It was Daigh, but not as I’d ever seen him. The fae king’s angular features had been rendered in long, lurid strokes. Instead of the cruel indifference that shone in his emerald eyes, here the irises were tinted with fear. His mouth hung open – a crooked, gaping maw from which issued a curling tendril of smoky darkness – like a snake who’d been chewing on too much licorice. His face seemed to sink, dripping toward the edge of the page. The slick varnish on top of the canvas only added to the illusion that the whole portrait melted under a cruel flame.
I turned the image this way and that, but I couldn’t make sense of it. “Flynn?” I angled the painting toward him. “You’re the artist here. Is that… “
“...a piece of shite? Aye, Maeve. It is.”
Ryan laughed. “Excellent spotting, Flynn. That was exactly what caught my eye about it. This painting is bad?—”
“Hey!” Smithers cried.
“—but it’sdeliberatelybad. Look at those brushstrokes – that’s that fine work of a classically-trained artist. See the structure of the face – it’s as perfect as any of the old masters. But then why has the artist deliberately distorted it and made it look so grotesque?”
“Because Daigh didn’t paint it,” I said, realisation hitting me. “Robert Smithers did.”
All eyes in the room flicked to Smithers. He rolled his eyes at the ceiling, and flashed a vacant smile.
“Honey, did you paint that picture?” Aline asked, patting his arm. “Did you do it yourself, without any help from Daigh…I mean, from Robert?”
Smithers clicked his tongue. “Robert wanted a portrait. He said I needed something to remember him when he left. I wanted to carry a piece of him with me always. He hated it but it was too late. Ha ha!”
Smithers’ barking laugh echoed around the vast room. I stared at the painting again, and for the first time I noticed something at the edges. A shadow that seemed to flicker across the paint.
“Clara, can you come here?”
She heaved her body off the couch and stood beside me.
“Could you sense if there was magic inside this painting,” I asked. “Like there was in Aline’s portrait?”
Rowan had felt Smithers’ earth magic last time, but right now he was so messed up I didn’t expect him to have any kind of control. And I couldn’t ask Smithers, because I’d never get a straight answer. Even though Clara was a spirit witch, I felt certain she knew how to sense something inside the painting. Sure enough, she pressed her hands against the paint. Her eyelids fluttered closed as she searched the pigments. A moment later, her eyes flew open, and she tore her hands away.
“Yes,” she whispered. “And it’s fae magic.”
My heart pattered in my chest. A new idea was forming in my mind, a sense of exactly what Robert Smithers might’ve been trying to do. I took a deep breath, and turned to Isadora. “When Smithers came to you with this painting, what did he want to know about bindings? Tell meexactly.”
“I don’t have a photographic memory for conversations that happened two decades ago,” Isadora snapped.
“Well, you better start remembering,” Arthur growled, waving his sword in front of her face.
“I said, I don’t know! Something about the lore witches had around bindings, if the children were viable, and what magic they would possess. He wanted to know who kept the children of bindings in myth – the fae or the witches, and if there was some magical connection between the child and the parents – if a child could sense who their true parents were through magic, or some such ridiculous thing.”
“That’s what I thought.” I slid back onto the sofa, my mind reeling. It wasn’t Daigh asking, it wasSmithers.He knew Daigh was leaving him, and his addled mind had cobbled together a plan, and not just a plan to save Aline, to save the world, but to save me.
He wanted to be my dad.
“You look like Obelix after Arthur gives him a sneaky bowl of cream,” Blake said, patting my knee. “Spill the secret, Princess.”
“I think…” I turned over the ideas in my head. “I’m not certain on a lot of points, but I think we owe Smithers here a lot more credit. Daigh lived in his head for all those months, and I think Robert heard and understood more about his plans than even Daigh realised. Robert knew that there had been a binding, and that Daigh wanted to take Aline and Maeve back to the fae world with him. We assumed he’d placed Aline in the painting because he thought she was in love with Daigh, but I think what he really did was create Aline’s portrait in order to save her fromwhat Daigh planned. And he usedthispainting to trap some of Daigh’s power so that he wouldn’t be able to return for me or Aline. Does that sound right, Rob?”
“Robert thought he was tricksy, but I was tricksy, too,” Smithers sang, beating his fist against his knee. “Tricksy, tricksy, tricksy!”
Ryan leaned the painting against the mantle, standing back to admire it. “I knew it was special as soon as I saw it. I think it might be your finest work, Rob.”
Smithers beamed. Aline placed her arm around his shoulders, burying her face in his neck so she could whisper something in his ear. A pang of something shot down my side. Pride, tinged with sadness.
Daigh’s desire for Aline had robbed her of years of happiness, of the life she could have had with a non-crazy Smithers, of raising me and being my mother. Even though Daigh was still taking and taking and tearing our lives apart, at least we’d given her back this tiny piece of the future she should have had. Maybe she could have it again.
I turned away from them, my eyes falling on Smithers’ painting again. This time, the ugliness of Daigh’s features struck me as hilarious. How he must’ve started when he saw it! I snorted at the image of Smithers painting away merrily while Daigh screamed protests inside his head. It reallywasgenius.
“So we’ve got a painting that contains some of Daigh’s power,” Flynn whistled. “Isn’t that a bargaining chip? We dangle the promise of a smidgeon of power over his head to get him to tell us what he’s chancin’ with this scheme of his.”
