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(Especially when she was busy trying to unite the Hold’s cats by tying their tails together, Iantine had added mentally. Bitra Hold did not have a single unscathed animal, and the spit-boy said they’d lost seven dogs to accidents that year already.) Luccha’s mouth was set aslant in her face, the thin lips usually compressed in a sour line.

Lonada, the second daughter, had a pudding face, with small dark holes for eyes, and her father’s nose: bad enough in a male, but fatal for a female.

Iantine had also had to buy a lock from the Hold steward to prevent his sleeping-furs from walking out of the narrow little cubicle in which he was quartered. He knew his packs had been searched the first day; probably several times by the variety of smeared fingerprints left on the paint pots. As he had brought nothing of real value with him - not having many possessions - he hadn’t worried.

Holds usually had one light-fingered person, and the Hold steward usually knew who it was and retrieved what had gone astray from guests’ rooms.

But when Iantine found his paint pots left open to dry out, he protested. And paid for a lock. Not that he felt all that secure, for if there was one key to that lock, there could be duplicates. But his furs did remain on his bed. And glad he was to have them, for the thin blanket supplied was holey and ought to have been torn up for rug lengths long since.

That was the least of his problems at Bitra Hold, however.

Having heard all that was wrong with the next set of miniatures he managed to produce, a third larger than the first, Iantine began to have a somewhat clearer grasp of just how the parents envisaged their offspring. On his fifth set, he nearly won the accolade of satisfactory”. Nearly. Then the children, one after another, succumbed to an infant disease that resulted in such a rash that they could not possibly sit”.

“Well, you’d better do something to earn your keep,” Chalkin told his contract portraitist when Lady Nadona had announced the children were isolated.

The contract says I will have room and board - - -, Chalkin held up a thick forefinger, his smile not the least bit humorous. When you are honoring that contract - But the children are sick Chalkin had shrugged. That’s neither here nor there. You are unable to honor the specific conditions of the contract.

Therefore you are not entitled to be fed and housed at the Hold’s expense. Of course, I can always deduct your leisure time from the fee… The smile deepened vindictively.

“Leisure…” Iantine had been so enraged that the protest burst from him before he could suppress it. No wonder, he thought, shaking with the control he had to enforce on himself, no-one else at Hall Domaize would sign with Bitra.

“Well,” Chalkin went on, as if he were a reasonable man, “what else does one call it if you are not engaged in the lab ours which you are contracted for?” Iantine had to wonder if Chalkin knew how necessary it was for him to earn the exact fee promised. Iantine had held no conversations with anyone in the Hold; they were so sullen and uncommunicative a group at their best - which was usually at mealtimes - that he hoped he’d be spared them at their worst. He had steadfastly refused to have a little game with cooks or guards, which accounted for a good deal of the general animosity towards him. So how would anyone know anything about his personal life or his reasons for working here?

So, instead of already being on his way home with a satisfactory contract fulfilled and the marks for the transfer fee heavy in his pouch, Iantine spent his leisure time touching up the faces of Chalkin’s ancestors in the main Hall murals.

“Good practice for you, I’m sure,” Chalkin had said, all too amiably, as he made his daily inspection of this project. “You’ll be better equipped to do satisfactory portraits of this generation.” Pig faces, all of them, with the ancestral bulbous nose, Iantine noticed.

Oddly enough, one or two of the ancestresses had been very pretty girls, far too young and attractive for the mean-mouthed men they had been contracted to. Too bad the male genes dominated.

Of course, Iantine had had to make up batches of the special paints required for mural work, having initially had no idea that such would be required. He also found his supplies of the oil paints drastically reduced by the repeated ‘unsatisfactory’ portraits. He had the choice of sending back to Hall Domaize for additional supplies and paying transport charges, plus having to wait for them to reach him - or finding the raw materials and manufacturing the colors himself - which was the better option.

“How much?” he exclaimed in shock when the head cook told him what he’d have to pay for the eggs and oil he needed to mix into his pigments.

“Yiss, an’ that doan include cost of hiring the equipment,” the cook added, sniffing. The man had a perpetually running nose, sometimes dripping down his upper lip. But not, Iantine devoutly hoped, into whatever he was in the process of preparing.

“I have to hire bowls and jars from you?” Iantine wondered how the cook could have become infected with Chalkin’s greed.

“Well, if I ain’t using em, and you is, you should pay for the use, seems like.” He sniffed so deeply Iantine wondered there could be any mucus left in his sinus cavities. “Shoulda brought yer stuff with ye if ye’d need it. Lord Holder sees you usin” things from his kitchen and one of us’ll be paying for it. Won’t be me!” And he sniffed again, shrugging one dirty white shoulder as emphasis.

“I came with adequate supplies and equipment for the work I was hired to do,” Iantine said, curbing an intense desire to shove the man’s face in the thin soup he was stirring.

“So?”

Iantine had walked, stiff-legged with fury, out of the kitchen.

He tried to tell himself that he was learning, the very hardest way, how to deal with the client.

Finding the raw materials for his pigments had proved nearly as difficult since it was, after all, coming on to deep winter here in the Bitran hills. He discovered a hefty hunk of stone with a rounded end that would do as a pestle, and then a hollowed-out rock that would act as a mortar. He had found a whole hillside of the sabsab bush whose roots produced a yellow color; enough raw cobalt to get blue, and the paw berry leaves that boiled up one of the finest pure reds with neither tint nor tinge of orange or purple. With the greatest of luck he also came across ochre mud. Rather than rent” containers, he used chipped crockery he unearthed from the midden heap. He did have to pay the price of best oil for the substandard stuff which was all the cook would sell him.

And that mark, he was sure, would never be passed on to Lord Chalkin as fee.

He managed to get enough saucers or mugs - they used a very cheap pottery in Bitra Hold - to hold the different colors he needed. He hadn’t quite finished the repair work when Chaldon recovered sufficiently from the rash to be able to sit/ stand once more.

Chaldon had lost weight during the fever which accompanied the emergence of the rash. He was also lethargic and, as long as Iantine could think up funny stories to tell as he worked, he stayed reasonably still. Calling himself the worst kind of panderer, Iantine made the boy resemble the best looking of the ancestors he’d relimned. The boy was certainly pleased and ran off to find his mother, shouting that he did look like Greatgranddaddy, just as she always said he did.

The same ploy did not quite work on Luccha’s portrait when she had recovered. Her skin was sallower, she’d lost hair and too much weight to improve her undistinguished looks. While he had aimed for her great-grandmother thrice removed, she didn’t have the right facial structure and even he had to admit the result was unsatisfactory.

“Her illness,” he’d mumbled when Chalkin and Nadona recited the long catalogue of dissimilarities between their daughter and the portrait.