Epilogue
The first snow of winter clinked against the windowpane.
It blended into a shy, constant rustle, matching the passage of Madge’s brush across her canvas.
She sat in a loose robe, her hair bound into a braid over one shoulder as she formed each contour, each highlight and shadow of her subject’s face. Her face.
The eyes of her painted reflection fixed on the snow, the window and the white-dusted world beyond, an unread book resting open on her skirts.
Beyond the cold glass, the hills north of the Guild fortress of Kesterlee were barren of trees, but ridges of black rock and ice-girded waterfalls decorated their austere heights.
Guild soldiers patrolled outside, rifles slung across heavy wool jackets, their horses’ manes dusted with snow.
The right half of Madge’s face could just be seen beside her canvas. Her gaze was focused, her lips slightly parted, and one could almost smell the magic in the room—the sweetly absent, dusty scent of dried roses in a forgotten vase.
Madge paused her brush mid-stroke. Her expression—the perfect half of it that could be seen—was caught between her social mask and a flicker of the girl who had once led her little sisters through sleepy hallways and soothed their nightmares.
Then her expression shuttered again. She set her brush aside on her palette and scrutinized the painting. Her gaze was calculating, professional and detached, looking for flaws and judging its quality. Still, one hand drifted to her stomach, and one paint-smudged thumb brushed at her sash.
The portrait was objectively beautiful. She had captured herself in perfect profile, early winter light turning the few hairs that had escaped a pompadour into soft, luminescent strands.
She had harnessed the nuances of the way her own hand rested on the imaginary book, her long, graceful fingers smudged with paint.
She had intricately rendered the lace edges of her blouse, broad across the shoulder and revealing collarbones and throat.
And, above all, she had captured her threads. They were delicate and gilt, lacing across the portrait’s collarbones, jaw, and temples like the seams of a once-broken vase.
One might have sworn, standing there on the lavish carpet next to Madge Rushforth, Golden Mage, that the portrait’s threads undulated and thrummed with life. And with that life, something of her subject’s memory, emotion began to fade. In fact it was already half gone, like fragments of a dream.
Madge brushed stray curls from her eyes with the back of one hand and looked directly into the portrait’s icy-blue irises.
As she did, she exhaled her magic across the canvas, slowly and steadily.
She held the portrait’s gaze all the while, shuddering at how they could be so full of emotion, of pain and love and regret.
Emotions that she, herself, could not show.
Finished, Madge moved to a side table where a cloth and water basin stood, leaving the portrait alone in the center of the room.
The gentle splash of water joined the shush of snow on the window as she washed the paint from her fingers and fought to keep her breathing even, her expression as still as the hushed, cold room.
With each moment that passed, each drop of water, a little more of herself settled into the drying canvas.
The portrait’s expression writ deeper with anger and loneliness, both raw and vivid.
Simultaneously, as Madge plied white and brown and black and blue from the creases of her nails, her own face became composed.
Her breathing eased. Her lips ceased to purse, and her posture settled.
When the magic was finished, Madge dried her hands on a delicate towel and turned to the door, where two suitcases sat ready to depart, next to a neat pile of travelling clothes. She passed the portrait of herself without a glance, dressed efficiently, and picked up the suitcases.
Then she left the room to its eerie, snowy silence. She left the tear-stained portrait behind; her own, perfect likeness locked into eternal misery.
She did not look back.