The Art Studio was a chamber I had avoided since my first failed year at Magnalia. But as I tentatively entered it that rainy afternoon, my wet hair wound in a bun, I was reminded of the good memories that room had hosted for me. I remembered the mornings I spent sitting beside Oriana as we sketched beneath the careful instruction of Mistress Solene. I remembered the first time I tried to paint, the first time I tried to illuminate a page, the first time I attempted an etching. And then came the darker moments that still sat in my mind as a bruise, such as when I realized my art lay flat on the page while Oriana’s breathed and came to life. Or the day Mistress Solene had pulled me aside and said gently, Perhaps you should try music, Brienna.
“You’re here!”
I glanced across the room to see Oriana readying a place for me, a new streak of red paint on her cheek. This room had always been overwhelming with clutter and mess, but I knew it was because Oriana and Mistress Solene made their own paints. The longest table in the room was completely covered with jars of lead and pigments, crucibles and earthenware bowls, pitchers of water, chalkstone, stacks of vellum and parchment, a carton of eggs, a large bowl of ground chalk. It smelled of turpentine, rosemary, and of the green weed they boiled to mysteriously render pink paint.
Carefully, I wended my way around the paint table, around chairs and cartons and easels. Oriana had set a stool beside the wall of windows, a place for me to sit in the stormy light while she drew.
“Should I be concerned about these . . . props Abree is so excited about?” I asked.
Oriana was just about to respond when Ciri entered the chamber.
“I found it. This is what you wanted, right, Oriana?” Ciri asked, leafing through the pages of a book she held. She almost tripped over an easel as she walked to our corner, passing the book to Oriana as she looked at me. “You look tired, Brienna. Is Master Cartier pushing you too hard?”
But now I did not have time to respond, for Oriana let out a cry of delight, which drew my eyes to the page she was admiring.
“This is perfect, Ciri!”
“Wait a moment,” I said, reaching for the book. I plucked it from Oriana’s hands. “This is one of Master Cartier’s Maevan history books.” My eyes rushed over the illustration, my breath hanging in my chest. It was a gorgeous illustration of a Maevan queen. I recognized her because Cartier had taught us the history of Maevana. This was Liadan Kavanagh, the first queen of Maevana. Which also meant she had possessed magic.
She stood tall and proud, a crown of woven silver and budding diamonds resting on her brow as a wreath of stars, her long brown hair flowing loose and wild about her, blue dye that Maevans called “woad” streaked across her face. Hanging from her neck was a stone the size of a fist—the legendary Stone of Eventide. She wore armor fashioned like dragon scales—they gleamed with gold and blood—and a long sword was sheathed at her side as she stood with one hand on her hip, the other holding a spear.
“It makes you long for those days, doesn’t it?” Ciri asked with a sigh, peering over my shoulder. “The days when the queens ruled the north.”
“Now is not the time for a history lesson,” Oriana said, gently easing the book away from me.
“You don’t intend to draw me as that?” I asked, my heart beginning to pound. “Ori . . . that would be presumptuous.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Ciri retorted. She loved to argue. “You are part Maevan, Brienna. Who is to say you have not descended from queens?”
My mouth fell open to protest, but Abree walked in bearing an armload of props.
“Here they are,” she announced and dropped them at our feet.
I watched, stunned, as Ciri and Oriana sifted through pieces of cheap armor, a dull sword, a dark blue cloak the color of midnight. They were props from the theater, no doubt smuggled from Master Xavier’s stash in the dramatics wardrobe.
“All right, Brienna,” Oriana said, straightening with the breastplate in her hands. “Please let me draw you as a Maevan warrior.”
They all three waited, Oriana with the armor, Abree with the sword, Ciri with the cloak. They looked at me, expectant and hopeful. And I found that my heart had quieted, thrilled by the thought, my Maevan blood stirring.
“Very well. But this cannot take all day,” I insisted, and Abree victoriously whooped and Oriana smiled and Ciri rolled her eyes.
I stood still and patient as they dressed me. The portrait would only be from the waist up, so it did not matter that I still wore my arden dress. The breastplate enclosed about my chest, vambraces about my forearms. A blue cloak was draped about my shoulders, which made my stomach clench as I inevitably thought of my passion cloak, and Ciri must have read my mind.
She stood and liberated my hair from its bun, braided a small plait, and said, “I told Abree to choose a blue cloak. You should wear your color. Our color.” Ciri stepped back, pleased with how she had arranged my hair.
When an arden became impassioned, their master or mistress would present them with a cloak. The color of the cloak depended on the passion. Art received a red cloak, dramatics black, music purple, wit green, knowledge blue. But it wasn’t a mere marker of achievement and equality, that the arden was now on the same level as their master or mistress. It was a unique commemoration, a symbol of the relationship between the master and the arden.
But before my thoughts could become too entangled with cloaks, Sibylle rushed into the studio, drenched from the rain. A jubilant smile was on her face as she held up a crown of white flowers. “Here!” she cried, slinging water and attracting our attention. “This is the most starlike crown I could make before the rain came!”
Indeed, all five of my arden-sisters must have been in on this portrait ambush. But Merei, my roommate, was the only one missing, and I felt her absence like a shadow had fallen upon the chamber.
“Where is Merei?” I inquired as Sibylle brought her flower crown to me.
Sibylle, graceful, buxom, and coy, set the crown upon my brow. “You look like you could take off a man’s head,” she said, her rosebud lips opening with a wide, satisfied smile.
“Can’t you hear her?” Abree responded to my inquiry, and held up a finger. We all fell silent, and over the tickling of rain on the windowpanes, we could hear the faint, determined song of a violin. “Merei said she is furiously working on some new composition, but she’ll come as soon as she can.”
“Now, Brienna, take up the sword and sit on the stool,” Oriana requested as she held a shell of blue paint.
I watched her, warily, as I eased myself to the stool, the sword awkwardly blooming from my grip. With my hand coaxed to my right thigh, the sword crossed my chest, its dull point near my left ear. The armor was pliant but still felt odd on my body, like a set of unfamiliar arms had come about my chest, embracing me.
“Ciri, will you hold the illustration up next to Brienna’s face? I want to make sure I do this perfectly.” Oriana waved Ciri closer.
“Do what perfectly?” I stammered.
“The woad. Hold still, Bri.”
I had no choice; I held myself still as Oriana’s eyes flitted from the illustration to my face, back to the illustration. I watched as she dipped her fingertips into her blue paint, and then closed my eyes as she dragged her fingers diagonally across my face, from my brow to my chin, and felt as if she was opening up some secret part of me. A place that was supposed to lie hidden and quiet was waking.
“You can open your eyes.”
My eyes fluttered open, my gaze anxiously meeting my sisters’ as they looked me over with pride and approval.
“I think we are ready.” Oriana reached for a rag to wipe the paint from her fingers.
“But what about that stone?” Sibylle asked as she braided her honey-brown hair away from her eyes.
“What stone?” Abree frowned, upset that she’d missed a prop.
“That stone about the queen’s neck.”
“The evening stone, I think,” Ciri said, examining the illustration.
“No, that would be the Stone of Eventide,” I corrected.
Ciri’s milk white face blushed—she hated to be corrected—but she cleared her throat. “Ah yes. Of course you would know Maevan history better, Brienna. You have a reason to listen when Master Cartier drones on and on about it.”
Oriana dragged a second stool before mine, her parchment and pencil ready. “Try to hold still, Brienna.”
I nodded, feeling the blue paint begin to dry on my face.
“I wish I held dual citizenship,” Abree murmured, stretching her arms. “Are you ever going to cross the channel and see Maevana? Because you absolutely should, Brienna. And take me with you.”
“Perhaps one day,” I said as Oriana began to sketch upon her paper. “And I would love for you to come with me, Abree.”
“My father says Maevana is very, very different from Valenia,” Ciri remarked, and I could hear the pinch in her voice, like she was still upset that I had corrected her. She set Cartier’s book down and leaned against a table, her gaze wandering back to mine. Her blond hair looked like moonlight spilling over her shoulder. “My father used to visit once a year, in the fall, when some of the Maevan lords opened their castles for us Valenians to come stay for the hunt of the white hart. My father enjoyed it whenever he went, said there was always good ale and food, epic stories and entertainment, but of course would never let me go with him. He claimed that the land was too wild, too dangerous for a Valenian girl like me.”
Sibylle snorted, unbuttoning the high collar of her dress to rub her neck. “Don’t all fathers say such, if only to leave their daughters ‘safe’ at home?”
“Well, you know what they say about Maevan men,” I said, helplessly quoting Grandpapa.
“What?” Sibylle was quick to demand, her interest suddenly burning as stars in her hazel eyes. I forgot that Francis’s letter to her was still in my wet arden dress, which I had left discarded on the floor of my room. That poor letter was most likely drenched through and smeared.
“They are smooth-talking, skilled, dastardly lovers,” I said, using my best imitation of Grandpapa’s scratchy voice.
Sibylle burst into laughter—she was the most confident with the opposite sex—and Abree covered her mouth, like she didn’t know if she should be embarrassed or not. Ciri made no response, although I could tell she was trying not to smile.
“That’s enough talk,” Oriana playfully scolded, waving her pencil at me. “If one of the mistresses happened to walk by and hear that, you’d be given kitchen duty for the final week, Brienna.”
“They would have to be skilled, dastardly lovers to be worthy of women who look like that!” Sibylle continued, pointing to the illustration of the queen. “By the saints, whatever happened to Maevana? Why is there now a king on her throne?”
I exchanged a glance with Ciri. We had both had this lesson, two years ago. It was a long, tangled story.
“You would have to ask Master Cartier,” Ciri finally responded with a shrug. “He could tell you, as he knows the entire history of every land that ever was.”
“How cumbersome,” Abree lamented.
Ciri’s gaze sharpened. “You do recall, Abree, that Brienna and I are about to become passions of knowledge.” She was offended, yet again.
Abree took a step back. “Pardon, Ciri. Of course, I meant to say how enthralled I am by your capacity to hold so much knowledge.”
Ciri snorted, still not appeased, but thankfully left it at that as she looked back at me.
“Are you ever going to meet your father, Bri?” Sibylle asked.
“No, I do not think so,” I answered honestly. It was ironic to me that on the day I vowed to never inquire of him again I would be dressed as a Maevan queen.
“That is very sad,” Abree commented.
Of course it would be sad to her, to all my sisters. They all came from noble families, from fathers and mothers who were in some measure involved in their lives.
So I claimed, “It truly doesn’t matter to me.”
A lull settled in the room. I listened to the rain, to Merei’s distant music mellowing the corridor, to the scratch of Oriana’s pencil as she replicated me on parchment.
“Well,” Sibylle said brightly, to smooth away the wrinkles of discomfort. She was an arden of wit, and was skilled to handle any manner of conversation. “You should see the portrait Oriana drew of me, Brienna. It is the exact opposite of yours.” She retrieved it from Oriana’s portfolio, held it up so I could get a good glimpse of it.
Sibylle had been staged as the perfect Valenian noblewoman. I gazed, surprised at all the props Abree had scrounged for this one. Sibylle had worn a daring, low-cut red dress studded with pearls, a necklace of cheap jewels, and a voluptuous white wig. She even had a perfect star mole on her cheek, the marker of feminine nobility. She was beautifully polished, Valenia incarnate. She was etiquette, poise, grace.
And then here was mine, the portrait of a queen who wielded magic and wore blue woad, who lived in armor, whose constant companion was not a man but a sword and a stone.
It was the stark difference between Maevana and Valenia, two countries that I was broken between. I wanted to feel comfortable in the fancy dress and the star mole, but I also wanted to find my heritage in the armor and the woad. I wanted to wield passion, but I also wanted to know how to hold a sword.
“You should hang Brienna’s and Sibylle’s portraits side by side,” Abree suggested to Oriana. “They can teach future ardens a good history lesson.”
“Yes,” Ciri concurred. “A lesson as to who you should never offend.”
“If you offend a Valenian, you lose your reputation,” Sibylle chirped, picking dirt from beneath her nails. “But if you offend a Maevan . . . then you lose your head.”