"What paint?"
"The motley. To make painting… different. To add an element. Or elements."
"I don't understand." But her heart thudded uncomfortably. She realised now. Motley-that was how he had started the first painting she had ever seen him do, the one that had changed. She had thought the colour was indigo.
"Watch. Watch very carefully." He picked up a paint spoon and dropped some sienna brown on the ridge of one of the roofs. Using the paint skewer, he swirled it gently to define the shape he wanted, then added a touch of umber, some ochre, a spot of yellow. A few more deft strokes and she could see the shape of a large bird perched on the ridge of the roof. When he put down the spoon and skewer, however, the painting was still unfinished, with the details of the plumage, head and beak left vague. He sat and gazed at the picture, his hands loosely clasped in his lap.
She thought she identified the moment when something changed, when the merest of shivers rippled the water beneath the paint and the surface moved. There was a shifting of colour, a blurring around the bird, a darkening of the reddish tiles. She tried to isolate the detail and yet watch the whole too. Even so, she almost missed the precise moment when the blurriness sharpened and the indefinite impression of a bird became something else: a scavenger hawk, every line sharply defined. It coalesced out of the splash of browns, becoming a real portrait of one of the birds that soared around the city waiting for the moment when something died. Its shadow deepened the colour of the tiles next to it, yet she was sure he had not painted its shadow at all.
"That's impossible," she said softly, knowing that it was not, for he had just done it.
He gave a quiet laugh that chilled her to the tips of her fingers. "Just as stormlords moving clouds be impossible, to the commoner."
"You used the colours in the motley," she said. "You took the colours you needed and pushed them up through the paint, mixed them with the colour you had already added, to make the detail of a painting on top of mine. How is that possible?"
"The affinity of water and man," he said. "Water is the key, always. Hook paint to water and move the water."
"Only sensitives can move water," she said.
"No, child, only rainlords and stormlords and waterpainters move water. Stormlords move the sea, rainlords a cistern, ye and I-a few drops in a tray."
"I'm not water sensitive."
"Never said ye were. I said ye can also move water. Fact, we do more even than stormlords, for we be moving the paint as well. If it be motley powder. Tomorrow, ye learn how to make motley. All colours in one mix. Special resin keeps each separate."
She shook her head. Her tongue was dry against the roof of her mouth and her skin felt stretched tight. "Is that what all this is about? You think I can move paint and water?" She meant: Is that why you have taken me in and compelled me to stay?
"All Watergivers who cry water can move water," he said. "And ye are your mother's daughter."
She was swept with panic. "You knew my mother," she whispered, confirming what she had long believed, though not knowing why the thought shattered her so. "And you knew my name. How? Who am I?"
Once again he casually dismissed her need. "Be of no matter. Matters ye be learning how to change a painting. I want ye to put another hawk there, on the roof, beside mine. The way I did it."
"I can't do that!"
"Ye can and ye shall." He dashed several more spoonfuls of paint-powder on top of the painting, in the shape of a similar bird. Then one scrawny arm reached out and took hold of her wrist. She stared at the marks that covered his hands and forearms. She had once thought the patterns were just painted on; she knew better now. The marks were permanent. "Look deep into the painting."
The power in his voice reverberated through his arm and into her body. "Connections," he whispered. "Water to water, life to life. Look deep. See beneath to layers of colour. See bird there, bring to life. Not with paint spoon, but using your mind. Connect to water, Terelle. Each grain of colour be floating in bubble of water. Take the grains ye need, the colours ye want, float them up. Re-form them, make your bird with your mind, see its colours, cruel beak, taloned claws, yellow eye, each feather. Move the colours, move them…"
His voice murmured on, saying words that no longer had individual meaning but built an entire idea. Her mind was not her own; she felt drugged; and yet she saw the bird. She saw it, beneath the paint. Under the painted roof tiles. And she moved it upwards.
The second bird sat on the roof ridge in the painting, next to the first.
She shuddered, cried out in denial. "You did that! It wasn't me!"
"Was ye," he said, and she hated him. She hated his manipulation. She hated what he had done, and why. Her heart told her that this was something he had done not for her, but for himself.
"Who are you?" she asked. "What are you?"
"One day I be telling ye. But not yet."
"And why?" she asked. Remembering the woman who had appeared in both the street and his painting at the same time, her gaze flew upwards to the rooftop, but there were no hawks sitting there.
He followed her gaze and smiled. "Be long way to go, child, journey we be making, ye and me. At journey's end, ye know exactly who ye be and what ye be. And when I die, your future be yours to choose. That's what ye be wanting, no? Ability to choose your own fate. Then ye no longer be saying life not fair."
He's mocking me, she thought. Laughing at my childish desire for fate to be both impartial and just.
He stood up, hitching his wrapped robes about him as if he was chilled, and walked back into their room. She stretched, needing to unwind, to feel the tension dissipate from her muscles and tendons. Finally, when she reached a semblance of normality again, she looked down at the painting once more. The hawks were still sitting there, side by side, Russet's better-made than hers. His bird regarded her with a living intensity in its yellow eye, all predator, with a predator's hunger-and impartiality. She could almost hear it telling her: Life isn't fair. It is harsh and unkind and cruel.
Why couldn't she accept that?
Because even if it's true, it's not acceptable, she thought.
Against her will, she found herself drawn into the painting again, entangled in its strands of light and dark, aware of the colours beneath the superficiality. She heard a whisper in her mind: You could do anything. You could make life fair. Her inner desire manifesting itself. Tempting her.
Anything? Could I?
Half in anger, half in defiance, she splashed more colours onto the roof ridge over the top of the hawks, obliterating them, and then manipulated the new colours with the paint skewer. A few lines: the suggestion of a face, an arm, a leg flung across the peak of the tiles. A man sitting up there where the birds had been.
Then she sat back and regarded the painting through half-closed eyes. She summoned up the colours beneath without even thinking about what she was doing. Not a bird this time but Vato the waterseller. She pulled him out with loving detaiclass="underline" his sardonic, bitter smile, the sadness of his eyes, the lines of his face. His worn clothes. His mended bab sandals. The rough way someone had cut his hair. His chipped nails. She melded the colour beneath with the colour she had painted on top and formed the picture of the man.
As she did it, she realised something that scared her: the details were not coming from her conscious mind but from somewhere else. Yes, she had noticed the nails before and the hair and his expression and the mended sandals-but she had never looked at his feet closely enough to know that one of his sandals was mended with hempen twine and the other with catgut, or that the mark on his cheek was not a scar but a birthmark. Yet those details had been filed away inside her memory.