Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,55

a moment.”

I nodded, and he went off to help the hapless soul. Caedmon and I walked to the end of the hall, and found a room that simply had to be Rafe’s. For one thing, it had a door—made of heavy old planks and banded with iron, like somebody had looted a castle—that was half-open, allowing us to push our way inside. For another, it was just him.

Stuccoed walls with rounded corners, like in an old monastery, rose up to a point in the center of the ceiling, where a decorative finial dropped down, capping it off. Elsewhere, there were scarred wooden tables littered with reference books and loose papers, old crockery full of paintbrushes and knives, and jars of the paints Rafe mixed himself, out of ocher and cinnabar, lapis and pearls, gold and silver. And it smelled just like I remembered: of turpentine and linseed oil, charcoal and wine—because who can paint without a glass of wine?

But there were no sketchbooks, or rather, there were, but they were all around us, the clean white stucco being offensive to an artist’s eye. Not that it was clean anymore: everywhere I looked were faces, hands, and profiles. Here a guy with a pert backside, looking at me coquettishly over his shoulder; there a mother with a baby at her breast, serenity radiating from her face; here a rearing horse, its mane flowing majestically in the breeze; there a beautifully rendered snake head, its scales like perfect little jewels—

And me, I realized, staring at the drawings above a cluttered workbench.

Some of them were me as a child, my pudgy cheeks and big eyes and bouncy ponytails making me look vaguely like an anime character. Others showed me with the long hair I used to have as a teen, before I cut it off while on the run, because hip-length red-gold hair is damned hard to hide. Others looked to be more recent, although there was something off about them.

It wasn’t the facial features, which were accurate, because Rafe was always accurate. It wasn’t the hair, which for once was my current curly bob. It wasn’t the clothes, not that many were shown because the portraits were mostly from the neck up.

I didn’t know what it was.

And then I realized: it looked like my skin but with somebody else inside.

Like the painting outside in the corridor, that wasn’t me. The proud lift to the chin, the resolute gaze, the confidence that that woman wore like a cloak—all were things I wished I had, but that wasn’t what I saw in the mirror every morning. And it suddenly hit me, like a pang under the breast.

Was this how he saw me?

It should have been flattering—that woman looked better than I ever had—but it wasn’t. I thought Rafe knew me better than this. I thought that he, of all people, liked me, not whatever everyone kept trying to make out of me.

It seemed like I wasn’t enough for him, either.

And then I saw Caedmon, or rather, his hand clutching the now destroyed staff. And a fallen horse, its eye round and frightened. And Mircea—only the upper half of the face, but I’d know that hawklike gaze anywhere. And the consul—

“These must have been practice for the paintings,” I said, relief obvious in my voice.

Until I turned around to see Caedmon pulling a sheet off of something on a central worktable.

“Not just for the paintings,” he told me gently.

For a moment, I just blinked at what he’d revealed, unable to process it. I felt like my brain had taken a vacation and was refusing to acknowledge what my eyes were seeing, although my body seemed to understand. Because my pulse was suddenly hammering in my throat, goose bumps had broken out on my arms, and there was a roaring in my ears.

And then I turned around and left the room.

Caedmon caught up with me almost before I got out the door. “People need heroes, Cassie, in war even more than in peace.”

“So go be a hero!”

A hand caught my bicep as I started to move away. “A hero they can understand, one they can identify with. The ancient Greeks knew that. Why do you think the stories of Hercules outnumber those of any other god? He was half-human—”

“I’m not Hercules!”

“Perhaps. But you are a target, whether you like it or not. You are a leader in this war, whether you like it or not. You are already involved, as are we all. What harm does