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“And no licking the end of your brush. We’ve talked about that.”
“No,” I promised. It was all I could seem to say.
I had wanted to paint for as long as could remember, and had watched him doing so longingly. But the most he would let me do was to sketch with charcoal on some of the cheap brown wrapping paper he brought home, the kind that sweets were sold in. He had said that I could paint when I was older, but I had thought to use a few of his scraps, not . . . not anything like this.
“Do you like it?” Mircea asked, when I continued to sit there silently.
I found that I still couldn’t say anything. I just looked up at him mutely. But when Horatiu, who had come in at some point, tried to take the paint box, my hands refused to let it go.
“I think she likes it,” the old man said, and ruffled my hair.
“Dorina. Dorina.”
I blinked and the second memory faded, leaving me with just the first. Which I realized had stopped, like a movie that had run to its end. It had stalled around Ray, with Colette’s birds paused in the air above his head, reaching for the last scraps of bread; with the door to the bell tower opening behind him, and an angry priest halfway out, his black cassock looking hot and uncomfortable in the summer sun; and with a bunch of guilty appearing kids looking up, halfway through their feast.
“I’m getting tired,” I explained. “It becomes harder to project.”
“Then don’t,” Ray said. “That was incredible. I’ve seen stuff in other people’s heads before, but nothing like that.”
I nodded absently, still half lost in memory. “There wasn’t much more. The priest came to run us off. I think he had promised the v
iew to some of his chief donors.”
“Figures,” Ray said cynically. “Everything’s sacrilegious ‘till it involves moolah. By the way, who won? I got my money on the fishermen.”
“You would lose. The shipwrights won. I had a bet with Luysio. He owed me pistachios and sweetened rice cakes . . .”
“Did he ever pay up?” Ray asked, leaning over the roof for a final view of the fight, which he didn’t get because child-me had turned to look at the priest.
“No.”
“Welcher,” he said, smiling.
I shook my head. “It wasn’t his fault. I had a fit that night, my third in a month. And father decided it was enough.”
“Enough?”
“He separated Dory and I, and after that, she was in control.” I looked around, feeling strangely lost suddenly. “This was my last memory as . . . me.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Dorina, Faerie
The sun-drenched scene of old Venice faded, to show me Ray’s face splashed by firelight. He looked confused, as people often did when surfacing from another’s mind, but also troubled. He didn’t look like he knew what to say, which was fair, I supposed.
Neither did I.
“Was it . . . painful?” he finally asked.
I shook my head. “Not the separation, no. But I did not understand what had happened. It felt like being in a prison cell, a dark, echoing space from which I could not escape. I thought I had gone mad for the longest time. And when I finally understood—”
“Wait. It took years?” He sounded appalled, having seen the truth in my mind.
“It . . . came in pieces, over time. I began to see things, slowly, here and there. I was conscious when Dory was not, but I did not know that at first—”
Ray frowned. “How could you not know you were conscious?”
I blinked at him. “Her eyes were closed.”
