He complied, angling himself to face almost entirely in profile. The scarred left side of his face wasn’t visible from Maeve’s position by the easel. Usually, saints faced fully forward, one hand raised, the other on their lap. Her preliminary drawing had posed him that way.
She picked up a brush and tried to think around the heavysilence. She needed to ask him to move, but would it offend him? He seemed wholly absorbed in staring out the window. If it weren’t for the stiff set of his shoulders or the subtle movement of his fingers under the cuff of his robe, she’d wonder if he was aware of her at all. She couldn’t paint him as he was. Ezra wouldn’t be pleased, and she needed Felix’s icon to be perfect.
‘Felix?’ Maeve hedged. Her knuckles bleached white around the paintbrush. ‘Could you… I mean, please, could you move to face me?’
His eyes flicked briefly to hers. ‘No.’
‘I need to see your entire face for the icon,’ she said, voice petering softer with every word.
His fingers moved faster beneath his cuff – a frenetic rub of his forefinger with his thumb. ‘This will have to do,’ he replied after a bloated pause.
Maeve dipped her brush in the paint. It was doable, she reasoned. She could follow her sketch from the neck down and still keep his face turned away. A thought occurred as she limned the curve where his neck met his shoulder in gold, lining out the halo’s contours surrounding his face – did he want his scar hidden?
The texture was unlike that of the scars on her own body or ones she’d seen on any of the men she met in the town – though she’d rather not dwell on her secret dalliances right now, worried that Felix might somehow know what thoughts swirled in her head. She was painting his icon, after all, and outside of answering prayers, his saintly abilities were largely a mystery.
The Abbey didn’t know she liked the occasional night away in someone else’s bed, and she wanted to keep it that way. Some things were a private indulgence just for her, sweetness tinged with shame. A constant teetering between letting the guilt suck her down or pushing back against the Abbey’s rhetoric around chastity. As an iconographer, purity was expected. Her personal feelings didn’t matter under the weight of her title.
Her thoughts spun out the longer she painted, the deeper the silence grew.
She had a saint in her studio. Would she ever have the honour again, an object of her devotion at such close range?Alone, with no listening ears at the door?
If she gained Brigid’s position, certainly. If not… Maeve didn’t know what shape her life would take. She tried to shove the gnawing thought from her mind. So much of the Abbey was kept from her. If she became lead iconographer, perhaps that would change—
Slowly, her eyes rose to Felix.
A saint in front of her. Questions on her lips.
Long-fermenting wonders about sainthood, his holy magic, the mystery surrounding his very existence. Her own prayers cast doggedly into the world. Forbidden questions and even more insidious doubts.
But she couldn’t ask him. Shecouldn’t.
Not Felix, not Ezra… no one. There was no one she could ask, no one who would reassure her.
She forced her eyes back to the painting. Lifted her brush. Pressure built just behind her eyes.
Waves drummed outside her window, urging a comfortable looseness to Maeve’s limbs. The action of sliding her brush across the canvas rode on instinct. The weak sun shifted into shadow, shadow into dusky blackness. Her gaze strained to focus only on what the bristles touched. An ear. The fold of a cloak. The arch of his cheekbone highlighted in raw sienna.
Minutes, maybe hours, ticked by.
Her breathing grew shallow, muscles tensing in her shoulders and wrist. Nothing else remained but him. Nothing could exist but what she formed by paint and brush. Gold-tinged candlelight flickered at the furthest reaches of her vision. Perhaps it was a mistake keeping the window shut as paint fumes filled her lungs.
A deep hum trickled into her ears.
With it, a voice. A whispered suggestion.
Maybe shecouldask him whatever she wanted. Maybe she could beg him to answer her prayers, to call upon his glorious abilities and grant her every petition. If she could paint an icon worthy of him, an icon that would propel her into lead iconographer, she could have the security she wanted so desperately. All Maeve wanted was to belong. To be acknowledged. To be trusted with the Abbey’s secrets. She wanted to be carved into their history as securely as the icons she depicted. All she had to do was her best, and everything she wanted could be hers.
Everything.
She sat at the cusp, the precipice just before the fall. Wind beat at her back. Never before had she stepped so close to the edge. How would it feel to jump? To break all the rules andask, ask, ask.To shatter the mirror and open the door. To fully see the glory of the Abbey she’d so readily given every particle of unflinching faith she had to offer.
A shivering wash of pain coasted down her arm to the fingers clamped tight around the brush, skating up to linger behind her eyes. Her vision began to blur.
In the space between breaths, Maeve tipped backwards on her stool.
She blinked slowly, slowly.
High above, the ceiling swam and dipped as the world shifted to glimmering, gauzy metallic. Reality unspooled like yarn. Warmth moved up her arms, down her shoulders and ribboned around her spine. A soft space of welcoming nothingness. Dreaming without sleeping.
