It was frighteningly easy. How simple it was to cover anything. To drown one truth beneath another. Paint long enough and the shape bent to the color. And the color was always stronger.
And always, it was red. Her curse, her kingdom’s seal, Dasmon’s sacrifice.
Across kingdoms, the same shade had meant something else. Vermilion was purity in Myceanos. In Zharesh, it was marriage. In Varantia, luck. In Kaer’Vosh, power. In Edrathen… memory.
Strange how one color fractured into a dozen meanings, depending on who spoke and who listened. It was never about what was painted. And red, whatever mask it wore, had always been the same at its core. Beautiful. Toxic. Inescapable.
She didn’t stop painting until the selanthers looked as though they had bloomed from wounds, petals opening like torn flesh, pretty and terrible all at once.
“It’s beautiful,” came a voice behind her.
Evelyne gasped and turned her head.
Ysara stood just inside the doorway, her gown a muted blue that caught the morning light gently.
“Ysara.”
The woman crossed the room in no rush. She stopped by the edge of the canvas, studied it.
“I haven’t seen you paint in some time. Is everything alright?”
“Yes, I’m… fine,” Evelyne murmured.
Ysara nodded. “It’s easier to confess to pigment than to people.” She let the silence breathe, then added, “Sometimes I think that’s why we still keep art around.”
Evelyne’s throat tightened, but she didn’t look away. She let her eyes settle on the red again.
Ysara folded her hands. “I didn’t come to press. Only to visit. And…” her eyes flicked to the fog rimming the window, “...to see how you were sleeping.”
That earned a dry huff from Evelyne. “Not well.”
“Neither is Thalen,” Ysara confessed after a moment. “He wakes often. Restless. Sometimes he asks for you.”
The brush slipped in her fingers. She turned sharply, breath caught. “He does?”
Ysara’s expression gentled, but she said nothing more.
Evelyne forced her gaze back to the canvas, though her stomach had gone cold. She made a silent note, etched into her like a vow: she would speak with him. She had to. Thalen—her baby brother, her treasure—if she could do nothing else in this shifting, treacherous world, she could at least try to keep him safe.
Ysara approached without hurry and stopped beside the canvas. “You’ve been quieter than usual.”
“I’ve been busy,” Evelyne replied, too quickly.
“Of course.” Ysara adjusted the edge of the glove. “Busy is often the only shield we’re allowed.”
Evelyne looked up at her. The words brushed against something raw in her, something that had been swelling since the council, since every lie she’d swallowed whole.
“Do you ever wonder,” she began, “if all of this—our order, our customs—if it’s one of those shields?”
She expected the usual response: a polite smile, practiced ignorance passed down like embroidery. But Ysara confessed quietly, “More often than I should admit.”
Evelyne blinked.
Ysara’s gaze drifted toward the window. “When I was your age,” she said, “I believed silence meant grace. That if I spoke softly, I would be… respected.”
Evelyne’s brush stilled in her hand. “And now?”
“Now I think silence just makes the cracks harder to see,” Ysara murmured. “Until everything breaks at once.”
