An Enchantment of Ravens(10)
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.
I wasn’t certain how to answer. To me the unnameable flaw overwhelmed the drawing, made it unsightly. “It’s how you look, sir,” I settled on. “But it still needs a great deal of improvement. I’d like to work on it more before we’re done today.”
Rook touched his crown, almost self-consciously, as he sat back down. He hesitated, then put his arm back where it had been before. After a pause he adjusted its placement to make it exact.
The remainder of the session passed in silence. Not the rigid silence I usually felt in the presence of Rook’s kind, but a warmer and more tentative stillness. It reminded me of the time I’d gone to sit under my favorite tree in town to read in the shade, and found another girl already there doing the same thing. We’d passed hours together after saying only a brief hello. By the time we went home I felt we were friends even though we’d only exchanged a single shy word. Later, I found out she’d left with her parents for the World Beyond.
I realized how late it was when two curly-haired heads rose up behind the window. Rook remained oblivious to the twins peering inside until May stuck her face to the glass like a suction cup and puffed out her cheeks. Then he turned, but not in time to see them duck down, leaving only a shrinking fog on the windowpane. The sun had nearly set. I still hadn’t figured out what was wrong with Rook’s eyes.
A trace of disappointment moved his brow when I told him we were finished.
“Can I come back again tomorrow?” he asked.
I looked up from untying my apron. “Gadfly has a session scheduled. The next day?”
“Very well,” he said, annoyed—but not at me, I sensed.
I’m not sure what came over me next. When he opened the door he didn’t walk out straightaway, but rather lingered as if he wanted to say something else, just wasn’t certain what. The exact same feeling gripped me. Our eyes met, forging a connection across the room. I drew a breath and then said boldly, chastising myself all the while, “Are you going to return as a raven?”
“More likely than not, I think.”