“… reads about insects.”
“He reads about a great many of the same insects, Your Grace. They are extremely well suited.”
“I agree.”
“I was relieved when I understood it.”
“I know.”
She looked at him. She looked at him because she had not, in the ordinary catalog of favorite colors and embroidery, expected him to sayI knowin the quiet way he had. He had not taken his eyes off her face since she had begun to laugh.
She drew a slow breath.
“I have not painted in sixteen years,” he said quietly. “And I will not paint at any point in the future.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Why?”
He did not answer her at once.
Cassian looked at the painting of his brother, whom he had loved more than anything. The love that had been at the back of his ribs when he was twelve had not gone anywhere.
“Because it distracts me from my duties.”
“That is your father’s reason, Cassian.”
“Yes.”
“It is not yours.”
“No.”
“Then what is your reason?”
He did not answer. He could not.
For sixteen years, he had not asked himself the question. He had taken the answer his father had given him at fourteen and had carried it in the careful, undisturbed place inside him where his answers about himself were kept, and he had not since that fated Tuesday in October taken it out and looked at it.
Alice had just taken it out. She had taken it out in his gallery with her hand hanging at her side and her face very serious, had looked at it, and had told him, with the small unanswerable courtesy of someone unwilling to let a man lie about himself, that the answer was not his.
He did not know what his answer was. He did not know whether he had ever had one.
He looked at her. She looked back.
“We are expected in the long drawing room for the card game,” he said quietly.
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Joanna has organized whist.”
“Has she?”
“With small forfeits for the losers.”
“What sort of forfeits?”
