one rose stem, then paused, still resting on the paper. “To see the truth of a thing…to be able to put that truth down on paper, or canvas…well, it is a rare gift. You should not disparage it.”

“I wasn’t—” I broke off, since I realized I had been doing that very thing. Well, it was never easy to shake off the habits of a lifetime. “So you don’t think it odd, that a woman should want to be a painter?”