Then Makepeace bit his own thumb and held it against her mouth, and she felt the flow of his ka, reinforcing the bond between them and bringing to the fore a combination of dismay and satiation that echoed Rian’s own response.
“Your sensitivity to light will spike again,” he said, climbing to his feet and walking without further delay from the room.
Of all the people she’d met since she’d returned to Prytennia, Makepeace was the last she’d expected to tumble with—which is what it most definitely felt like she’d done, even though all clothing had remained on. An embarrassing development, something she might cringe from when she was no longer so trammelled. She was not a person who needed a meeting of hearts to bed someone, but usually her dominant emotion wasn’t annoyance, or fear.
Rian had no certainty as to how long that had taken, but the light-headed exhaustion, the dragging confusion of thought, suggested that he had drunk very deeply of both blood and ka, and she was fortunate indeed that he’d found the wherewithal to stop.
It had at least briefly distracted her from earlier events. Possibly she now felt even worse, but that would pass. The one lesson she had no trouble remembering: in time she would recover, stop feeling so mortified, find her calm centre and move on.
She always had.
THIRTY-ONE
Aunt Arianne looked very small and crumpled, sitting with her knees drawn up under her chin. Though her eyes were open, she didn’t seem to notice Eluned and Eleri’s arrival until they put their hastily-assembled tea tray on the low table in the centre of the room. Then she unfolded, and said, “Thank you,” and then her face went tight and blank, like she regretted saying that and was trying to hide it.
“What happened to your hands?” Eleri asked, bluntly.
The way Aunt Arianne looked down at her collection of broken nails and scrapes made it clear she hadn’t even noticed.
“Oh,” she said, voice croaky with exhaustion. “That Sea of Lies thing. Nearly pulled me down—I was trying to drag myself out.” She lifted her head. “But I killed both Mendacii. I find I am inordinately proud of my shooting today.”
Aunt Arianne hadn’t told them that she’d been caught by the same thing that had killed Dem Blair. Eluned was willing to bet she’d have never even mentioned it, if they hadn’t asked about her hands. But even Aunt Arianne couldn’t be lightly amused tonight: she’d never sounded less able to breeze through all difficulties.
“He bit you, didn’t he?” Eluned said, putting a cup of tea almost sweet enough to please Griff in her aunt’s hands, and then sitting down and slipping her left arm around her waist to steady her upright.
Even though the day had been quite warm, Aunt Arianne’s skin was cold, and she seemed boneless and limp, only managing to drink a little tea before resting it on her lap. Eluned considered Forest House’s excess of stairs, then mouthed “Blanket” to Eleri.
“I don’t think I would have liked doing anything even resembling that with Lord Msrah,” Aunt Arianne said, distractedly. “Raw. Yes, raw. It would not have suited.”
Eluned freed her hand so she could rest it against Aunt Arianne’s forehead, but this was clammy, not hot. Still, the action seemed to bring her aunt a little way back to herself, and she offered Eluned an amused smile.
“It’s the loss of ka,” she said, and sipped her tea. “Not quite like being drunk, but I am rather disconnected.”
“Did he—did you decide to serve as his Bound after all?”
“No.” Aunt Arianne paused, then repeated more definitely. “No, that was an exigencies of battle thing, not a career decision. And something of a foretaste…” She looked absently at her cup, then up at Eluned. “Speaking of careers, Eluned, why is it that you change the subject whenever I try talk to you about your atelier application? Is it because you won’t be able to go to school with Eleri any more?”
Ambushed. “It’s nothing. I don’t.”
“I did receive a lot of artistic training, you know, even if I don’t…but if not me, I know a great many people—indeed, I believe I’ve met Nathalie Morris. Would you like me to arrange for you to talk to her?”
“No!” The idea of admitting to a National Artist that she couldn’t even… “It’s nothing.”
Aunt Arianne didn’t push, just sipped her tea again. It was only Eluned’s imagination that she slumped. She’d only been asking because she was a dutiful aunt.
But how true was that? One thing Eluned had come to understand was that Aunt Arianne was both nothing like the shallow care-for-nothing mother had thought her, nor the detached sophisticate Eluned had struggled to accept.
Eluned should have seen as soon as she noticed that every second person Aunt Arianne met remarked on her parents, and Aunt Arianne had to tell them she didn’t have the talent to follow in their footsteps. That light, vaguely amused tone made it into nothing, a small thing, so they wouldn’t ask again. A glass shield of pride, so expertly wielded it looked weightless.
But it felt like Aunt Arianne’s shield had become so much a part of her that she couldn’t put it down. This might be the first time Eluned had seen her without it, and only because it had shattered under multiple blows. To add another, even a tiny one, seemed impossibly cruel.
“I can’t draw,” she admitted, barely loud enough to be heard.
Eluned expected some kind of protestation, some insistence that that couldn’t be true, when the house in Caerlleon had been dotted with framed examples of her work. Instead, Aunt Arianne drank the last of her tea, then said: “You’ll never be able to show Aedric anything again.”
“What?”
“He was your teacher, yes? The one whose opinion mattered. Nothing you do from now on, no matter how good or bad, can ever make him proud of you.”
Eluned felt short of breath. It was true, true.
“But, then, what can I do?” Her throat hurt from the words.
“Stop. If the only reason you have is Aedric’s approval, you should find a better way to spend your time.”
Eluned stiffened. She knew she shouldn’t have asked Aunt Arianne.
“And there,” Aunt Arianne said, with a smile in her voice. “Now you can prove me wrong. But I meant what I said. Be someone who doesn’t draw. Don’t even try, until something comes along that makes it impossible to not draw, which makes it not even a choice. Then it won’t matter who is proud, or not, because that isn’t the point, is it?”
“I…”
“You’ll find a way, Eluned,” Aunt Arianne said, and dropped her head to rest on Eluned’s shoulder.
Her weary certainty was oddly warming, and Eluned sat quietly until Eleri returned, and they tucked their drowsing aunt under the blanket.
“What next?” Eleri asked, as they left Aunt Arianne a covered plate and took the teapot back to the kitchen. “Sit up? Bed?”
“I don’t think Dem Makepeace is likely to come back tonight,” Eluned said. “I don’t think I can sleep yet, though.”
“Going—”
The window rattled. Not from wind, but as if something had tried to tear it open from the outside. Eluned managed, barely, not to drop the teapot, and stared into the blackness of the grove, and at the shape barely visible in the soft gaslight, standing on the sill.
“Cat. Folie?”
“Must be,” Eluned said, staring at the small head, the slender legs. “That’s what chased off that thing on the wall?”
The folie clawed at the window again, and the whole casement shook, the glass in extreme danger of breaking. Tiny as it was, the folie was clearly capable of doing serious damage if they didn’t let it in.