That was very much Aedric: serious, steady, and sure. Rian swallowed the cold anger swelling in her chest, mindful of Griff, Eluned and Eleri’s loss made newly raw. She had wanted them to see The Processional, but there had been no way to avoid the hurt that would inevitably accompany the sight of this past Aedric.
Catching the fraught atmosphere, Prince Luc looked from face to face, then said: “Were any of the figures modelled by you, Dama Seaforth?”
“Ah, there should be…”
Rian turned to the stone Sulevia Sceadu, Queen Mennia, with a long-limbed and attenuated menagerie in her wake. Among the hounds and hares, the owls and mice, were two larger pieces: the sacred three-tailed mare that led the Night Breezes, and a long-necked stag, both with children on their backs. The mare carried a graceful girl of ten, who gazed with frank interest across at the triskelion. On the back of the stag a child of five sprawled, fast asleep.
“Mother had me pose on an old saddle, every day for what felt like months. Aedric read to me, in hopes of keeping me still. I would always fall asleep—and then be up half the night, racketing around the house and garden.”
“It’s like you’ve always belonged,” Eluned said.
For one startled moment, Rian thought the girl was referring to the Sulevia Sceadu, to her past self’s presence in a train now belonging to Princess Aerinndís. But she caught the direction of the girl’s gaze. The stag.
The world revolved, rearranging itself around the idea that the past few weeks had not been a series of unrelated incidents, but instead a predetermined course, a path laid out toward creating an Amon-Re vampire in Cernunnos’ service. Producing not an apprentice for Makepeace-Heriath, but a successor.
And one of the steps along that path had been Aedric’s death.
SIXTEEN
A blank page was an invitation, an opportunity waiting to be taken. It should not sit in mute accusation. Eluned gripped her pencil, willing herself to at least start, to put down a single line. Before her was the perfect subject, a tangle of briar roses, all serrated leaves and thorns, shapes she loved to work with, and not touched in any way by withering heat.
One line.
Hopeless. Eluned’s fingers tightened, and then she snatched up the sketchbook and hurled it into the tangle in a wild flutter of paper. Chest heaving, she gripped a handful of grass and threw it after the sketchbook, and then flinched as her right arm flailed in response to incautious movement. Instinctively she locked its movement, then let all her breath out in a rush and flopped heavily back onto the grass.
It didn’t make sense, none at all. No-one need see the result. It could be as bad as she liked, clumsy, even a stick figure. Scribble. Anything.
What was wrong with her? Why had the thing most central to her become a cliff she could not climb?
A slender, gold-crowned head lifted against the background of blue and leaves. The amasen’s warm scales brushed her arm as it rose higher to look down at her.
“Sorry,” Eluned said. “Did I startle you?”
A flicker of vivid tongue.
“Is your name really Lila?”
The faint dip of the head could mean anything. Eluned wondered if Lila was a girl’s name among amasen, and whether being female was the reason Lila’s horns were a short, backward-jutting curve, or if that was because it—she—was young and small, and eventually she’d have the heavy, curling ram horns of the larger amasen.
“I try not to get angry around other people,” Eluned said, her gaze returning to the hazy blue above. “I make them nervous.”
She remembered being more temperamental, before Jasper. And utterly furious in the first months after. Because she’d failed him, and because of all the things she suddenly couldn’t do. She’d given up on long hair, and clothing with difficult buttons, and had had to learn how to draw left-handed, to discover work-arounds for things that were easy with two hands. It had been so frustrating that for a while it had seemed she was always boiling over.
Then she’d noticed how worried it made people. As if having half an arm made tantrums against the rules. And, when she was a little older, with the first, clumsy, mechanical hand, there were times people would even flinch.
“I taught myself not to shout at the world,” she told the amasen, or the sky. “I think maybe I need to yell a little more.”
She consoled herself by gently stroking Lila’s head before collecting her sketchbook and returning to Forest House.
Dawn had come and gone while she’d fought a blank page, but it was still early. There’d be at least an hour before they were due to leave for Tangleways.
Last week, Eluned had been aching with impatience to get to this school and see if Lord Fennington knew anything worth asking. Now she dreaded the trip, because before they’d visited the palace, Eleri had invited Nabah and Melly, and then had…done nothing.
“Oh, Eluned, perfect.”
As Eluned wiped her feet on the mat inside the main hall, a mass of pink and white approached from the kitchen, ginger curls visible above a riot of lilliums.
“Be a pet and take these up to your aunt, will you? Let her know breakfast will be ready in twenty.”
With enough of a pause to allow Eluned to tuck her sketchbook under her arm, the woman passed over the heavy vase, checked that it wasn’t in danger of immediately plummeting, and whisked away.
Dama Seleny had been Aunt Arianne’s response to the deputation of the Wise. They’d arrived the morning after the visit to the palace, and had for the most part been ponderously polite while telling Aunt Arianne all the things she should and shouldn’t do. Eluned suspected there would have been more not-quite-shouting if not for the foreseeing, and the bite marks the Wise clearly could see, though even Eluned’s had healed oddly quickly. Once they’d left, Aunt Arianne had gone to visit Dama Chelwith, and the next day a gangly woman with freckles on her freckles had come to stay.
Dama Seleny’s official role was ‘Grove Administrator’, with a budget for management of the house and the press of visitors wanting to access the grove. Most of the work would be done by day staff, leaving Dama Seleny free to attend classes at Rutherford University, but she took care of early visitors and making breakfast, and was particularly good at stonewalling those with questions about the foreseeing. A simple flower delivery must make a nice change.
Blinking in the cloud of scent from the lilliums, Eluned spotted an envelope tucked beside a fern frond. An extravagant admirer: the arrangement would be impressive even in a normal year, let alone at the end of a summer of scorching windstorms. Speculating idly, she climbed up one flight of stairs and headed along the short corridor of bedrooms that now belonged to herself, Eleri and Aunt Arianne: chosen because their walls were less faded and carpet newer than the other bedrooms.
Tapping with her foot on the door at the end of the corridor, Eluned waited for the faint response, and managed to hook the handle with her elbow, passing on Dama Seleny’s message as she entered. The half-light of the room was a mark of Aunt Arianne’s progress toward tolerating the sun. So long as she stayed out of the direct rays, she’d stopped wincing.
“Put it on the sill,” Aunt Arianne said, glancing at Eluned’s burden in the mirror of the dresser.
There was room beside Aunt Arianne’s growing collection of invitation cards, and Eluned gladly lowered the heavy vase, then admired the way the sun picked out veins in the fleshy petals. Greatly daring, she pulled out the envelope, then paused, frowning.