The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  I stared at her, unsure. “I don't know how.”

  “Follow your instincts.”

  I dabbed my brush into faint yellow and turned to the panel. I concentrated on the memory of the slipper’s softness against my cheek. The bristles compressed against the panel as I made my first stroke.

  Lisane inhaled sharply. “Well,” she said with a hint of amazement.

  I turned back to see her staring thoughtfully at the panel, her usual air of detachment replaced with surprise. The slipper in her hands had begun turning ashen, but Lisane paid it no heed.

  She reached toward my brushstroke. I watched as her finger neared; it did seem soft, as if she might brush real velvet instead of wood. She halted a moment before touching the oil, as if reminding herself that it was only an illusion.

  She looked down at me, her expression changed from indulgent amusement to something else entirely. “You’ll never be a great painter. But the magic…”

  I didn’t even hear what she said next. My heart beat at a furious pace. I knew she was going to kiss me a moment before she did. I closed my eyes to savor the feeling of her lips, softer than any velvet.

  Once I consented, the house went into tumult. Lisane called Giatro to give him the news. Apprentices went out to notify journeymen and masters who had their part to play in the plan, preparing the ague victim and running errands elsewhere in the city.

  A determined young journeywoman began setting up a canvas on an easel in Lisane’s chamber. I knew Lisane preferred canvases, but I had always worked on wood; I protested that I should be allowed to choose my materials, but the journeywoman informed me in a flat voice that Lisane had given specific instructions. Lisane, lying with her eyes closed, added nothing. The journeywoman hurried me out the door so she could begin laying out her bundled supplies.

  I went downstairs. Through the archway, I glimpsed the teaching hall which resounded with voices and footsteps. Orla's name rang back and forth, an acoustic centerpiece to their plans.

  I ducked away from the activity, moving into the kitchen where I’d sometimes spent time as an apprentice, sitting alone with a pan of coals after the cook had gone to bed. I was surprised to see Giatro seated on a bench by the fireplace, slumped over with his hands resting on his knees. Firelight lit the planes of his face with saffron, amber, and crimson. Smoke billowing from the low fire made his body smudged and indistinct.

  The smoke stung my throat. Giatro looked up as I dabbed my watering eyes. He slid over on the bench, making room for me to sit beside him.

  “People will find out.” His voice was a low grumble, thick with smoke and emotion.

  I gestured toward the hall. “I thought all this uproar was supposed to prevent that.”

  “It’s against the law,” he protested. “It’s not…it’s not right. You could still say no.”

  A passionate flush made his skin ruddy underneath the flickering colors. He seemed so young, even though I’d been no older when I started sleeping in Lisane’s bed. “Lisane, she…favors you…am I right?”

  His flush deepened. He looked away.

  “I know how—how hard it is to let go of someone when you feel that way, whether it’s an illness that comes between you, or something else.” I paused. “She’s not going to live through this whether or not I paint her. You know that, don’t you?”

  Giatro turned beseechingly toward me. His position shifted the play of shadows and light. His right half brightened while his left fell into darkness, dividing his face vertically into yellow and black like a festival mask. “What will happen to her soul?”

  “I don't know,” I said, as gently as I could.

  My other answer—the genuine one—was that I didn’t care.

  I never knew which were more splendid: the nights I spent in Lisane’s bed, or the mornings I spent drawing by her window.

  At dawn, she would pull back the heavy drapes that curtained the bed from the world at night, and I’d get up to throw open the wooden shutters, letting in the sun and fresh air. Below, women made their way through the streets, chattering as they carried jugs to the river. Early light brought out undertones of rose and lavender in the nearby stone buildings and dazzled off the cathedral dome just visible in the distance. Peddlers carrying meat and fruit stopped to knock at familiar doors, waiting for gruff-countenanced cooks to emerge and haggle. Breezes carried the scent of their wares to our window, along with the echoes of women’s chatter and footsteps on the cobbles.

  Lisane reclined on the bed, watching as I sketched. She gave me fresh paper to work with instead of the wax tablets the apprentices used, which never took precise lines, however sharp the stylus.

  She taught me the principles of composition. One morning she saw me begin sketching a set of majolica dishes she’d lain on a chest beneath the window. “What are you doing?” she demanded, roused from her bed. “You can’t just draw what you see. First you have to arrange it into art.”

  She taught me to arrange objects so they created drama with different shapes and sizes. The eye was drawn to curves, she said, and to triangles. A tea cup’s handle could gesture the eye toward a pitcher, which in turn rose tower-like above a stack of plates. Or a platter might lead the eye to a tall candlestick, which in turn would draw the viewer’s attention to a silver finger bowl set behind the others as if it were an afterthought.

  “Art is lain out in shapes,” she said, “and brought to life with color.”

  She instructed me in linear perspective, the technique that had been invented by her teacher’s teacher, Umo Doani Nazatore. Begin by viewing your composition as a window on another plane, she said, teaching me to draw the painstaking lines that determined whether surfaces should be lengthened or foreshortened.

  I loved the beautiful work that could be created using linear perspective—but I was not made for methodical measurements. I worked for hours, struggling to sketch the lines correctly, but they always came out sloppy and badly placed.

  When my eyes welled with frustration, Lisane was always there to lay kisses on my clumsy fingers and up my arm, her body pressed against my back, her breath warm in my hair.

  “Let me show you again,” she’d say, guiding my hand so the art was drawn from our mingling.

  Lisane looked mad under the flickering oil lamps. Yellow light highlighted her sallow undertones and brightened her feverish eyes.

  I suddenly did not want to paint her at all. “We should wait until morning,” I said, gesturing to the shutters.

  Lisane gave a fervent shake of her head. “It must be now.”

  “The light…”

  “There’s plenty of light.”

  Giatro’s objections didn’t seem so easily dismissed anymore. “What will happen to your soul if I—”

  “My soul! Spare me your maundering. Paint! It must be now!”

  I forced my fingers to remain steady around the brush.

  The journeywoman had lain out a rainbow of mixed paints, preserved wet and ready by techniques I didn’t know. I dabbed carnelian onto horsehair. The shade was a vivid memory—the same as Orla’s long-ago dragonfly wings—wholly inappropriate for sallow Lisane.

  I went to wash the brush. Lisane called out, “Use the red.”

  I turned back. She’d pulled herself up against the headboard. The whites of her eyes were clouded and bloodshot. Her mouth gaped into a grotesque expression.

  Her tone was like a knife. “Did you think painting a person would be like painting a slipper?”

  “I thought—”

  “Don't think. Paint!”

  With an ordinary object, one begins by painting a representation. The careful painter will render a detailed facsimile. Magic can be done with less—even a hint of yellow can steal a measure of velvet softness—but there must always be something that reflects the real object.

  Or so I’d believed.

  I mixed carnelian and yellow, slopping them on in messy, concentric whorls. When my brush seemed inadequate, I used my fingers,
my palms, my face, whatever parts of my body I could bring into contact with the canvas.

  Lisane’s breath hissed through her lungs. I turned, afraid I would see that she’d disintegrated into a heap of ashes—but she was still there, leaning toward me, wearing a predatory look.

  “Keep painting,” she said. “You’re doing it. You see?”

  The whites of her eyes were wholly red. Her skin dripped like wax, hanging in folds from her skinny bones.

  “Stop staring at me! Paint!”

  She shrieked with all the remaining power in her withered lungs.

  “Paint, blast you! Paint!”

  The slipper had turned to ash. People decayed in different ways.

  “She’ll get bored with you,” Orla said one afternoon when I was late for instruction, my clothing still rumpled from Lisane’s bed. Her tone was low, but jagged with resentment.

  I tried to pass her and gather my wax tablet. She caught my shoulder.

  “It happens to all of us,” she said. “It happened to me. It happened to Xello. It happened before him, too, to Rey and Cosiata and I don’t know how many others. Most of us are from the city. At least we knew what she does. It’s not fair that no one told you.”

  I felt flushed. I tried to pull away. She held fast.

  “Did she teach you magic, Renn? Tepri said you told her that Lisane showed you how to paint velvet.”

  “Tepri’s a liar.”

  “I’m trying to help you, Renn!” Orla shook her head. “Lisane is getting desperate. She’s started doing strange things to the apprentices—she says if normal teaching techniques only produce normal students, then she has to act exceptional. She wouldn’t let me learn any magic at all until I’d mastered everything else. Now I can hardly use it. It’s like a limb that atrophied. What’s going to happen to you?”

  I held still, breathing hard. Orla’s grip was painful on my shoulder, but that didn’t matter. I couldn’t accept what she was saying about Lisane.

  “There’s a reason no one teaches magic to apprentices, Renn. It changes how they relate to art. She’s going to ruin your ability to paint—if she hasn’t already. And then she’s going to throw you out of her bed, too. You won’t have the art. You won’t have her. You won’t have anything.”

  She tried to hold my gaze. Her eyes were too deep. I turned my head.

  She released my shoulder. Her next words were so soft I barely heard them. “I didn’t believe it either,” she said, her skirts rustling as she turned to leave.

  It should have taken longer, but the magic was feverish. Morning came. Day passed. Night fell again. My brush moved with impossible speed and surety.

  I’d known Lisane before. Now I knew her better than I’d ever known anything.

  I painted the furled anger of her childhood, growing up in the shadow of her household’s disdain. A crack of possibility opened when Signore di Gael accepted her as a student—but even that joy was tempered by her simmering fury at always being treated as less than, as if she were some kind of dog that had jumped onto the table in the middle of a banquet and insisted on eating his supper off of silver dishes.

  Then there was the glory of painting. The splendor, the fascination—the recognition! Praise temporarily chased away her anger. Lisane sought accolades from patrons, esteem from peers, devotion from admirers. Nothing salved her better than the adulation of her student lovers whose kisses mingled awe and desire. She left them smoldering as she passed from one to the next, always seeking new, white-hot passions.

  The figure in the bed had become even more frail now. Her bulbous head loomed above her withered torso, dominated by bloodshot eyes and cavernous mouth.

  “Keep painting!” Rage hissed through Lisane’s teeth. The painting had stripped her façade, leaving nothing but furious ambition.

  There were things I had to know.

  “Why did you teach me magic before I knew how to paint?”

  She loosed a feral snarl.

  “The usual techniques weren’t working,” she said. “I had to innovate, to use a different tool.”

  I’d known the answer, but to hear it—I simmered with bitterness. “You ruined me.”

  She jabbed a desiccated finger toward the canvas. “If I hadn’t dared to risk breaking you, you’d never have made that! You’d be some ordinary Orla, preparing to take my house and leave a legacy of mediocrity. You’re my true heir. The only one who was worth my time.”

  “If I’m your heir, then give me the house.”

  “What would you do with it? Paint miserable nothings? Paint the dying until someone turned you in and they dragged you through the streets? You’re the last of my line. In a hundred years, when there’s no one left to be punished, my estate will bring out the painting. Then they’ll see. They’ll see what you did. They’ll see what I made you.”

  Her teeth shone with saliva. Her fingers clutched the air.

  I wanted to flee. I wanted to kill her. I did the latter. I did it with paint.

  Lisane didn’t even say she didn’t want me anymore. She just barred her door and told the cook’s son to keep me out.

  Despite his crippled left foot, the cook’s son was enormous—the size of the duke’s dancing bears. Not that he needed much strength to deter me, fourteen years old and still the size of a younger child.

  I flailed against him. “I always come in the evening. That’s what I do! Ask her! She’ll tell you to let me in! She’ll tell you—”

  By now an expert in detaining Lisane’s rejected lovers, Colu caught my fists as I tried to pound his chest. He let me thrash until I began to cry and then he led me quietly downstairs. I expected him to return me to the apprentices’ quarters, but instead he took me to the kitchen and sat me before the foul mouth of the oven.

  He brought me a stale sweet from the previous day. I nibbled on its edges, devoid of appetite. “It’s what she does,” he said. “Nothing to do with you.” Sotto voce, he added, “Best forget it.”

  I should have listened.

  Instead, I waited until evening when Lisane met with the journeymen to discuss the apprentices’ work. The other apprentices were doing chores or snatching a few moments to sit outside with a crust from supper, enjoying the last of the night. I lingered in the shadows behind the archway until I couldn’t bear it anymore.

  I threw myself at her skirts. The journeymen drew back, laughing nervously. “Renn!” Orla exclaimed, reaching to pull me away. I ignored the plump fingers stretching toward me.

  “It's a mistake!” I shouted. “Tell Colu you didn’t mean it. I don’t know what I did, but I won’t do it again. Please! Let me come back. I’ll get better at painting, I promise. I’ll do whatever you want.”

  I still remember the look of disgust on her face as she pried me away from her skirts.

  Even then, I could have left. Instead, I ran to the bench beneath the window and began smashing the dye pots.

  Someone moved to restrain me but Lisane held up her hand to stop him. “Let the creature tire itself.”

  I ran back to the easels and toppled them, one by one. Half-painted panels clattered across the floor. I cracked one against the wall. Wood splintered. I reached for a second. Finally, Lisane decided she’d had enough.

  “Where is this one’s work?” she demanded.

  Orla was crouching by the wall, her hands thrown over her face like a painted mourner. I thought she was ashamed of me, but now I wonder if she wasn’t feeling a deeper shame. What similar scenes might played out before I entered the house?

  Slowly, she lowered her hands and raised her eyes. “In there, mistress,” she said, gesturing vaguely to the heap of panels.

  “Locate it,” said Lisane. “Now, please.”

  Laboriously, as if pushing herself through an invisible substance, Orla went to the middle of the room and dug through the pile until she found my most recent effort. She laid it carefully on the floor.

  Lisane gave it a brief, disgusted glance. “This one’s work is not i
mproving.”

  Her gaze moved from the painting up to me, her expression displaying utter loathing. She shook her head and swept out of the room, leaving others to straighten the mess.

  Orla began picking up the panels. One by one, the other journeymen stooped to help. A sweet-smelling dusk breeze blew through the open shutters, ruffling their sleeves. It was dim and the shadows were gathering.

  Angry oranges now, bright and uncompromising, jagging down the canvas like lightning bolts. Snarls of unflinching, determined white, tangling in the corners and then stretching into tendrils, writhing blindly toward something neither they nor I could reach.

  When I finished at last, I steeled my nerve to turn back to the bed. Lisane was gone—not a husk, not an ash, not a trace. Only her rumpled sheets remained beneath her enormous headboard.

  Whatever had happened to her soul, it was finished now.

  I stood shaking by her empty bed for a long time, wondering if I was mad. I did not feel mad, but I did feel different: a trifle colder, a trifle more resolute.

  The angle of the sun’s rays shifted through the shutters, creeping toward me across the floor. Eventually, Orla came up the stairs. She lingered in the doorway, holding a lit candle even though it was daytime, her head bowed as if she was afraid to see what I’d done.

  Age had stolen the peachy smoothness from my rival’s skin, but she’d gotten heavier instead of lining so she still looked young. Wrapped around the candle, her short fingers were rough, her knuckles knotted. Stained fingertips testified that she continued to paint even though many teachers became indolent once they had students.

  She braced in the doorway, ready to defend herself. “I wasn’t sure if it was over,” she said, glancing at the empty bed for a moment before looking hastily away.

  I wanted to berate her for standing in front of me, acting as if we were equals when Lisane had given her the house, had given her everything. Instead, I snapped, “There are no ghosts here.”