Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [49]
“Don‘t,” she whispered. “Don’t think that.”
He lowered his head again, trembling. “I didn’t want to tell you. God knows, I didn’t want to tell anyone. But when I tried on the armor at your shop ... it all came back to me, then. All of it at once, all the blood and the fear and the hopelessness....”
“Why?” she asked him. Trying to understand the connection. When he didn’t answer for several long seconds, she pressed him gently. “What does the armor have to do with all this?”
In answer he disentangled his hand from hers—reluctantly, she thought—and reached across the table. The canvas roll had been tied shut with a slender cord; unknotting it, he set the string aside. He made room to spread the canvas out on the table, then did so. Handling it gently but firmly, hands trembling as he unrolled it. It was an old piece which had been torn and repaired more than once; stripes of tape had yellowed across its back, eating into the linen canvas. As he unrolled it, she saw aged paint, a webwork of fine cracks, the edges of a piece that had been hastily and carelessly hacked from a larger painting—
And then it was laid out before her, and she saw.
“Oh, my gods,” she whispered. Stunned.
The painting was part of a formal portrait, and it was marked with several parallel slashes where a knife had scored the canvas. The object of the portrait was a young man, and even this tattered remnant of a larger painting conveyed the power of his presence, the beauty of his person. Tall, slender, he wore a breastplate emblazoned with a golden sun and a coronet decorated with mythological figures. That breastplate. That coronet. Fine golden-brown hair flowed down about his shoulders, tousled by an unseen wind. Gray eyes, cool and dominant, met the viewer’s own as if there were some living will behind them. Sardonic, seductive. Seeing him rendered thus, Narilka felt herself tremble. Because there there was no mistaking the portrait’s subject. And no denying that she knew him all too intimately.
The Hunter.
“Who is it?” she managed. Finding her voice at last.
“Gerald Tarrant. Founder of my family line, first Neocount of Merentha.” He hesitated; when he spoke again she sensed him picking his way through his words carefully, perhaps choosing which facets of the story to reveal to her. “In his day ... he slaughtered all his kin. All but one. His son returned home to find ... what I found ... it was he who did this.” He indicated the slash marks in the canvas, their edges cracked and yellowing. “That’s what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Do you understand? Not my face, but his. A man who could murder his entire family....”
“Shh. It’s over now.” She took his hands in hers, warming them gently. “The armor’s just a piece of metal. And the coronet. No more.” It hurt her inside, to know what the next words had to be—her artist’s soul rebelled at the thought—but she knew they had to be said. “If they cause you pain, then destroy them. Unmake them. Commission something else, which has a better meaning for you.”
The green eyes were fixed on her, their surface glistening; were those tears gathering in the comers? “I could never destroy your work,” he whispered.
“It’s only metal,” she assured him. Trying to make the words come easily, so that he wouldn’t sense how much this was costing her. “We can melt it down and make something worthwhile out of it. Something equally beautiful, that doesn’t have memories attached.”
He managed a wry smile. “Your boss would hardly approve of that.”
“Some things are more important than Gresham’s approval,” she assured him.
And for a moment, in his eyes, it seemed that she could see into the core of him. Sensing a frightened young man who had thought that the world would always indulge his pleasures, now forced into a hellish maturity of fear and isolation. All that, masked to perfection