Chapter 33
“Princess Evelyne,” came the voice, too familiar, too cheerful by half.
The gods also had no sense of timing when one required even the briefest respite from their chaos.
She did not sigh. She had better control than that. Slowly, deliberately, she pivoted, curving her lips into a smile so practiced it might have been carved from marble.
There he stood grinning like a man who had never once known the meaning of 'unwelcome', hands clasped behind his back. Cedric hovered behind him, somehow managing to look both amused and apologetic. He exchanged a glance with Vesena as he stopped, the faintest smile tugging at his mouth.
Alaric was dressed in lighter colors today—a soft blue jacket, light cream trousers tucked into brown boots, and an open-collared linen shirt.
Evelyne curtsied; Alaric bowed.
“You look radiant, Your Highness. Have you seen the sculpture near the east alcove? Remarkable craftsmanship. Almost made me wish I'd taken up carving instead of politics.”
Evelyne’s lips curved in polite acknowledgment. “You would have made a fine apprentice,” she quipped. “Perhaps with enough dedication, you might have achieved mediocrity.”
Cedric coughed into his hand. It might have been a laugh. Evelyne chose to let it pass without acknowledgement.
Alaric pressed on. “It's a fine gathering, truly. The art, the atmosphere—Varantia could learn from you, Your Highness.”
“You flatter me,” Evelyne replied. “But if you truly wish to learn, I suggest you start by mastering silence.”
The smirk that flickered at the corner of Alaric’s mouth was pure mischief. “I stand corrected, Princess. I see you are an artist after all.”
“Oh?” Evelyne raised a brow.
“Yes,” Alaric explained, grinning wider. “In the delicate art of polite assassination.”
She silently prayed that Rhyssa might grant her the strength not to commit royal homicide in the middle of the drawing room. Perhaps, if she prayed hard enough, the goddess would also grant her the miracle of Alaric losing his voice.
Or, at the very least, his enthusiasm.
A beat of silence stretched between them, taut as a pulled bowstring, as they measured each other. Gods, how he annoyed her. How was it even possible that one man could be so grating and—
She locked down the thought, clearing her throat and looking away. Alaric, of course, only smiled wider.
“Princess Evelyne,” he began, his voice a velvet drawl, “might I have the honor of a private tour of the exhibition?
I know you possess vast knowledge in the history of art.
.. and I'd like to learn.” His grin tipped into something almost self-deprecating.
“Aside from the value of silence, of course. I promise to listen this time.”
Evelyne stared at him for a long moment. The nobility was watching—she could feel their eyes like the prickling brush of thorns against her skin. The royal couple, united. That was the image they needed to project.
She could not afford to give them fodder for doubt.
“Very well,” she said. “If you can manage to keep your commentary to matters of actual relevance, I suppose I shall endure your company.”
“A more generous invitation was never given.”
Evelyne smiled after the briefest hesitation, and together they turned toward the paintings.
They walked close enough to suggest unity, distant enough to preserve propriety.
The afternoon light caught on frames of oil paintings and the gleam of marble busts.
Isildeth had managed to weave through the crowd and return with Evelyne’s requested lavender lemonade.
She accepted the glass with a slight nod.
They stopped before a tall canvas framed in dark walnut. It depicted a lone figure in a sunlit atelier—elderly, bald man hunched over a half-finished portrait, the painted, barely legible face of a young woman in red staring out at the viewer with a gaze that was almost alive.
Alaric’s voice broke the quiet. “This is beautiful. Not like what passes for art now. Designed to drain creation rather than spark it.”
Evelyne’s gaze traced the edges of the scene—the loosened collar of the artist’s shirt, the tired curve of his shoulders, the shadow where another figure might once have stood.
“It’s pre-Sundering,” she replied. “He was a master portraitist. This was his final work. It’s said the life of his lover paid for it. ”
Alaric’s brows drew together. “Meaning?”
“She killed herself,” she explained. “The records never confirmed it. But it’s the story people remember.”
Her focus lingered on the brushstrokes. “He worked entirely in oils, always on dark ground. No one could catch light the way he did. His palette was muted; but liked to put an emphasis on the red.”
He exhaled. “I saw a few of his works in our archives. But most were lost after the Sundering.”
From the far side of the gallery, a pair of blue-robed officials moved in slow orbit through the crowd. Their eyes flicked from guest to guest. The Artisanal Circle.
Alaric followed the line of her attention. “And now we have this. Every brushstroke inspected. Every commission catalogued. An unlicensed artist is arrested. Or worse.”
“Those are the laws,” Evelyne recited, voice even.
“For commonborns, they’re a sentence,” he countered.
“You’re lucky if you can scrub brushes in someone else’s studio.
Highborns get to sip tea and admire work their rank protects.
Everyone else—” He broke off with a small shake of his head.
“Art should be for everyone. Not just those the Circle finds convenient.”
Her lips curved, but it wasn’t quite a smile. “And I suppose you’d start by handing a chisel to every dockhand in Varantia?”
“If it would wake the world,” he murmured with a tense jaw, “I’d hand them the hammer, too.”
“Another thing that bothers you?” Evelyne asked, her tone deliberately light, though her eyes stayed on him.
“Absolutely,” he admitted without hesitation. “Haven’t you noticed? In the name of so-called stability, they stripped us of the one thing that made us human—art. And for what? To keep us safe from ourselves?”
Evelyne paused. She had no answer. It was what simply was. The order she had been raised to accept without question. She had never asked why. But lately she had been questioning too much, and it was changing the shape of her silence.
Alaric went on, eyes bright, voice low enough not to draw attention but quick with frustration.
“Art is the first universal language. It bridges everything—culture, class, even belief. We could come from entirely different worlds, but we might both stand before the same piece and feel the same thing. Grief. Longing. Wonder. It’s endured every empire, every collapse.”
Evelyne tilted her head, studying him. “Are you an artist?”
He huffed a laugh, one corner of his mouth curling. “No. I can’t draw a straight line to save my life. I tried once. It was a horse. Cedric said it looked like a haunted pear.”
That earned a flicker of something from her—amusement, or maybe disbelief.
“But I can appreciate it,” he added. “I admire people who can give form to what most of us don’t have words for. What annoys me isn’t just the rules. I don’t like it, but fine. But this?” He gestured vaguely. “This is erasure. And it’s not right.”
He paused then, eyes narrowing slightly—as if replaying something in his mind, memorizing the shape of a memory no one else could see. His voice, when it came again, was quieter. Steadier.
“It’s never right.”
Evelyne stared at him, caught off guard by the sharpness of it. The conviction. The grief folded inside the words, subtle but unmistakable. She’d known him to be bold, brash even—but this was something else. Something harder to name.
She looked at his profile, at the stubborn line of his jaw, the way his hand rested against his chin like he wasn’t aware he’d clenched it. Her pulse skipped once, unexpected.
Oh.
There it was. The breathlessness of being wrong about someone.
His gaze returned to her. “What do you see, Evelyne?”
“I already said—”
“No.” His voice was softer now, but insistent. “Not what’s painted. What you are seeing.”
Her eyes darted to him, startled, before sliding back to the painting.
What I see.
Not what the doctrine permitted, not the careful phrases drilled into her spine since girlhood.
For a moment, she considered deflecting—offering something neat and correct, the kind of polished answer that cost nothing. But the question had already loosened something she wasn’t ready to lock away again.
She drew a breath, made herself see, truly see, until the paint blurred into emotion.
“A man who is half gone,” she whispered at last. “Her absence drained the color from him. See his palm, turned upward… it’s the gesture of someone who remembers touch and aches without it.”
She leaned in slightly, gaze fixed. “He painted her shadow beside him. His muse was always elusive. The faces were blurred. Sometimes it felt like fog. Sometimes it was only motion, where a person should have been.”
A pause followed, longer this time.
“When he painted himself, he always faced her. His back turned to us, as if she was the only thing that mattered.”
When she glanced up, Alaric was already watching her, his expression unreadable and entirely focused.
“Edrathen was once famous for its painters,” he observed quietly. “The most beautiful frescoes and portraits on the continent. I read that the art back then felt alive.”
She nodded—too quickly—and then slower, as if the second movement might erase the first. But her chest gave her away. Something restless had curled up beneath her sternum and refused to be ignored.
Because he was right.
And because she was only just now realizing how much she had taught herself not to see.
It had been a skill, once. If she didn’t ask, then the world remained contained.
So she told herself that everything was as it should be.
That the silence meant safety. That unanswered questions were questions not worth asking.