Once upon a Lover

Isaveth Corrane went to the Gallery of the Lost when she could not sleep, which since the spring had meant most nights. She told no one. The Gallery was the one room in the palace where nobody pretended anything, and that was exactly the trouble with it. From the stone floor to the vaulted ceiling its walls were hung with the portraits of every person the crown had ever loved and buried. Forty-one frames, one for each Corrane heir who had learned what the Ember Moon cost. Beneath each hung a small brass plate bearing a name, two years, and a single word. Lost. Never dead. Her family had never once written dead. Dead was a thing that happened to other people. Lost was a thing that happened to you, and it implied, in the way polite lies do, that someone had been careless. Her mother's was the thirty-ninth: a horse-master named Edric Vane, painted mid-laugh, a man who looked as though he had just heard something indecent and approved of it. Isaveth had never seen her mother look at it. She had watched Ottiline walk this hall at state funerals with her eyes fixed so precisely on the far wall that it amounted to a kind of staring. The far wall held the forty-second frame. It was empty. Gilt, polished, hung perfectly level. Every spring the court painters came with their little pots to refresh its varnish, though there was nothing inside it to protect. Nobody had ever explained whom it was for. Nobody had needed to. Tonight there was a light at the end of the hall. Isaveth stopped in the doorway with her hand still on the latch. The lamps in the Gallery were put out at eleven by the Keeper of Keys, and it was long past midnight. This was a single flame, low and steady, set on the floor beneath the thirty-first portrait. Beside it, crouched on his heels with his back to her, a man was drawing. Not on the wall. On a long sheet of paper held flat against the stone. She heard the scratch of charcoal before she understood what she was looking at, a sound so small and domestic that it took her a moment to be frightened. “The Gallery is closed,” she said. The scratching did not stop. “So I gathered. The door was quite insistent about it.” “You picked the lock.” “I removed an obstacle.” He turned the page. “There's a difference, and it mostly comes down to how much I enjoyed it.” She waited for him to turn around. He did not. He finished whatever line he was drawing, blew the dust off it, and only then stood, unhurried, and let her see him properly. Tall, in the careless way of someone who had never been told to stand straight. A coat the color of river mud. Boots that had walked a long way to reach this room. Charcoal black to both wrists. Dark hair that wanted cutting, the squint lines at the corners of his eyes that belong to people who study distances for a living, and a mouth that looked as though it had been interrupted in the middle of an argument and was waiting, politely, to resume. He did not bow. He did not do any of the things men did when they realized who she was. It was the first thing she noticed about him, and the thing she would spend the following weeks failing to forgive. “I am Princess Isaveth Corrane,” she said, because it sometimes helped. “I assumed. Nobody who owns a dressing gown like that has ever had to ask permission to enter a room.” His gaze moved over the river-silk, the loosened braid, her bare feet on the cold marble, and came back up without a single insolent thing in it. That was somehow worse. “Forgive me. I'd bow, but I'm told I do it badly.” “You are trespassing in a royal gallery at midnight.” “Yes.” “Which is a hanging offense.” “Only on the second night,” he said. “The first is a flogging. I looked it up.” She took three steps toward him before she meant to. Up close he smelled of lamp oil and river water and something sharper underneath, like a struck match. She looked at the paper in his hand, ready to be offended by whatever she found there, and found instead a row of eyes. Nothing else. No faces, no noses, no gilt. Just eyes, forty-one pairs of them, drawn side by side along the length of the sheet with the patient accuracy of someone who had counted every lash. “Why only the eyes?” “Because the painters got everything else wrong.” He said it without heat, the way a man might remark on the weather. “Faces are what you're told to paint. Eyes are what actually happened to the sitter. Look at the thirty-first, there. He's hiding a toothache. See how the left lid sits a hair lower? Nobody paints a toothache on purpose.” She looked. He was right. She had walked past that portrait since she was nine. “And there's something else,” he said, and for the first time his voice lost its ease. “Come stand where I was.” She should have called the guards. She stood where he had been. “Now look at them. Not at the faces. Where the eyes are pointed.” It took her three portraits to see it. Then she saw it in all of them at once, and the skin tightened along her arms. Every sitter looked slightly left. Not at the painter. Not at the viewer. Some barely, some boldly, the soldier in the sixth frame with a sidelong glance like a man hearing his name called in a crowd. Forty-one portraits, painted across four centuries by dozens of different hands that agreed on nothing, not on light, not on noses, not on the cut of a collar. And every one of them had been made to look at the same place. She followed the line of their eyes to the far wall. To the gilt rectangle hanging empty in the dark. “Someone told them where to point,” he said quietly. “Four hundred years of painters. Someone stood behind each of them and said, Look at the empty one.” “How long have you been in the palace?” “About three hours, if you count the drain.” “Guards,” Isaveth said, and then louder, because the Gallery swallowed sound the way it swallowed light: “Guards.” Boots answered somewhere beyond the double doors, a long way off. The stranger did not run. He did not even look toward the sound. He folded the paper once, carefully, as though the eyes might bruise, and said in a voice so low she almost missed it, “You should. I'd think less of you if you didn't. But don't let them put me somewhere you can't reach, Veth, I need to—” He stopped. The silence after it was complete. He looked as startled as she felt. One charcoal-black hand had come up to his mouth, fingers pressed against his lip, as if the word had been something he'd bitten his tongue on, and for the first time he looked young. Not a thief, not a wit. A man of perhaps twenty-six who had just heard himself say something that had not come from him. Nobody had ever called her that. Not her mother, who used all four syllables and made them sound like a verdict. Not Caspian, who had made do with Sav since he was two. Not Tamsin, who said Highness in public and Isa in private. Not the court, which preferred a bow and a title. It wasn't even a nickname anyone could have invented. It didn't fit the shape of her name. It was a name cut from the middle of it, the way you cut a thread you didn't mean to leave long. And yet her right hand had gone cold, as though someone had pressed a key into it. Her whole body had turned toward the sound like a plant toward a window. “Where did you hear that?” Her voice came out very quiet. “I didn't.” He lowered his hand. “I swear to you, I have never heard that word in my life.” The boots were closer now, running. Lantern light jumped along the ceiling. And the worst of it, the part she would turn over for hours in the dark, was that she believed him.