Chapter 122: Still Life (Patreon)

The candle on the little shrine had burned down a full finger's width since Lilith took the stool, and the wax had run over the lip of the dish onto the shelf. Mona would scrape it off later, whoever Mona was. Seluna had said the name twice already, each time while shoving something out of sight with her foot.

Lilith kept her hands folded in her lap where Seluna had arranged them. Across the room, the shrine's silver huntress drew her bow at the ceiling. Lilith had asked about it, and Seluna had shrugged and said people thought she was blessed, that she didn't believe a word of it, but it never hurt to keep the goddess close. Lilith had looked at the carved braid and the beads in it and said nothing more.

Seluna stood at the easel with a brush between her teeth and another in her hand. Nyssa sat on the top edge of the canvas frame, legs dangling over the painted side. Twice now her wings had flicked when Seluna mixed a colour.

Queen Gaearien stood by the balcony arch with her staff resting in the crook of her arm.

"I'll admit," Gaearien said, "I didn't expect you to take this seriously."

"And I didn't expect you to come and watch." Lilith kept her chin where Seluna had put it. "Nothing's happening. I'm sitting on a stool."

"Oh, something is happening." Gaearien's mouth moved at one corner. "I'm surprised, that's all."

Lilith turned her head. "Surprised about what?"

Seluna took the brush out of her teeth. "Lune. Please don't move."

She still used the fake name, though she knew the other one now. There were people outside, watching, and the walls were thin.

"Sorry." Lilith set her jaw back at the angle she'd held for the past hour and found the knot in the wall she'd been looking at.

Gaearien chuckled. "Surprised you have a fairy for a follower."

"Nyssa's my finest attendant."

On the frame, Nyssa straightened and pushed her chest out, and the thorns along her shoulders lifted with it. She looked down at the canvas with approval for a second before her eyes narrowed at it again.

"And surprised," Gaearien went on, "that you refused the nude."

"Thank you," Nyssa said, and swung round on the frame to face the Queen. "I told her. Wrapping my Mistress in cloth is putting a sack over a sunrise. The whole world ought to see her as she is."

Lilith let out a breath through her nose. "I decided to spare a few eyes the dazzle."

Nyssa tilted her head. Her claws tapped the wood of the frame, one, two, three. "Hm. Yes." She nodded. "You're right, Mistress. Ordinary eyes aren't fit to look on you in your full glory. They'd only spoil it."

"I could still paint one," Seluna said as she rinsed the brush.

Nyssa's head snapped round to Lilith.

Lilith looked at the ceiling, which cost her the pose, and Seluna sighed at the canvas. "If you're quick," Lilith said, "and there's time left after this one, we can do a second. In my true form."

"I'll do my best."

"You better do," Nyssa said.

Seluna stuck her tongue out at her and went back to the shadow under Lilith's cheekbone. Nyssa's wings buzzed once, hard, and she stayed on the frame.

Gaearien came away from the arch and stopped beside the bed alcove, where a fur had slid half onto the floor. She did not pick it up. "Now that we're all nice and cosy," she said, "perhaps you'll tell me what you're really after."

Lilith laughed, short and low, and held still through it. "So that's why you came to watch."

"One of the reasons."

"I've never hidden it." Lilith kept her head still and let her voice do the moving. "I want Nocturne restored to what it was."

"It once covered more than a third of the continent."

"It did." Lilith let her gaze slide from the knot in the wall to the map pinned beside the rack, the borderlands with Seluna's pencil marks crawling along the edge of the Wastes. "Though the land's moved around a good deal since then."

"So you intend to expand."

"I will. That doesn't mean I have to march into whoever's nearest." Her hands had tightened in her lap, and she loosened them before Seluna could complain. "Besides, there are nations giving me reason enough."

"And when those run out?"

"Then we'll stay where we are and be content with it."

Gaearien's eyebrows rose. "That doesn't sound very ambitious, for you."

The brush had stopped. Lilith didn't look at Seluna, but the scratch of bristle on canvas was gone, and Nyssa had gone still on the frame too.

"Maybe my ambitions are somewhere else." Lilith kept her voice even. "Maybe I want to build a place people choose to join on their own feet. Or maybe I think borders are lines someone drew, and what actually splits people is how they live and what they believe."

Gaearien held her eyes a moment longer. Then she nodded once and walked out onto the balcony. The woven branches took her weight without a creak. She leaned over the outer edge, where there was no rail, and looked down the length of the trunk to the next platform and the foliage below it.

"Seluna," she said, without turning. "Next time, try not to climb down from here."

The brush started again. "Got it. I'll find somewhere else."

Gaearien shook her head at the drop, and stayed there, one hand resting on her staff.

*

The candle on the shrine had burned down to a stub, and the frame where Nyssa had perched stood empty. The light from the balcony had moved off the floorboards and onto the foot of the bed alcove.

"You can move," Seluna said.

Lilith stood and stretched, arms over her head, and her spine cracked on the way up. Her left leg had gone to pins below the knee, and she shook it out as she crossed to the easel.

Seluna had laid the auburn hair in with broad strokes, darker at the roots where the window light failed. The face was finished down to the freckles across the nose. The hands were still pencil over a wash of ochre, and the knot in the wall Lilith had spent the afternoon staring at sat behind her painted shoulder as a brown smudge.

"That's good," Lilith said. "And you've got the whole face done in one sitting. I expected an outline."

Seluna wiped the brush on a rag and grinned at the canvas.

Gaearien came in from the balcony, her staff tapping once on the threshold. "It's one of her talents. She paints the way a human does. She doesn't stop to guess at every stroke three times over."

"Hey!"

"It isn't an insult." Gaearien stopped beside the easel and looked at the unfinished hands. "Most of our people would still be choosing the first colour. She doesn't freeze. That's a good thing in a ruler, whatever she says about not wanting to be queen."

"But it's true." Seluna dropped the brush into the jar, and the water clouded ochre. "Sitting on a throne all day would be dull."

"I don't sit on a throne all day."

Seluna opened her mouth. Gaearien sighed before she got there and turned to Lilith.

"I was the same at her age," she said. "So I know where it comes from. I also know it passes. Long before I give any thought to abdicating."

Lilith picked the rag off the stool and folded it in half. Somewhere in the Spire her clone was working through Stolas's grain ledgers line by line.

"I understand where Seluna's coming from," she said. "If I could hand every scrap of paperwork to someone else, I would."

Seluna turned from the easel, beaming, and pointed the clean end of a brush at her mother.

"That doesn't mean she gets to shrink away from her duties," Lilith said.

The brush came down. Seluna turned back to the canvas and said something to the painted freckles that ended in traitor. Gaearien laughed and covered her mouth with two fingers too late to stop it.

She lowered the hand and looked at the empty frame. "Where did your fairy go?"

"Oh, Nyssa?" Lilith set the folded rag on the stool. "She went back to her duties."

"Would those duties have anything to do with the stack of complaints from the Solarian delegation?"

Lilith lifted both shoulders and let them drop. "Could be. I can't fully control a fairy. They're whimsical creatures by nature."

"If this becomes an incident, I'll hold you accountable."

Lilith met her eyes and held them. "I haven't done anything. I've been the most reasonable guest you've had this whole visit." She tipped her head at the door. "If anything, the scrutiny's a bit much. A guard inside the room I'd have accepted. Someone watching us from out there is less polite."

Gaearien's grip shifted on the staff. "What do you mean, watching from out there?"

"Didn't you set someone on us?" Lilith kept her voice at the same level. "There's been a gaze on this room since we started talking about the painting."

It sat at the back of her neck, from beyond the balcony, out among the branches. It had been there the whole sitting, and for the last stretch of it Gaearien had stood at the unrailed edge with her back to the drop.

"I ordered nothing," Gaearien said. Her face held still, but her chin came up toward the balcony, and stopped. "Who is it? Where?"

"It would be unwise to point." Lilith picked up the jar of cloudy water and swirled it. "Whoever it is will know the moment I do."

Gaearien breathed out through her nose. "Yes. Of course. I was caught off guard." She turned toward the door with her staff in one hand. "We'll walk out as we came in. Tell me once we're out of sight. Seluna, you're coming with us."

Seluna had both hands on the easel. "Does that mean the house arrest is over?"

"Yes, yes," Gaearien said, and opened the door. "Just act natural."

*

The door shut behind Seluna, and the carved crescent settled against its frame. Gaearien walked up the woven bridge to where the corridor curved into living wood and the balcony fell out of sight. There she stopped.

"Now," she said.

"Up and to the left of the balcony, in the canopy." Lilith pictured the room's layout and laid the direction over it. "There's a small ledge above the main branch traffic, well hidden, maybe forty paces out. One watcher. They didn't move once in two hours. When you stood at the edge, their attention sharpened on you and stayed there."

Gaearien's knuckles paled on the staff.

"If you didn't put them there," Lilith said, "I wouldn't be surprised if it's a spy. Or an assassin."

The staff came down on the floor, hard enough that Seluna flinched. "You let me stand at that edge with my back to the drop. And you knew someone was aiming at it."

"I thought they were one of yours." Lilith turned a palm up. "Your city, your branches. If you're so annoyed, do you want me to take care of it?"

In her head the problem was already half solved: a blink to the ledge, a hand at the throat, and the watcher dropped at the Queen's feet before supper.

"I'll pass." Her grip loosened on the staff, one finger at a time. "I believe you could. But it would be impolite to put a guest to work, and I have ruled long enough to know how to clear my own house."

"Suit yourself." Lilith let the hand drop. "If they turn out to be after me, though, I'll still make a move."

"That's understandable."

Seluna had been standing between them with paint on her thumb, looking from one to the other. "And me?"

"You'll go to your father. Now." Gaearien touched the moonstone beads at the end of her daughter's braid and straightened one that had slipped. "You don't walk anywhere alone until this is settled. Not to the range, not to the kitchens, not across a single bridge. Is that clear?"

Lilith expected a protest.

"Clear," Seluna said. She wiped her thumb on her sleeve and glanced toward the bend that hid the balcony. Then she pulled her shoulders back and waited for the guard her mother would assign.

Lilith filed that away beside the annotated border map and the custard.

"Then I'll leave you to it." She inclined her head to the Queen, exactly as low as protocol asked. "I'll be in my quarters."

She turned down the bridge. The fog was thickening below the branches.