Once more, Usha looked around her studio at the two series of sketches tacked to the east and west walls. She calculated the time she would need to paint the portraits she’d contracted. One was of a young man, promised to his ailing grandfather. The other was of a woman whose children wanted her to portray their mother exactly as they knew her—a queen among women. Usha shook her head as she did every time she looked at that set of sketches. The subject was the most unqueenly of women. She’d promised to deliver the portraits within the month. It was a lot of work, but possible, and the fees were generous. One fee alone was enough to pay her and Dez’s expenses for the past month and the next.
All that was true, but when she looked again at Loren, Usha realized that none of it had to do with her hesitation to give him an answer. She set down the scraping knife and came out from behind the easel.
“Loren, when you saw the portrait of your nephews, you were afraid Lorelia or Havelock would be harmed by it, yet here you are wanting to commission a portrait of Tamara. Aren’t you afraid the portrait I paint might work in your daughter’s life in some magical way?”
He pushed away from the desk and took her hand. Before she realized it, her fingers curled comfortably around his. “You asked me to trust that if you worked with a good will your magic would cause no harm.” He lifted her hand, the fingers speckled with flakes of pa’ressa. “I trust that this hand would never harm my child, mysterious Usha.”
“Mysterious?” She shook her head, withdrawing her hand and paying no attention to the flutter of excitement his touch had caused. “That’s an odd naming.”
“No, it isn’t. You are a mystery to me, Usha. I have known you for weeks, and I don’t really know anything about you.” He looked around her studio, at the easel, the buckets and pots for mixing paints, the baskets of brushes. He looked at the sketches, his eye lingering over the emerging details of a woman’s weathered, old face. “This is all I know about you. You are an artist of remarkable talent, and you live in Solace. For the rest, you might have drifted into Haven like a feather on the breeze.”
There was so much more he shouldn’t know about her—not the least dangerous her connection to an underground organization that ferried refugees out of Haven. Uneasy, Usha turned back to her easel.
“Who are you, Usha? Who are your people, your family?” He hesitated, but only for a moment. “Who are you to have magic when all of magic is fading from the world?”
Usha paid close attention to her work now, a little thread of fear in her heart.
His voice low, Loren said, “What of your husband, Usha Majere?”
Usha’s blade rasped over the pa’ressa. It took an effort not to use too much pressure. Her voice flat, she scraped carefully and said, “I didn’t drift on the breeze, Loren. Dez and I came here on business for her father’s inn.”
Loren cocked an eyebrow. He did not often mention Dez, and Usha never did. His attention could quickly become Sir Radulf’s ... or worse, Lady Mearah’s.
“And now my sister-in-law and I are trapped here. As for my people, they are ...”
She stopped, for how could she tell him the story of the infant raised by the Irda and deny the naming “mysterious?” What words could she find—what words had she ever been able to find?—to tell him of the haunting sadness of being a human child among people whose physical beauty surpassed any legend’s telling? How to tell the story of a child who’d known herself as desperately ugly among the most beautiful creatures in Krynn, who became a woman without a country, with no family but that of the husband who’d deserted her?
Of these things she’d hardly spoken to anyone. For all her life the pain had felt too raw.
“Usha, what of your husband?”
She scraped carefully, steady, even strokes. The blade whispered to the canvas.
Into that whisper, Loren said, “You ask for my trust, Usha, yet you won’t give me yours.”
It was a flat statement, but it felt like an accusation. Grimly, she admitted that given the reason she accepted—no, be honest, encouraged—his interest in her, the word “trust” was something to wince from. She didn’t.
“Loren, there is no mystery about my husband other than where he might be right now. Palin Majere is a man who has been pleased to step out of my life without so much as a fare-thee-well.”
Considering the matter closed, Usha returned to her canvas.
Surprise, like the breath of lightning, lifted the fine hair on her arms. Where she’d been working, an image, ghostly and indistinct, shimmered and became a figure she hadn’t painted, one she had not contemplated painting. But it was there, a trick of intuition.
“Come here,” she said, her mouth going dry as the image resolved itself.
Perhaps he heard the quiver in her voice, for Loren came around the easel at once.
“Do you see that cloaked man? That is Palin Majere, a mage who suffers the inability to trust his magic, as all mages do these days, but who shares nothing of his feelings with me, not a word of this thoughts. He journeys on errands he will not speak of. He returns in despair and he leaves in anger, and I don’t know where he goes or why. He’s been gone from me for a long time.”
Loren moved closer, his sleeve brushing against her arm. The image on the stark canvas faded. In moments it vanished as though it had never been. Loren drew an astonished breath.
Shaken, Usha said, “Our last parting was the bitterest of all. I don’t look to find my husband returned should I ever get out of Haven.”
“Usha,” he said. “How can you bear a loveless life?”
Usha gasped, a small sound, like flinching. The question, so gently, compassionately asked, called up a memory she’d been a long time trying to forget—that of the look in Palin’s eyes the last time she’d seen him. It used to be that she could look into her husband’s eyes and see the light of his love. It had burned brightly in youth, warmly in their middle years. But the last time she’d looked into Palin Majere’s eyes, with the echoes of recrimination, anger, and suspicion still hanging in the air between them, what she’d seen recalled a spent and guttered candle.
Loren touched her cheek, his gray eyes filled with both sorrow and longing. Again, her skin prickled, and again Usha thought of how it felt when lightning passed close by outside the window. In a bright moment of clarity, Usha knew she could accept the caress or turn from it.
She turned.
“I... I have a lot of work to do, Loren, if I’m to deliver two portraits when they’re promised.”
The words no sooner spoken, Usha regretted them, but Loren had stepped away from her and the moment was lost.
“Will you consider my commission, Usha?”
A business-like request, and there was no sign of wounding in his voice. Usha knew better.
“I will consider it.” She gave him a long, level look, then nodded gravely, though the gravity was belied by a smile. “Come tomorrow and we can talk again.”
How can you bear a loveless life?
Loren’s question haunted Usha. Unspoken in every conversation she had during the day, behind even the most mundane thought, it haunted her. She didn’t try to avoid it. In truth it seemed she’d been trying to avoid it long before she came to Haven. She’d begun to think that was why she’d come to Haven, to answer the question. She thought in Madoc’s strange metaphor now.
Perhaps I’ve come here to see what shape emerges next in the design, or perhaps I’ve come to make a new shape....
A new shape for her life? For love? Women did it. So did men. Marriage grew old. People grew apart. They no longer tried to mend what kept breaking, yet they did not dissolve the bonds of family. It was done that way among the highborn folk in Palanthas. Discreetly came lovers, and then people stood in different relationships to each other than before.