Chapter 8 #2
“As I said, I’ve never had anyone here, so I’m not sure how it works. Or if you can carry anything with you. But I suppose you’re still wearing your clothes, so—”
“A small mercy,” Florrie murmured, turning her eyes demurely downward.
“Whatever do you— Oh, oh dear. That’s not… I mean… I only mentioned it as proof that you can bring whatever you’re presently touching. I should have said gloves.”
He cleared his throat. “Why don’t we see about getting you out of this painting?”
Vern opened the door – revealing a world formed of the most beautiful brushstrokes.
Technically speaking, Florrie was certified as a first-class evaluator of painterly mark-making, which meant she had studied every book on the subject of brushstrokes and could capably distinguish between the most common among them.
The splashes and whorls of paint that made up the features of Vern’s home – the garden, the cottage, the trees, even the strip of glaucous-gold twilight fading toward the horizon line – appeared most uncommon.
Everything sparkled and shifted, animated by some unfathomable motion that made the ground seem to breathe.
Florrie had not simply stumbled through an enchanted doorway.
She was inside a painting – and she was unconsciously jumping up and down in a most unseemly manner.
Florrie reached for the nearest touchable object (a blade of grass, as it happened) to compose herself.
It was nothing more than a spiky line in radiant viridian, highlighted with an undertone of silver – but it was a line she could hold, feeling the pleasantly rough texture of old jewel-pigment through her gloves.
She laughed, strangely and softly, without attempting to make the loud, elegant sound that Chary had taught her.
Everything was painted. Painted! Florrie stood up, felt her legs bouncing beneath her once more, and surveyed the rest of the landscape while basking in her endless admiration for the artist’s handiwork.
But with one giddy turn to the left, Florrie suddenly found herself faced with her own regrettable handiwork.
On the whole, the ruins appeared as achingly splendid as the rest of the painting.
The jumble of precarious columns and unfinished staircases was, as Vern had promised, thickly overgrown with lattices of flowers.
Then there was the arch – which was, at present, nothing more than a blotchy vortex of mangled jewel-pigments and the beige weave of the canvas.
“There’s no need to look in that direction, is there?” Vern’s tone was thrillingly soft. Florrie had never been able to hear him murmur before.
She looked back to see him leaning against the cottage’s door, tossing a cloud of fibres back and forth between his hands.
“It is my responsibility to study that mess,” she insisted. “Now that I understand the extent of what I’ve done to… to – why, the most sublime place I’ve ever seen!” Fearing she was about to burst into unnecessarily intense tears, Florrie turned to continue her examination of the wreckage.
“Do you truly mean that?” Vern called from behind her. “But you must have seen so many sublime places?”
Florrie rubbed her eyes with her gloved hands and took a deep breath.
“Vern,” she intoned, “I may restore all sorts of art, but paintings are my favourite. I can tell you anything you’d like to know about pigments or frame damage or the historical precedent for the inclusion of at least one arachnid in every twelfth-century wishing-well portrait.
Now I’m in a painting, and I feel so elated that I could practically run laps around this garden. ”
“Oh” was all Vern said in reply – though he gazed at her, quite intently, and smiled. Florrie thought the expression suited him well. Extremely well, in fact.
“Why don’t you look painted?” Florrie asked, to distract herself. “The interior of your cottage didn’t, either.”
“I can’t say. But I rather like the difference. Keeps life interesting.” He pointed to the forest. “Your way out would be over there, I imagine.”
What surprised her most, as they walked, were the sounds.
Looking at paintings was such an inherently visual experience, after all.
Here, she could hear the breeze toy with the trees behind her, and the rush of the stream that snuck past Vern’s cottage before disappearing into the bracken.
Even the painted grass crunched cheerfully beneath their feet.
Keen to keep up with Vern’s quick pace, she resisted the urge to touch everything within reach.
Though the forest seemed far from the cottage, Florrie was delighted to realise its apparent distance was the consequence of forced perspective.
What she had perceived as a massive glade was only a moderately-sized garden.
The trees were not receding into the distance – they were simply very small.
A few steps ahead of her, Vern stopped and turned around.
“That’s as far as I can go,” he said, folding his hands behind his head and leaning against the empty air as though it were a wall. “What about you?”
Florrie approached him to ask what she ought to do – and suddenly found herself sprawled on the maroon moss near the Old Amethyst Road.
The rogue hues had vanished and the rain had stopped, but everything else was as she’d left it.
Yet the landscape she had found fascinating mere hours ago now seemed lifeless.
The sunlight was but a rough glow, with no visible paint streaks.
There was no sense of motion or texture.
Nothing like what she had seen in The Resolute Portrait.
Had she really seen such things, though? She stood and began searching for the painting, half-convinced she’d awakened from a dream.
“You made it! I can’t say I’m not a little jealous.”
It was Vern’s voice – his false voice, she now knew, that seemed so faint.
Remembering her objective, Florrie turned around to find her portfolio-bag and the prince’s hamper.
From the latter she extracted a handful of vegetables and a seed-loaf, then wrapped them securely in a napkin.
She finished by concealing the hamper and the portfolio-bag within a bush of quadrilobed amber flowers.
It seemed wise to keep both out of sight.
The charm might ensure the portfolio-bag’s safety, but she didn’t want to take any chances with her supply of food.
Entering the painting proved as simple as leaving it. Though she felt rather silly, Florrie simply pressed her hand against the portfolio-bag – and she was in the garden again, with the pigments swirling about and Vern awaiting her on the cottage steps.
“How do you feel?” Vern asked as he opened the door ahead of her. “Still shaky?”
“I am perfectly well, thank you.”
“I saw you nearly fall over when you unpacked the hamper out there.”
Florrie leaned against the wall – simply because she was interested in the texture of the gold-grain, and definitely not to stabilise herself.
“Were you watching through that… er, window you mentioned? Where is it?”
“Goodness! I forgot to introduce you!” Vern gestured to the wall behind the head of the bed – the one direction in which she had not looked during her study of the cottage.
There, a frame made from interwoven gilded twigs hung close to the ceiling.
Inside the frame was a rectangular window, its dimensions matching those of the real Resolute Portrait.
The window revealed a familiar sight: the triple-stitched lining of the portfolio-bag, mostly, plus a glimpse of the Old Amethyst Road beyond it.
“That’s how you see me?” asked Florrie. “How very interesting.”
“It’s far more interesting when I can see you than the inside of the bag.”
In response, Florrie could only continue staring at the window. Why must he say such things in that sweetly earnest way? Surely he wouldn’t dare if he knew the effect it had upon her.
“Well, as promised, I’ve brought you some new flavours,” she said.
Florrie made to put the provisions on the golden table, but Vern took them and ushered her back to the bed.
She accepted her fate with curious amusement.
Only when Florrie was safely at rest again did Vern allow himself to inspect the contents of the napkin.
“I’ve never seen anything like these.” He held up a tapered turnip with far more reverence than ordinary vegetables deserved. “How do we eat them?”
“Let me show you.” When she rose, though, Vern shook his head.
“Your hands are shaking, Florrie.”
Florrie realised, rather belatedly, that her whole body was shaking.
“You mean that lovely Vapid Era candelabra up there is not supposed to spin?” she said lightly, though it wasn’t a joke.
“Let me take care of making more stew, while you take care of yourself.”
“But you don’t know how to make it!”
Her protests were in vain. Vern had already installed himself at the low counter near the hearth (which was vaguely in keeping with a regional Stillscape architectural style from the latter half of the sixth century) that presumably served as his kitchen.
He opened a drawer and produced what looked like a sort of peeling knife, though it was rather impractically spiral-shaped.
“Just tell me what to do, and I’ll follow along,” he said over his shoulder.
To Florrie’s surprise, this novel method of meal preparation proved quite effective.
Vern’s relative unfamiliarity with common vegetables caused him no confusion whatsoever.
(Excluding, of course, one particularly striking moment in which he asked whether a carrot would need its “internal scales” removed.)