Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2012 Edition: A Tor.Com Original

by Elizabeth Bear

  I mixed pale blue oils and dabbed color on to the painted riverbank. As my brush touched the panel, the water in the pitcher beside me began to tremble. A measure of liquid disappeared, as though swallowed past invisible lips. The painted river attained a new dimension, becoming tangibly cold.

  A second knock sounded, followed by a third. Finally jarred from my concentration, I traded my brush and palette for the oil lamp and hastened to answer.

  One of Lisane’s apprentices stood outside, water beading across his slender brows. His gloved hands shivered around the handle of his lantern. I recognized the boy from the last holiday I’d spent at Lisane's manor—Giatro. His infatuation with Lisane had been obvious. He’d followed her, lurking like a shadow cast against the wall, always ceding her the light as though she were the main figure in a composition and he a hastily brushed afterthought.

  I’d been the same way when I was her apprentice.

  Rain pelted the cobbles behind him. Giatro’s gaze flickered like a wavering candle flame across my face. “Mistress Renn, I have a message.”

  “Come inside. I’ll boil some water. You must be freezing.”

  I stepped aside to admit him. Giatro remained in the doorway. “Mistress Lisane has taken ill. She says she won’t last the night.”

  Giatro’s voice was newly tenor, but grief gave it gravity beyond his years. Lisane dying? Rain tipped from the gutters above my house, pouring onto the cobbles like water from a pitcher.

  “Has she summoned a physic?”

  “One came last night.”

  “And there’s nothing…?” I trailed off.

  Giatro inclined his head. A droplet ran down the bridge of his nose and splashed across his hands. As it went, it reflected the hazel of his eyes, the silver buttons on his coat, the slick black of the cobbles.

  “She wants you to come,” he said.

  “Is the hall big enough for all her old apprentices?”

  “She only asked for you.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d once thought I was special to Lisane. The intervening years had shown otherwise—or so I’d thought.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Please,” Giatro said. “Will you come?”

  Giatro’s lantern swung, casting weird patterns of light and shadow across our bodies. White petals driven down by the rain lay crushed in the grooves between cobbles, releasing scents of perfume and soil.

  I pulled my cloak from its hook and followed him into the rain.

  I was taught to paint by Lisane da Patagnia, whose skill at rendering inner lives transformed portraiture. She painted aristocrats and merchants—and sometimes others who could afford her fee—in luminous colors against stark backgrounds. Even when she painted merchant’s wives in sumptuous golden gowns or dukes wearing ermine stoles, her paintings always drew the viewer’s eye toward the plain oval of the face.

  Her early work conceded to prevailing aesthetics. She softened sharp features and strengthened weak chins. The familiar iconography of portraiture crowded the panels: bowls of fruit to indicate fertility, velvets for wealth, laurel leaves for authority.

  As her work gained acclaim, she eschewed such contrivances. Her compositions became increasingly spare. She painted her subjects emerging, solitary, from darkness or fields of color. She detailed their expressions with an unflinching gaze—pinched lips and watery eyes, crooked noses and sagging jowls. Yet each flawed face contained its own ineffable intrigue. It was impossible to look away.

  Hints of magic sparkled across the panels, softening the fur on a collar or sluicing red in a raised wine glass. Her paintings flirted with magic, using its spare presence to captivate, just as Lisane herself might tantalize lovers with a hint of bare shoulder, inviting them to imagine more.

  Lisane was born the bastard child of a maid who worked in the house of Ruschio di Gael, an artist renowned for shimmering sfumato. He was famously debauched—a drunkard—but he was also a man with modern ideas. When he saw Lisane sketching faces with charcoal in the kitchen, he decided to let her sit with his students.

  She soon became his best pupil—the only genius who emerged from his school, just as he had been the only genius to emerge from the school of Umo Doani Nazatore, whose revolutionary invention of linear perspective had sparked the modern artistic renewal.

  Lisane da Patagnia, Ruschio di Gael, Umo Doani Nazatore—a line of geniuses stretching back through time like links in a chain, each creating a kind of beauty the world had never seen. Every one of us who came to study with Lisane hoped to be the next genius to emerge from that line.

  I was no exception.

  It was summer when I first came to Lisane’s house. The sun shone brightly, casting rose and gold across squared stone rooftops, glimmering through circular leaded windows, emboldening the trumpet-shaped blooms that peaked out of alleys and window boxes. Women sat at upper-story windows, watching events in the streets, their heads and shoulders forming intriguing triangles. Shadows fell everywhere, rounding curves, crisscrossing cobbles, shading secretive recesses.

  That wasn’t how I saw it as I walked to Lisane’s house that morning, holding the hand of the journeywoman who’d met my boat. It was Lisane who would teach me how to dissect the world into shapes and shadows. That day, I was still ignorant, overawed by the chaos and clamor of beautiful, crowded Patagnia.

  The journeywoman, whose name was Orla, led me through an ironwork gate and small formal garden and into Lisane’s mansion. Russet tile spanned beneath painted plaster ceilings. A narrow hallway wended east to the kitchen at the back of the house; a staircase led to the mistress’s rooms. Orla guided me through an archway into the teaching studio.

  The room was large enough to hold a court banquet. An enormous window filled one wall, its wooden shutters thrown wide to admit sunlight and fresh air. Journeymen and apprentices crowded the room, their conversations echoing off of the wide walls. A circle of easels stood in the room’s center; the nearest one displayed an unfinished still life of a dragonfly with carnelian wings.

  “Is that Renn?” inquired an alto voice.

  I looked up to behold my new mistress. Lisane stood taller than most men, piled auburn hair adding to her height. Her features were so sharp they looked as though they’d been cut out with a knife. She wore a saffron-hued inset over a white chemise, triangles of lace at her throat and cuffs.

  A man, who I later learned was her fiancé, stood beside her, clearly annoyed by the interruption of my presence.

  Orla nudged me forward. I stumbled, too dazzled by Lisane to mind my feet. “I'm Renn.”

  “I brought her straight from the ship,” said Orla.

  “Unharmed by her travels, I see. Well, what did you think of the water?” Lisane bent to address me as if I were a child even though I’d already reached my full, diminutive height by age thirteen. She examined my face the way I’d later learn she looked at things she wanted to paint—assessing, absorbing.

  Her eyes were the shade of a cloudless sky, the perfect complement to her dress. My heart raced.

  Lisane straightened. She addressed the man beside her. “This will only take a moment, Damaro. Go on without me.”

  Damaro’s irritation was clear, but he leaned in to kiss the convex line of Lisane’s cheek. “I'll see you at the grotta.”

  He departed and Lisane turned her full attention toward me. I felt like a lamp catching fire.

  “Do you know why we agreed to let you study here?” she asked.

  “I have an eye for color and composition,” I said, repeating what her man had told my father.

  “And something else,” said Lisane. “Has anyone ever told you how guild painters catch the essence of their subjects?”

  I shook my head.

  Lisane rested her hand on my shoulder, giving me a warm smile. She looked to Orla. “Give our new apprentice a demonstration.”

  Orla was several years older than me, plump with peach-soft skin and strikingly pretty features. When dealing with the s
ailors, she’d seemed competent and authoritative, perhaps shading into bossy. She’d always been kind—if abrupt—on the ship. Now she looked down at me with suspicious, disdainful eyes. “Yes, mistress,” she said.

  At the time, I didn’t understand why her demeanor had changed so rapidly. Now I know she must have been looking at Lisane’s hand on my shoulder and seething with jealousy.

  She approached the easel holding the unfinished dragonfly painting and made a show of regarding the panel from different angles. When she was ready to begin painting, she reached into a pouch at her waist and drew out a dead dragonfly pinned to a sheet of vellum. She laid the insect on a small table beside her easel. I recognized it immediately as the same dragonfly as the one depicted in the painting.

  Orla wet her brush and feathered in the web of the painted dragonfly’s wing. The real dragonfly’s wing tip turned ashen and blew to dust.

  “Orla’s been here for several years,” Lisane said. “She’ll leave soon to set up her own house. When you’ve been here as long as Orla has, we’ll teach you to paint like that.”

  Perfecting a mix of ginger and white, Orla brushed highlights across the painted carapace. The dragonfly on the vellum shuddered and disintegrated. The painted wings acquired a new, subtle shimmer, a sense of incipient flight.

  My heart fluttered. I thought it was love of painting—and it was—love of painting, love of Lisane, two crushed dyes blending into a rich new hue.

  Giatro led me, as Orla once had, into Lisane’s courtyard. Rain pooled in the bowls of upturned leaves, weighing them until they bowed, pouring out their fill. We entered the main room. The tile was swept cleaner than I’d ever seen it, no doubt by the restless hands of grieving apprentices. Through the arched door, I glimpsed the darkened studio, echoes of rain casting navy gloom across the walls.

  Giatro started up the steps to Lisane’s room. He paused, lantern uplifted as if he were a messenger on a hill, signaling to troops below. Gathering my skirts, I followed him up.

  In her private chamber, Lisane leaned against her ornate headboard, her bedside lamp casting a yellow glow over her face and hands, the lace cuffs and collar of her nightdress receding into shadow. Her face was hollowed by illness, reddened eyes staring blankly upward. I was surprised when she called out.

  “You brought Renn?”

  Giatro began to reply. Lisane cut him off.

  “There’s nothing else I need from you. Leave and get some sleep. Renn, come in.”

  Giatro glared at me, suspicious and jealous—but also afraid for Lisane. He made his way out, letting the lantern swing low so that it illuminated his calves.

  I moved toward Lisane’s bed. Familiar smells of wood polish and drying oils infused the air. My eyes traced the regimented angles of the furniture and the contrasting curves of the scrollwork decorating the walls. I remembered lying on Lisane’s bed during cloudy mornings, staring up at her vaulted ceiling and mapping out its lines and arches in the sketchbook of my mind’s eye.

  Lisane stank of sweat and illness. I resisted the urge to take her hand.

  She said, “I've been meaning to ask you here for the past few weeks, but foolishly set it aside. I need to make dispensations for the future.”

  My mind raced to catch her meaning. “I'd be honored to take over your house.”

  Lisane gave a dry, rattling laugh. “Orla will take the house. She has her own students. She’ll know what to do.”

  I struggled to conceal my resentment, but I knew my expression must have betrayed me. Lisane had always said that a gifted portraitist must be able to unlock the secrets of the face, and Lisane was the best portraitist who’d ever lived.

  “I see,” I said, tone flat. “Then what do you want from me?”

  “I want you to paint me.”

  This time, I didn’t even try to hide my frown.

  Long ago, Lisane had dismissed my chances of becoming a master. She’d said that depending on magic was the sign of an inferior artist. It was true. I was inferior. I couldn’t make paintings seem real using only oils the way that Lisane and Orla could. That was why I eked out a meager career painting landscapes and still lifes that I could magically endow with a semblance of life—never portraits.

  “I want you to paint me into the canvas,” said Lisane. “Tonight. Quickly. Before I die.”

  Painters bide uneasily with the church.

  The highest levels of the hierarchy have ruled that our magic does not come from the devil—although from time to time, the lesser clergy decry the vague, dark forces they imagine we employ.

  Painting a man with magic is another matter, however. According to the church, employing magic to paint a man is a sin for two reasons. First because it is murder, and second because it may interfere with the dispensation of his soul. In case anyone should take a different view, the church is prepared to enforce their assertions with faggots and flame.

  We have our own reasons for avoiding that kind of magic. We have records—diaries and observations carefully copied and passed down through generations—detailing what happens to those who try to paint men with magic. Such a painter need not fear the stake. The act itself will drive him mad.

  Those who believe in demons say that opening oneself to so much magic creates an opportunity for infernal creatures to crawl inside and hollow you like a husk.

  Lisane does not believe in demons.

  She told me once that she believed the old artists had gone insane for the same reasons that painters sometimes used to perish from mixing poisoned dyes.

  “We learned what ingredients made them deadly,” she said, “and we developed better techniques.

  "We strove. We learned. We innovated. Once, art was confined to flatness, but Umo Doani Nazatore gave us the secret to dimension. Given enough time, we will demolish all the barriers that stand in our way.

  “Someone will find a way to paint a man with magic.”

  During the first months of my apprenticeship, I rarely saw Lisane. I caught glimpses of her remote figure as she drifted past with a manner as stately as a sailboat on a windless sea. I treasured the moments when she stood in the studio speaking to Orla or one of the other journeymen, her hands drawing shapes in the air as she explained the principles of linear perspective.

  My painting progressed slowly. Magic was for journeymen and older apprentices, so I was a slave to mundane methodology. My eye for color was thwarted by my impatience. Other apprentices mixed their oils with turpentine in exacting proportions, coating their panels with heavy layers at first and then lightening the mixture until the top layers were almost all oil. I painted like my mother cooked, in haphazard dashes and dollops. My colors muddied. My paint cracked. Left to myself, I’d spend hours trying to catch the way the light pooled on the rim of a porcelain bowl, and then dash in the rest with harsh, rapid strokes.

  Orla was patient with me. She tempered her sighs as she led me, time after time, back to the dyes to reconsider my pigments. Patiently, she described how each hue was created. She showed me how to dab a thread of grey onto a hint of yellow and create the color of lamplight shining from shadow. Overexcited, I’d rush back to my panel and ruin the day’s work with ill considered swipes.

  Other apprentices quickly surpassed me. I was used to being the quickest child, able to decide whether to taunt my peers with their limitations or be magnanimous in success. Now I was the object of pity and patience. I liked it not at all.

  Nights, I dreamed of Lisane, not knowing why she towered in my vision, her long, pale skirts swishing over me as if I were the tile in her entryway, my form supine beneath their cool caress.

  After a year, I finally finished a painting that Orla deemed worth showing Lisane. It depicted an old, lopsided clay urn, with only one remaining handle. For once, my cracked paint worked with the subject, suggesting an imperfect glaze.

  Lisane came to view my work that evening. She was sumptuously dressed for a banquet at another artist’s residence. Her umber silk gown rustled a
s she walked. Jewels flashed at her throat and wrists.

  She examined the brushwork and reached out to touch one of the spidery cracks. “I'm sure you've done your best,” she told Orla, “but it’s clear that Renn requires intervention. Send her to my rooms when she’s done with whatever chores you’ve assigned her.”

  Lisane was diffident when she gave her instructions, neither looking at me nor speaking with particular emotion. Orla watched me though, anger simmering behind her eyes, fingers clenching around her brush.

  “I’d go mad,” I protested.

  Lying in her deathbed, Lisane bided my statement of the obvious, expression unchanged.

  “They’d burn me alive.”

  She waved her hand. “I’ve made arrangements to have the painting stored in secret until after your natural death.”

  “But your remains—”

  "My agents have located some poor wretch suffering from ague. They rescued her from the gutter and installed her at one of my properties for her last days. I’m told she has the misfortune to resemble me in this miserable condition.”

  “And what? You propose to kill her and replace your body with hers?”

  “That is my proposition.”

  “You've been intimate with half the guild. They’ll know it isn’t you.”

  “Orla will take care of it. The face is only another kind of canvas.”

  I stared blankly at Lisane. Feverish sweat damped her brow, but she lay calmly despite the pain she must have been enduring.

  “All this planning…” I mumbled. “How many people have you told?”

  “A few, only a few. They understand. I’ve given my life to art. Why should I stop now? One last devotion, painted by my most gifted pupil.”

  I scoffed. “I'm not your most gifted pupil.”

  “Not at painting, no. But at magic…”

  “Depending on magic is the mark of an inferior artist. That’s what you say, isn’t it?”

  Lisane shifted finally, the first sign of perturbation she’d given since I entered the room. She pushed aside the crisp bed linens as she struggled to sit higher. I moved to help, but Lisane pushed me away as she achieved her new position. She looked small, her shoulders pressed against the enormous, dark triangle of the headboard. Her face flushed with exertion. She leveled her gaze at mine.