Page 24 of Where Shadows Bloom

My words were greeted with thick silence. Shame washed over me, though I didn’t quite know what I’d done to offend.

Emilia cleared her throat, smiling. “So, mi linda, why is it that you brought your knighthere? To the safest place in the world?”

It was simple: because she and I were not to be parted.

“Lope and I traveled alone, all the way from the countryside,” I said. “It was imperative that I come here, that I find my mother, even if we faced monsters on the—”

The gamblers gasped and hushed and whispered. A young woman’s fan clicked rapidly as she fluttered it. A man clutched at his heart. Emilia waved a hand at me.

“Enough of that,” she said. “You’re new here; you do not understand. The king loathes such talk. He’d have you thrown from the palace if he knew you spoke of those...things.”

I frowned. “But His Majesty is not here.”

Emilia lifted her own fan, white and covered with flowers. She hid her mouth as she said, “One can never be toocareful, my dear.” With a flourish, she shut her fan and tapped the back of my hand. “How curious it is, that a noblewoman would be raised in the countryside. You are nearly a woman. You should have beenhere, finding yourself a match, not languishing out in the middle of nowhere.”

Yes.Yes, she understood. That had been all my heart had wanted. Mother and Lope and I, tucked safe within the pages of the story of this beautiful, blessed palace. A story where I was independent and bold and in love. In love with a stormy-eyed girl, spinning in a ballroom...

“Who is your father, dear?”

I blinked, awaking from the reverie. “My father?”

Someone at the table giggled and then hastily tried to disguise it with a cough.

“Yes, love. If he was a count, he must have lived at Le Château, mustn’t he?”

Mother rarely spoke of him. A few paintings of him were among the many portraits lining the halls of the manor. I had always assumed that stories of him, like stories about Le Château, were simply too painful for her.

“I—I know little about him,” I admitted. “He was Comte Luc de Bouchillon, and Mother fell in love with him when she was commissioned to paint his portrait. He and Mother both lived at Le Château before I was born.”

“Another clue!” said Emilia. “How long ago was that, dear?”

My heart quickened. Perhaps she remembered. Perhaps the tiles of this strange, muddled mosaic were coming together. “I just turned seventeen, señora.”

“Seventeen years ago... I was a little younger than you are now.” She looked heavenward as though trying to remember something. “So your mother was a painter. That does not help our mystery, I’m afraid. The king loves to collect artists.” Emilia fluttered her hand in the air to every wall. “As you can see.”

My eyes flitted from one canvas to another. Vistas I’d never seen, great boats amid violent storms, castles and manors, and snowcapped peaks.

If one of her paintings had been on these walls... if some trace of her remained in this very room...

“Excuse me—!” I cried as I leapt from my chair and moved toward the gallery walls. I knew her style so well. She preferred simple, realistic settings, pastoral and sweet. Her favorite part of painting, she’d said, was trying to capture how the light would play against the features of her subjects.

Weaving through the tables, I glanced from one painting to the next. A portrait of an old woman—no, it was painted indoors, which Mother didn’t care for. I looked past every landscape, every dull painting of a bowl of fruit or a stack of books.

“My lady!” I heard behind me.

I called back to Lope, “Maybe Mother painted one ofthese!” and dove back into the crowd. There was a smaller portrait, the size of my hand, hanging beside a window, similar to what Mother would have painted. But the artist’s signature in the corner was aJand a scribble—nothing like Mother’s at all.

It was a useless hunt. One fueled by desperation and fatigue. We had journeyed fordaysand had been whisked into this room like leaves blown by storm winds. My head was addled, I was losing my—

Across from me, among a thousand other paintings, one captured my eye. It was no bigger than one of the history books in our library. A small window without any panes.

In the painting, bushes overflowed with scarlet roses, and spraying fountains were placed along a dirt walkway into the vanishing point of the painting. The bright sky with the softest brushstrokes of clouds was so realistic that I could imagine the sun shining warm upon my face.

Two statues were rendered delicately, tenderly, within the painting. A marble statue of a man was on the left side, dressed in robes like he was from a thousand years ago. His hand was upon his hip, where a sword was kept. His head was turned toward the right side of the canvas—toward his companion statue, a woman. Though made of stone, her full figure appeared soft and graceful beneath carefully draped fabric, carved in marble. She looked fondly at the other statue—and cold seeped into my stomach as I looked at her.

The shape of her nose. The dimple in her smile. Thepaintbrush hidden within the crown of laurels in her hair. The statue of the woman—my mother?—gazed so intently at the statue of the man. If she was real... who was he? This man looked nothing like the painting of my father hanging in our manor.

I stumbled closer, my eyes darting to the bottom-right corner of the canvas. Among boughs of ivy was a single letter painted in white—M. The same curves and flourishes of Mother’s signature.

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