Chapter 41
The morning light was too kind for how she felt. She didn’t know why she reached for the white pigment. Her hand moved before thought caught up. A curved petal. Another. And another. Her strokes were careful.
Selanthers.
The drawing room had been aired out, the tall windows unlatched just enough to let in a soft draft. It smelled of rain. Evelyne’s brush drifted toward the water cup, but stopped midway. Her gaze flicked to the windows. The mist was lifting.
She had spoken aloud.
The memory of Alaric sitting across the table, eyes sharper than they had any right to be that early in the day, still made her stomach turn. She’d told him. She hadn’t meant to.
And now her entire body ached from the weight of being seen.
Control. Calm. Focus.
She knew the rhythm by heart now. A triad of survival. But this morning, the words rang dull.
Tiny, trembling fingers. The same ones that had once tugged her sleeve in the middle of state dinners, insistent that she look at some absurdly shaped carrot on his plate.
The same hands she’d held through fever and fear and bedtime stories.
He had held that cursed veil like it weighed nothing, though the stain bloomed deeper and darker with each second he stood there.
The look that said you were supposed to protect me.
Evelyne closed her eyes, breathing slowly. She should have known better. She did know better. Vulnerability wasn’t meant for daylight. It was something you buried in the night and covered with courtly silk in the morning.
She turned back to the canvas and added a second layer. Shading the blooms. Letting the white bleed faintly into duskier grey. But it looked too clean. Too soft. The pigment clung to her fingertips, smelling faintly of lye and crushed chalk.
So she dipped into red.
A touch at first—a petal, the fine vein of a leaf. But the brush didn’t stop. It pulled her hand further. Stroke after stroke, the red spread, seeping into edges, swallowing white until nothing else mattered. Her grip tightened until the wood of the brush bit into her palm.
It was frighteningly easy. How simple it was to cover anything. To drown one truth beneath another. Paint long enough and the shape bent to the color. And the color was always stronger.
And always, it was red. Her curse, her kingdom’s seal, Dasmon’s sacrifice.
Across kingdoms, the same shade had meant something else. Vermilion was purity in Myceanos. In Zharesh, it was marriage. In Varantia, luck. In Kaer’Vosh, power. In Edrathen… memory.
Strange how one color fractured into a dozen meanings, depending on who spoke and who listened. It was never about what was painted. And red, whatever mask it wore, had always been the same at its core. Beautiful. Toxic. Inescapable.
She didn’t stop painting until the selanthers looked as though they had bloomed from wounds, petals opening like torn flesh, pretty and terrible all at once.
“It’s beautiful,” came a voice behind her.
Evelyne gasped and turned her head.
Ysara stood just inside the doorway, her gown a muted blue that caught the morning light gently.
“Ysara.”
The woman crossed the room in no rush. She stopped by the edge of the canvas, studied it.
“I haven’t seen you paint in some time. Is everything alright?”
“Yes, I’m… fine,” Evelyne murmured.
Ysara nodded. “It’s easier to confess to pigment than to people.” She let the silence breathe, then added, “Sometimes I think that’s why we still keep art around.”
Evelyne’s throat tightened, but she didn’t look away. She let her eyes settle on the red again.
Ysara folded her hands. “I didn’t come to press. Only to visit. And…” her eyes flicked to the fog rimming the window, “...to see how you were sleeping.”
That earned a dry huff from Evelyne. “Not well.”
“Neither is Thalen,” Ysara confessed after a moment. “He wakes often. Restless. Sometimes he asks for you.”
The brush slipped in her fingers. She turned sharply, breath caught. “He does?”
Ysara’s expression gentled, but she said nothing more.
Evelyne forced her gaze back to the canvas, though her stomach had gone cold.
She made a silent note, etched into her like a vow: she would speak with him.
She had to. Thalen—her baby brother, her treasure—if she could do nothing else in this shifting, treacherous world, she could at least try to keep him safe.
Ysara approached without hurry and stopped beside the canvas. “You’ve been quieter than usual.”
“I’ve been busy,” Evelyne replied, too quickly.
“Of course.” Ysara adjusted the edge of the glove. “Busy is often the only shield we’re allowed.”
Evelyne looked up at her. The words brushed against something raw in her, something that had been swelling since the council, since every lie she’d swallowed whole.
“Do you ever wonder,” she began, “if all of this—our order, our customs—if it’s one of those shields?”
She expected the usual response: a polite smile, practiced ignorance passed down like embroidery. But Ysara confessed quietly, “More often than I should admit.”
Evelyne blinked.
Ysara’s gaze drifted toward the window. “When I was your age,” she said, “I believed silence meant grace. That if I spoke softly, I would be… respected.”
Evelyne’s brush stilled in her hand. “And now?”
“Now I think silence just makes the cracks harder to see,” Ysara murmured. “Until everything breaks at once.”
Evelyne’s lips parted, but no words came.
The truth of it pressed somewhere deep, somewhere she hadn’t allowed light to reach.
And yet—something about it rang right, with a quiet, awful clarity.
But what was one supposed to do when the cracks could no longer be ignored?
When pretending they weren’t there became heavier than the truth itself?
Ysara smiled, the faintest curve of understanding. “But that’s what frightens them most, isn’t it? Someone who isn’t performing the part.”
Evelyne looked at her, surprised.
“I don’t pretend to know everything,” Ysara continued, eyes still lowered, her voice steady.
“I know enough to care for what is mine. My son. My family. And enough to try to leave this place kinder than I found it. Even if it is only by one boy.” She glanced toward Evelyne, just briefly.
“So, I am trying to raise him better than it.”
“You don’t agree with it all,” Evelyne murmured, not quite a question.
Ysara’s mouth curved, faint, a wry tilt of lips. “Agreement isn’t always the point. Survival is. But survival doesn’t have to mean surrender.”
Evelyne’s jaw tightened. A dozen words crowded her tongue, but none of them survived the daylight.
“You don’t need to explain yourself to me,” Ysara went on. “I only wanted you to know that you’re not alone.”
For a long while, neither of them spoke. The wind moved through the room, lifting the heavy curtains in slow, sighing waves.
Ysara made a few steps to Evelyne and laid a steady hand on her shoulder—a fleeting, grounding touch—before stepping away. Evelyne followed her with her gaze.
“Let the flowers bloom, Evelyne,” she said softly from the doorway. “Even the red ones.”
The door closed with a muted click. The quiet that followed felt heavier for her absence.
Evelyne’s eyes drifted back to the canvas, the red blooming there.
If she could speak to Alaric, fractured as she was, she could face Ravik too.
Perhaps fear didn’t have to win every time.
Perhaps silence didn’t have to be the only form of survival she knew.
It wouldn’t be easy. But then, nothing worth unraveling ever was.
Her jaw tightened.
She had made a promise the day Dasmon died—though no one had heard it but the blood-soaked stones beneath her knees.
Her hand curled at her side.
Enough.
The least she could do was to remember.
For just one person.