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hadn’t been pretty, and it sure as hell hadn’t been the walk in the park the artist had made it seem. A lot of good people had gone into that mud and had never come out again.
But we’d won.
And for a moment, I felt some pride in that stupid painting, after all.
“But the tide turns,” Caedmon whispered, bending down to me. “As it always does. Soon, time will begin to run slower in Faerie than here, and for a good span. We must be ready to take advantage of it, for such an opportunity will not come again for a decade.”
“So that’s when we invade.”
He inclined his head. “It is . . . less than optimal,” he admitted. “The slowdown has already begun, and will reach full effect by the end of this week—”
“This week?”
He nodded. “We could wish for more time to prepare.”
“How long will it last?”
“Here? A few months. There, several days.”
I licked my lips. A few months. We were invading another world in the next few months. It didn’t seem real.
Which was good, because if it had, it would have been terrifying.
Caedmon was watching me, but he didn’t have time to say anything before Rafe appeared on the other side of the universe. “What are you two doing out here?” the annoyed genius demanded. Hands were on slim hips, and his face had that look.
“Sorry!” I said, and scurried to catch up. Caedmon followed, looking slightly bemused—at what, I didn’t know. “Hurry,” I told him when he lagged behind, and grabbed his hand. He laughed then, and ran along with me, heedless of his dignity.
There were more guards on the other side of the room, near the entrance to yet another corridor. But they only straightened up a little as we went past into something more normal-sized for a hallway. There was some lovely honey-colored stone under our feet now instead of marble, an only slightly taller than normal ceiling, and a bunch of rooms with arched doorways but no actual doors yet. A lot of artistic types were visible inside the rooms, hunched over workstations, painting, carving, or arguing about what I assumed were more parts to the consul’s great puzzle.
One of them called out to Rafe in what sounded like serious distress, and Rafe sighed and looked at me. “Would you mind? My office is just down there. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
I nodded, and he went off to help the hapless soul. Caedmon and I walked to the end of the hall, and found a room that simply had to be Rafe’s. For one thing, it had a door—made of heavy old planks and banded with iron, like somebody had looted a castle—that was half-open, allowing us to push our way inside. For another, it was just him.
Stuccoed walls with rounded corners, like in an old monastery, rose up to a point in the center of the ceiling, where a decorative finial dropped down, capping it off. Elsewhere, there were scarred wooden tables littered with reference books and loose papers, old crockery full of paintbrushes and knives, and jars of the paints Rafe mixed himself, out of ocher and cinnabar, lapis and pearls, gold and silver. And it smelled just like I remembered: of turpentine and linseed oil, charcoal and wine—because who can paint without a glass of wine?
But there were no sketchbooks, or rather, there were, but they were all around us, the clean white stucco being offensive to an artist’s eye. Not that it was clean anymore: everywhere I looked were faces, hands, and profiles. Here a guy with a pert backside, looking at me coquettishly over his shoulder; there a mother with a baby at her breast, serenity radiating from her face; here a rearing horse, its mane flowing majestically in the breeze; there a beautifully rendered snake head, its scales like perfect little jewels—
And me, I realized, staring at the drawings above a cluttered workbench.
Some of them were me as a child, my pudgy cheeks and big eyes and bouncy ponytails making me look vaguely like an anime character. Others showed me with the long hair I used to have as a teen, before I cut it off while on the run, because hip-length red-gold hair is damned hard to hide. Others looked to be more recent, although there was something off about them.
It wasn’t the facial features, which were accurate, because Rafe was always accurate. It wasn’t the hair, which for once was my current curly bob. It wasn’t the clothes, not that many were shown because the portraits were mostly from the neck up.
I didn’t know what it was.
And then I realized: it looked like my skin but with somebody else inside.
Like the painting outside in the corridor, that wasn’t me. The proud lift to the chin, the resolute gaze, the confidence that that woman wore like a cloak—all were things I wished I had, but that wasn’t what I saw in the mirror every morning. And it suddenly hit me, like a pang under the breast.
Was this how he saw me?
It should have been flattering—that woman looked better than I ever had—but it wasn’t. I thought Rafe knew me better than this. I thought that he, of all people, liked me, not whatever everyone kept trying to make out of me.
It seemed like I wasn’t enough for him, either.
And then I saw Caedmon, or rather, his hand clutching the now destroyed staff. And a fallen horse, its eye round and frightened. And Mircea—only the upper half of the face, but I’d know that hawklike gaze anywhere. And the consul—
“These must have been practice for the paintings,” I said, relief obvious in my voice.
