The Mural Gallery

They walked the length of the east corridor without speaking.

Kieran did not look at her. He did not slow his pace, either, and Solaia, whose legs were still unreliable, was forced to lengthen her stride to keep up. Behind them, Berylla trailed at a respectful distance with two Black Guards. In front, the courtiers who had streamed out of the Hall of Measure parted like water around a stone and closed again in their wake, murmuring.

Pale blue. She caught the words on the air. Weak as milk. I told you. And, with a little silvery laugh from somewhere behind a fan, poor Ashvale. What a comedown.

She kept her face bored. She was getting rather good at it.

At the door of the Moonlit Jade Pavilion, he stopped.

"You may go where you like," Kieran said. He said it to the air somewhere above her head, in the flat, courteous voice of a man reading a decree. "Within the palace walls. The guards at the garden gate have been told. Berylla will accompany you."

"And if I decide to go over the walls?"

"Then I shall be very disappointed, and Berylla will be reassigned to the salt mines."

"That's not funny."

"It was not meant to be." A pause. For the first time since the Hall, his eyes came down and rested on her face. They were tired. They were so tired that she nearly forgot to hate them. "You did well."

"I didn't do anything. I stood there."

"Yes," said Kieran. "That is what I meant."

He left. She watched him go, a long dark figure walking away between the winter roses, and she had the odd impression that the whole garden had dimmed a little in his passing.

He wanted me weak, she thought. And now he has me weak. So why does he look like a man who has been told that his house is on fire?

…

The court changed in a matter of days.

It was like watching ice melt. She had come to expect the sneers, the fans snapped shut, the little hostile pauses when she entered a room. For a week they continued. Then, one morning, an invitation to tea arrived from the Duchess of Valmont, and the next day another from the Countess of Hale, and Berylla came into the pavilion with a stack of cards like a banker bringing news of a profitable war.

"They have decided you are harmless," she said.

"Is that good?"

"It is the best thing that can happen to a woman at court. To be harmless is to be forgotten, and to be forgotten is to be left alone." Berylla set down the cards. "You should not trust it."

"I wasn't going to."

"Good."

She did not attend the teas. She walked instead, as the Emperor had permitted, through the palace he had called a cage and she was beginning to think of as a labyrinth. Twice she lost Berylla in the east wing and was found by the guards standing in front of a window, looking at the mountains. Once she wandered into the kitchens and left with a loaf of bread, a wheel of cheese, and the cook's frank, unforced affection, which unsettled her more than anything the nobles had done.

And one gray morning, a week after the test, she was followed through the west colonnade by a flock of ice-blue silk.

"Lady Solaia!"

It was a lovely voice. High and clear and perfectly warm, the voice of someone who had never been refused anything. Solaia stopped, and sighed, and turned.

Lady Ysolde Orloff was coming down the colonnade with two other young women trailing at her elbow like ducklings. She wore a gown the color of a frozen lake and a little cap of white fox. Her golden braid lay over one shoulder like a rope of honey. She was smiling.

"I have been trying to find you for days," she said. "You are so very hard to catch. May I walk with you?"

"I'm told I can't stop you."

"What a pleasant way you have of putting things." Ysolde took her arm. Solaia let her, and felt, under the soft fur of the sleeve, the sharp little bones of her fingers tighten. "Come. I want to show you the gallery. It is the finest thing in the west wing, and no one has taken you there. I think it very remiss."

"I'd rather not."

"But you must." The smile grew. "You see, I have been wondering what you remember. Of your family. It must be so dreadful, to lose them all, and not even have the comfort of a face. Do let me tell you about Ashvale."

The two ladies behind them tittered.

Solaia felt the old animal stillness settle over her. She did not pull her arm away. She walked.

"I only know what my father told me," said Ysolde, in the voice of a girl confiding a lovely secret. "It was a very small keep. Nothing but a gatehouse and a sad little tower, on a cliff above the ash plain. He said they fought to the last. The lord and his sons. The lady, in the great hall, with a kitchen knife. My father led the siege himself. He signed the order." She sighed. "He says it burned beautifully."

It is not true, Solaia thought, with a strange, clear, distant calm. None of it. There was no keep. There was no lady with a kitchen knife.

And the stranger part, the part that made her skin crawl, was that she felt nothing at all. She had expected rage. She had expected a long dark grief opening under her feet. But there was no one to mourn. The people Ysolde was describing had been conjured out of nothing in a cold tower by a man who needed a story, and the girl who stood listening to their deaths felt only a bleak, cold amusement, like watching a stranger's play.

"What a pity," she said.

Ysolde's smile slipped. Just a fraction.

"You are very calm."

"I don't remember them."

"I see." The pale eyes searched her face with sudden, brittle intensity. "That must be convenient. For you. And for His Majesty, of course, who did so love a clean slate." Her voice dropped, sweet as poison. "He likes strays, you know. He has always liked them. There was a hound once, that he kept for six months. It followed him everywhere. And then it didn't."

"What happened to it?"

"I forget." Ysolde squeezed her arm, tenderly. "Isn't that dreadful?"

They had stopped in front of a pair of tall carved doors. Solaia hadn't seen them come. Ysolde released her arm, smoothed her sleeve, and with a delicate flourish pushed the doors open.

"The Gallery of the Dragon Plague," said Lady Ysolde. "I hope it teaches you something."

And then, with a flick of her silver skirts, she was gone, and her ladies after her, and the colonnade was empty.

…

It was a long, tall room, and it was cold.

Not the cold of winter. The cold of a place that had been built to be looked at, and not lived in. The floor was black marble, polished to a dark glassy sheen. The ceiling vanished into shadow. Down both walls ran a single, unbroken series of paintings, forty feet tall, hung one after another in frames of tarnished gilt, and each one showed a fragment of the same enormous story.

Solaia walked into the gallery as if into a church.

The first painting showed a green and golden land under a smiling sun. Villages, orchards, a river. A great white city on a hill. It was beautiful, in the way of things that are about to be spoiled. In the sky above it hung the first dragons, small and graceful, painted with a loving hand.

The second showed them larger. And darker.

By the third the sky had gone black. The dragons were everywhere, a boiling swarm of fanged and winged shapes with red eyes and gaping mouths, swooping over burning farmland. Peasants fled. Children wept on their mothers' shoulders. In the foreground a man in silver armor knelt with his hands raised to a shaft of golden light that fell from a painted cloud.

The Dragon Plague, said a brass plaque below, in the Church's ornate lettering. In the Dark Age, the beasts descended.

She walked on.

The fourth painting showed the Church rising. Priests in silver. A great white cathedral. Fire and light and the beating of angelic wings, and the beasts falling from the sky in heaps. The fifth, the first king, a black-haired man in armor on a red horse, riding beside the High Pontiff with a drawn sword. The Saint-General Aldren and the Blessed Order Deliver the World.

She noted the name. Aldren. It meant nothing to her.

And then she turned the corner at the far end of the hall and came to the last painting, and stopped.

It was the largest of them. It covered the whole end wall, from the floor to the unseen dark of the ceiling, and it had been painted by an artist with an extraordinary gift and a bottomless hatred. The sky was a vast, bruised crimson, torn open by black thunderheads. Beneath it lay a great fallen city, wreathed in smoke. In its heart, on a tall white tower, stood a woman.

She was beautiful. That was the horror of it. The painter had not been able to help himself. She stood alone on the highest spire in a gown of pure white, her arms flung wide, her black hair streaming in the wind. A crown of white flame burned on her brow, and white fire poured from her hands in two great spirals, and at her feet a vast winged shadow, black as the underside of the world, reared up and roared at the sky.

Her eyes were violet.

The Dragon Queen, said the plaque, in letters nearly a foot tall. In the last hour of the age of beasts, the Demon-Queen was cast down, and the world was made clean.

Solaia did not read it. She did not need to.

She could not breathe.

The floor of the gallery was tilting under her feet, very slowly, the way a ship tilts on an enormous swell. A sound had begun in her ears, a distant rushing, like a sea heard through a shell. And through it, so faint she could not say whether it came from the world or from inside her skull, a voice was singing.

A woman's voice. Low and sweet. It was a lullaby, and the words were in no language she had ever learned, and she knew every one of them.

Under the sky, a throne.

Under the throne, a flame.

The painting blurred.

For one instant, one single blinding instant, it was not a painting at all. She was standing on a balcony of white stone, high above a great shining city, with the wind in her hair and warm sunlight on her face. The sky was a clear, deep, wonderful gold. And in it, wheeling and rising, rank on glittering rank, flew the dragons. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Scales of sapphire and emerald and bronze, wings spread wide against the sun, and the sound of them was a great slow music that she felt in her bones, and she was laughing. She was laughing, a bright, unbelieving, joyful laugh, and a man's hand was warm in hers, and someone said her name—

Then the gold turned to red.

"My lady!"

Hands caught her. The gallery rushed back in a tangle of marble and cold air. Berylla's face swam up out of the dimness, white to the lips, her eyes wide with a terror she had no business feeling for a girl she had not yet decided to like.

"Lady Solaia. Look at me. Breathe."

She breathed. It hurt.

"It's all right," she heard herself say, in a voice that did not sound like her own. "I'm all right."

"You are the color of a corpse."

"It's only..." She laughed, a thin, scraping sound. She was clinging to Berylla's sleeve with both hands and could not seem to let go. "It's only the painting."

"Which painting?"

"That one." She pointed, and her finger shook. "It's wrong."

Berylla did not look at the mural. She kept her eyes steadily on Solaia's face, and her voice, when it came, was very quiet.

"Wrong how?"

"The sky." Solaia closed her eyes. "It was never that color. It was gold. It was gold, and it was full of..."

She stopped.

The silence in the gallery had grown a quality she did not like. She opened her eyes. Berylla was watching her with an expression she had never seen on that stern, handsome face before. It was not suspicion, and it was not contempt. It was something deeper and more fearful than either.

It was the look of a woman who has been handed something very heavy and very dangerous and understands, all at once, that she will be expected to keep it.

"It was a long time ago," Solaia said, slowly. "Nobody alive could know what color the sky was."

"No one alive, my lady," said Berylla.

She said it softly. She did not blink.

And at the end of the long cold hall, in the shadow of the last great painting, the white-robed queen on her burning tower looked down at the two of them with her painted violet eyes, and it seemed, to a girl who could not remember her own name, that she was smiling.