Page 133 of A Game of Veils

The painting encompassed in that frame stretches nearly to the ceiling and four times as wide as my arms can reach. I have to step back to the opposite wall to take it all in.

As soon as I do, I know why it caught my gaze.

Flames lick across a hilly landscape spotted with forests and towns. Trees have toppled, buildings have collapsed. Tiny figures flee in chaos across the terrain.

It’s a depiction of the Great Retribution. The punishment our greatest god, the All-Giver, rained across the realms in response to terrifying acts of brutal magic as a scourge of twisted sorcerers attempted to raise themselves above any higher power.

In the aftermath, out of divine disappointment and offense, the Great God abandoned our continent to the care of the lesser gods who remained. But the painting isn’t one of despair.

Right in the center of the epic masterpiece, a new city shimmers, sunlight catching off the spire of its temple and its silvery rooftops. There’s no mistaking the intended symbolism.

Just as the cleric said that past evening, out of the ruin of the Great Retribution, Dariu recovered first. It was during those early days of recovery that an emperor saw the opportunity to bring the surrounding countries under his sway. His armies swept across the continent while the rest of us were still picking up the pieces of our livelihoods.

The painting might as well be gloating about their victory at our expense. Still, even as I grimace, a fire of my own flares up inside me to fill just a little of the emptiness.

Hundreds of years ago, after the worst destruction the continent has ever faced, Dariu rose from the ashes and turned itself into something even stronger than before.

Who’s to say I can’t do the same?

Chapter Forty-One

Lorenzo

The sky above the trees is pitch black. I can barely see the strings of my lute in the faint illumination that seeps from the distant palace lanterns.

I ought to be in my bed. Weariness drags at my bones. I keep missing notes, stumbling over melodies I know.

The problem is that whenever I close my eyes, I see too much. Marclinus’s ladies smearing blood beneath their feet as they dance to my music. The panther lunging among them.

Aurelia’s grief-stricken face when the former Lady Rochelle lay crumpled in front of her.

Then the flush in her cheeks as she embraced Bastien and Raul together, so much like the rosy hue that came over her face as she gazed up at me in her bed.

My fingers trip over the strings again. I grimace at the instrument as if it’s at fault rather than me.

The crunch of footsteps brings my head snapping up. If a few restless nobles are wandering the forest looking to relieve their late-night boredom, I’d rather not become their target.

The forms that emerge from the darkness are more welcome, if not by much in my current state of mind.

Raul comes to a stop a few paces away, carrying a lantern set at a dim glow. Bastien draws up at his side.

The slimmer man’s mouth twists with an uneven smile. “I figured if you weren’t in your chambers, you’d be out here.”

I don’t feel like expending the energy to focus my gift if I don’t have to. Gripping the lute’s neck in one hand, I let my other dart through the air. What do you want?

My gesture must look as brusque as the question sounds in my head, because Bastien winces.

“You’re obviously upset,” he says. “We never had a chance to talk after— I’m sorry, Lore. It shouldn’t have happened that way.”

He isn’t saying it shouldn’t have happened at all. Does he have any idea just how forcefully that moment in the shuttered bedroom sent me ricocheting from one extreme of emotion to another?

I’ve never felt anywhere close to as happy as I did today, with Aurelia’s caresses and eager words repeating in my memory. To know that she wanted me enough to offer up every part of herself, that she trusted me so much she didn’t fear the consequences, that she wanted to dream of another reality where we might have been entwined for the rest of our lives…

Even the awful truth of her situation and who she’d have to marry dwindled to nothing but a faint sting in the midst of that giddy whirlwind.

But I don’t have her even that much. She looked just as eager for my foster brothers’ attentions as she did for mine. Just hours after we tumbled together…

Do I even still have the men I thought of as my closest friends? They noticed my good spirits, I revealed the reason to them with all due respect to the woman involved—and they immediately set out to have her for themselves.

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