Андреа Хёст - The Pyramids of London

“Me? What do you mean?”

Attention divided, Griff almost walked into the page who had been their initial guide, who had clearly been lurking ready to escort them back. She skipped nimbly aside, and at a word from the prince fell into step behind them.

“You look a great deal like your father when he was your age,” Rian explained.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Griff studied the prince suspiciously. “You never met my father, did you?”

“In a way, I grew up with him,” Prince Luc said. “You’ll see in a minute, we’re nearly there.”

They had reached the Crossing Gallery, and headed right, collecting numerous interested glances and a discreet escort of the guard who had been stationed at the entrance to the royal residences. The Stone Garden was only a short walk beyond the Gallery: a conservatory looking out over the western reach of Lake Gwyn Lynn, its glass and restrained plantings carefully designed to complement a work that had taken so many years of Charlotte Seaforth’s life.

“ The Processional ,” Eluned said, brightening. “I was hoping to see it.”

“One of the highlights of the palace,” Prince Luc said, and added to Griff: “Can you see what I meant now?”

The look Griff offered him was deeply suspicious, and the boy walked toward the centre of the room as if expecting some trick or trap. Rian watched his face anticipating the moment of recognition, but the unreality of the day combined with fragments of her own childhood and made it difficult to overlook that this was the first opportunity Rian herself had had to see her mother’s masterwork in full. She had become someone who counted, who received invitations, and could go to a palace as a guest not a servant, using the front entrance, even indulged with tours of its treasures. And this abrupt increase in her own value had so little to do with her determined effort to climb out of a well, but mere circumstance.

The Processional was not a single piece, but a circle of statues. The Sulevia Leoth, the Sulevia Sceadu, and the Sulevia Seolfor, each leading the creatures they, by Sulis’ grace, commanded. Every piece brought Rian’s mother back so strongly. Her cutting sarcasm when they discovered she’d been given the wrong measurements, and had had to rework her design. A technical discussion over the difficulty of depicting the triskelion. Laughter, warm as honey, at the vanity of a model she’d used for the entourage. One of the rare arguments between her parents, over nothing Rian had been able to guess, and her father’s immense contrition when a wild gesture had sent one of the stone hares crashing to the studio floor.

There had been long absences as well, when her mother had been working on the depictions of the Suleviae of the time—Queen Mennia, her sister Princess Nyroe, and Princess Ashwen. Whenever his wife was away, Rian’s father would rattle about the studio, starting new projects and then abandoning them half-done, frequently disappearing off to London and leaving Aedric and Rian to the care of neighbours, his latest student, and once even with a confused visitor. Each time her mother’s return had been spring after winter.

Griff had made his discovery. “Is this really Father?”

Rian nodded, and gathered together her composure to join the children crowded around the train of the Sulevia Leoth. Three dragons, miniatures of Nimelleth, Dulethar and Athian, each escorted by a child of twelve, one hand resting lightly on neck, or flank, or crested spine. This represented how the Sulevia Leoth could use people as vessels for the dragon’s fire, for it was an extreme rarity for the dragons themselves to rise from beneath the land. Aedric had modelled for the third of these pairs, fingers barely brushing Athian’s flank. The marble dragon looked back at him, to be met with a smile of solemn reassurance.

That was very much Aedric: serious, steady, and sure. Rian swallowed the cold anger swelling in her chest, mindful of Griff, Eluned and Eleri’s loss made newly raw. She had wanted them to see The Processional , but there had been no way to avoid the hurt that would inevitably accompany the sight of this past Aedric.

Catching the fraught atmosphere, Prince Luc looked from face to face, then said: “Were any of the figures modelled by you, Dama Seaforth?”

“Ah, there should be…”

Rian turned to the stone Sulevia Sceadu, Queen Mennia, with a long-limbed and attenuated menagerie in her wake. Among the hounds and hares, the owls and mice, were two larger pieces: the sacred three-tailed mare that led the Night Breezes, and a long-necked stag, both with children on their backs. The mare carried a graceful girl of ten, who gazed with frank interest across at the triskelion. On the back of the stag a child of five sprawled, fast asleep.

“Mother had me pose on an old saddle, every day for what felt like months. Aedric read to me, in hopes of keeping me still. I would always fall asleep—and then be up half the night, racketing around the house and garden.”

“It’s like you’ve always belonged,” Eluned said.

For one startled moment, Rian thought the girl was referring to the Sulevia Sceadu, to her past self’s presence in a train now belonging to Princess Aerinndís. But she caught the direction of the girl’s gaze. The stag.

The world revolved, rearranging itself around the idea that the past few weeks had not been a series of unrelated incidents, but instead a predetermined course, a path laid out toward creating an Amon-Re vampire in Cernunnos’ service. Producing not an apprentice for Makepeace-Heriath, but a successor.

And one of the steps along that path had been Aedric’s death.

A blank page was an invitation, an opportunity waiting to be taken. It should not sit in mute accusation. Eluned gripped her pencil, willing herself to at least start, to put down a single line. Before her was the perfect subject, a tangle of briar roses, all serrated leaves and thorns, shapes she loved to work with, and not touched in any way by withering heat.

One line.

Hopeless. Eluned’s fingers tightened, and then she snatched up the sketchbook and hurled it into the tangle in a wild flutter of paper. Chest heaving, she gripped a handful of grass and threw it after the sketchbook, and then flinched as her right arm flailed in response to incautious movement. Instinctively she locked its movement, then let all her breath out in a rush and flopped heavily back onto the grass.

It didn’t make sense, none at all. No-one need see the result. It could be as bad as she liked, clumsy, even a stick figure. Scribble. Anything.

What was wrong with her? Why had the thing most central to her become a cliff she could not climb?

A slender, gold-crowned head lifted against the background of blue and leaves. The amasen’s warm scales brushed her arm as it rose higher to look down at her.

“Sorry,” Eluned said. “Did I startle you?”

A flicker of vivid tongue.

“Is your name really Lila?”

The faint dip of the head could mean anything. Eluned wondered if Lila was a girl’s name among amasen, and whether being female was the reason Lila’s horns were a short, backward-jutting curve, or if that was because it—she—was young and small, and eventually she’d have the heavy, curling ram horns of the larger amasen.

“I try not to get angry around other people,” Eluned said, her gaze returning to the hazy blue above. “I make them nervous.”

She remembered being more temperamental, before Jasper. And utterly furious in the first months after. Because she’d failed him, and because of all the things she suddenly couldn’t do. She’d given up on long hair, and clothing with difficult buttons, and had had to learn how to draw left-handed, to discover work-arounds for things that were easy with two hands. It had been so frustrating that for a while it had seemed she was always boiling over.