The Art of Charming a Changeling

Chapter 1

As a royal conservator well versed in the fifty-six varieties of painting damage, Florrie Hyverfell felt quite confident she’d just discovered the fifty-seventh.

Not intentionally, mind you, but that wouldn’t make much difference once her blunder was revealed. As the brush dropped from her trembling fingers, Florrie forced herself to re-examine the canvas with respectable detachment.

For the most part, The Resolute Portrait of Vibrant Lord Vernal Mauve Among the Ruins remained in fine form.

The condition report she drafted before commencing the cleaning had been almost monotonously straightforward.

Jewel-pigment on weave, fifteenth century.

Original cast-blossom frame and backing extant.

Surface injuries limited to candle soot accretions, slight canvas-buckling on the lower left quarter, and gentle discolouration of the floreated border.

Now she was obligated to add “ghastly swirl of flaking paint and ease-flower stains obstructing the stone arch in the midground, courtesy of an apparently inept conservator”.

This apparent ineptitude vexed Florrie the most. While she would never count herself among the finest conservators in Stillscape, Florrie employed the utmost caution when treating an object for the first time.

As a matter of fact, the cleaning solvent responsible for this destruction was the gentlest substance in her alchemist’s pouch.

Florrie turned to her flacon of ease-flower extract, examining the wrinkled label for answers it could not provide.

The spun-glass bottle, angular and lace-grey in the fourteenth-century style, felt comfortingly cool to her gloved hands.

Her mentors at the Conservatory had always joked that it was impossible to harm a painting by applying ease-flower – unless one literally threw the bottle at the canvas.

No, the fault must lie in the painting itself.

Under other circumstances, Florrie might have assumed it was painted with substandard stone-powder instead of fine pigments, or that the canvas was woven with unpredictably enchanted threads from the days before trade of such materials between Fairies and Folk dwindled.

It would not be the first time she had caught an enterprising lordling mislabelling a painting to bolster their reputation.

Yet a painting of The Resolute Portrait’s repute simply could not be mislabelled, and Prince Ardant was no mere enterprising lordling.

When she had arrived at the Commonplace Palace earlier that morning, laden with chemicals and cloths, Florrie had felt cautiously thrilled about accepting a position with one of Stillscape’s many princes.

(By present standards, a collector of any gender must possess a mere thirty artworks of only middling quality to qualify as a prince.) Prince Ardant had set Stillscape abuzz by announcing his search for a conservator to reside at the Commonplace Palace – and only increased the uproar by selecting Florrie, a conservational consultant he had never even met.

In fact, Florrie herself had set eyes on her employer for the first time as she ascended the palace’s third-century cascading staircase.

To her relief, Prince Ardant appeared as stately and smiley as the gossip columns in curatorial circulars suggested.

He was lithe of build, with strikingly eager eyes, a simple silver circlet slung across his dark brown brow, and black hair glossed with the amethyst dye that was quite the rage in the capital.

“Pardon my impertinence,” he said, most graciously, “but I don’t suppose you happen to be Miss Floral Hyverfell?”

“Please,” murmured Florrie, pulling a bow, “call me Florrie, if you would be so kind.”

“Do forgive me!” exclaimed Prince Ardant.

“Florrie it is. Well, what shall we do, Florrie? Haul your cases to your new quarters? I’ve prepared a lovely guest chamber for you in the east tower; I hoped you might appreciate a view of the gardens.

But perhaps we ought to enjoy some breakfast first?

Or… Have you visited the museum before? Shall I give you a tour?

Oh, but only after you’ve put down your cases and eaten.

Apologies. I’m a bit of a wretched host.”

“I’ve breakfasted already, and my cases are remarkably light. May we make for the galleries?”

The prince’s welcome was bafflingly hospitable.

No collector of Florrie’s acquaintance would consider themselves a host to their conservator.

According to the Conservators’ Code, princes and conservators must treat each other with nothing more cordial than courteous disapproval.

They were, after all, natural rivals. Conservators decried the mishandling of artwork by incautious collectors, while princes resented what they described as “conservatorial arrogance”.

“Might we discuss your expectations for my work, as well?” she added. “I appreciated your kind letter of invitation, but I’m afraid I have ever so many questions.” (The first of which was Whyever did you choose me?, though she wasn’t about to begin with that.)

“But of course! Won’t you please follow me to the atrium?

It’s a glorious, glassy thing – new construction, all of it.

You can gaze into the galleries while we speak.

” He paused to catch his breath. “Have I exhausted you already? Forgive me. You must understand that this is a momentous day for our collections.”

Florrie certainly did understand. She was, to the best of her knowledge, the first conservator invited to the Commonplace Palace in recorded history.

The former prince-in-residence, Ardant’s grandfather, insisted upon keeping his galleries locked away decades after other Stillscape princes had opened theirs to visitors.

Only after his grandfather’s recent passing did Prince Ardant dare to announce the palace’s public reopening as the Commonplace Palace Museum.

Despite the fashionable humility implied by its name, today’s Commonplace Palace was expansive, with a series of fuchsia stone-spired towers sprouting from the central seed of a keep in the Elegant Eclectic style.

Every so often, Florrie spotted bricks painted with delicate mist-scape miniatures in the soft colours and fragile dry-brushing of the thirteenth century.

The entry hall was more ostentatious, with vesperwood carvings of fish and field crickets – aggressively twelfth-century in every aspect, she noted – dangling from the vaulted ceiling with eyes wide and mouths agape.

The prince ushered her through the hall until they reached a vast room of windows, suspended by columns (spiralling vegetal, tenth-century) and beams (woefully contemporary) above the crowded galleries below.

He waved his hand in the general direction of a plush taupe bench, and she sat beside him.

To Florrie’s disappointment, their present perspective prevented her from identifying any paintings on the gilded walls beneath them.

She did recognise one famous sculpture – the moralising fifteenth-century gem-and-paste titled A Captive of Curiosity, which featured a shield-bearing Fairy warily regarding the triple-socketed skull of some impossible animal.

“I thought she might catch your eye,” gushed the prince. “A Captive of Curiosity is one of my favourites. Why, as a boy, I frequently indulged in a most embarrassing daydream about the lady coming to life and asking me for a dance. Made my heart pound to think of it!”

Florrie gasped before decorum could intervene. “Do you mean to say that you appreciate Fairy portraiture, Prince Ardant?”

“Appreciate it?” Ardant laughed so fiercely that he had to steady himself on the bench’s wrist-rest. “There’s nothing I appreciate more – though I’ll confess, with apologies to this dear sculpture, to a slight preference for Fairy paintings.

When I heard word of your unusual interest in that subject, I knew you were the only applicant worth considering.

I do hope to get along with my conservator, and you understand what a fraught topic the genre can become in polite company. ”

Florrie could hardly contain her excitement.

Painting Fairies had fallen out of favour – understandably so, since there were no Fairies left in a Folk city like Stillscape to paint.

The limited novelties of unmagical Stillscape only captured the Fairies’ attention for a few centuries before they retreated to their own dazzling realms, taking their artistic enchantments with them.

In response, the prideful Folk of Stillscape reached a collective cultural agreement that magic of all sorts was both unnecessary and unfashionable.

Most of Florrie’s colleagues dismissed her passion for Fairy art as a peculiar fancy.

Years ago, she’d even ruined her first conservation commission by babbling on about fifteenth-century Fairy paintings until the frustrated client showed her the door.

Consequently, Florrie had long learned to keep quiet about the interests that made her feel the most exuberant.

She left little notes on her wardrobe, inside her condition-report journal, and atop the lids of her brush boxes to remind herself never to speak of Fairy portraiture without an invitation.

“I knew your grandfather possessed a few portraits of Fairies, but I did not realise you admired them yourself.” Florrie tugged at her gloves as she tried to repaint her irrepressible delight into something vaguely businesslike. “How many does the museum contain?”

“Fewer than I’d like. You will be responsible for hundreds of objects, and only five of them feature Fairy subjects.

But among those is one I cherish above all, and I did not wish to entrust it to someone who dismisses Fairy art as sentimental nonsense.

” Prince Ardant sprang from the bench, though they’d only just sat down. “Oh, I can’t help myself!”