We were exiles from a throne I’d never known, and which my father had never wanted. It was now occupied by someone else, who I wasn’t sure as it changed often, but not us. And it would never be us again.
But Horatiu saw me as a little princess, and now his princess had a doll. I had hugged his neck and told him how much it meant to me. That, at least, had not been a lie. But I had been dismayed to think that I was to be stuck inside with it, while my friends stole candy and played pranks and watched ships come in at the docks, carrying untold wonders from faraway lands.
And now I had two dolls.
I smiled anyway and unwrapped my gift, and then just sat there for the longest time, staring.
It was not a doll.
“Do you like it?” Mircea asked, his face growing concerned. Probably because I had immediately thanked Horatiu this morning, whereas now, I couldn’t seem to speak.
It was a small copy of Mircea’s own artist’s box, the one he used to paint the pictures that supplemented our income. It had a plain wooden cover concealing wonder after wonder. There was a sheaf of finely made brushes, half vair hair, from the squirrels whose bluish gray fur often lined gowns in winter, and half pig bristle; a wooden palette fitted for a small hand, and complete with a flask of linseed oil, already reduced in the sun and perfect for mixing paints; a bunch of willow twigs made into charcoal for sketching; some costly rag paper, which could also be used for sketching or could be coated in linseed oil and made semi-transparent, for tracing.
But as astonishing as all of those were, they paled into comparison with the pigments, so wonderful and so many! There were the two mainstays of lead white and lamp black, the latter made from the soot collected from oil lamps. There were the arsenic-derived hues of orpiment and realgar, the first of which was a bright, lemon yellow, and the second a vivid orange, and which mixed together made a color reminiscent of gold. There were the clays: the beautiful reddish-brown of sienna, the softer, yellowish brown of umber, and the rich, dark brown of burnt umber. There were the blues: the deep sapphire of indigo, the sparkling, blue-green of azurite, and the purplish red of madder root. Even the rich crimson of vermilion had been included, and the costly but brilliant green of malachite.
But they weren’t in solid form, as I’d expected. Instead, finely ground powders resided in small, square wooden cells that took up fully half of the larger box. I had never seen anything like it.
“I ground them for you,” Mircea explained. “Some of the pigments can be dangerous. This way, you don’t have to touch them.”
“No,” I whispered.
“And no licking the end of your brush. We’ve talked about that.”
“No,” I promised. It was all I could seem to say.
I had wanted to paint for as long as could remember, and had watched him doing so longingly. But the most he would let me do was to sketch with charcoal on some of the cheap brown wrapping paper he brought home, the kind that sweets were sold in. He had said that I could paint when I was older, but I had thought to use a few of his scraps, not . . . not anything like this.
“Do you like it?” Mircea asked, when I continued to sit there silently.
I found that I still couldn’t say anything. I just looked up at him mutely. But when Horatiu, who had come in at some point, tried to take the paint box, my hands refused to let it go.
“I think she likes it,” the old man said, and ruffled my hair.
“Dorina. Dorina.”
I blinked and the second memory faded, leaving me with just the first. Which I realized had stopped, like a movie that had run to its end. It had stalled around Ray, with Colette’s birds paused in the air above his head, reaching for the last scraps of bread; with the door to the bell tower opening behind him, and an angry priest halfway out, his black cassock looking hot and uncomfortable in the summer sun; and with a bunch of guilty appearing kids looking up, halfway through their feast.
“I’m getting tired,” I explained. “It becomes harder to project.”
“Then don’t,” Ray said. “That was incredible. I’ve seen stuff in other people’s heads