Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,56

that do?”

He gestured back at the monstrosity on the table.

And it was a monstrosity. In fact, that was being kind. It was a bunch of small, individual statues: me, the consul, Mircea, Caedmon, and a headless guy I thought might be Marlowe, given the Elizabethan outfit, only he wasn’t finished yet. We were standing in the middle of the table, chins and even a few arms raised, Caedmon’s cloak flying out dramatically behind him.

We looked like crappy superheroes. We looked like we’d just dropped our first mixtape. We looked like we were posing for the world’s cheesiest album cover.

It was awful.

Even worse, these weren’t the finished versions. They’d been made on a wire base—a little loop of it stuck out of Marlowe’s neck, for the head, I supposed. Another protruded from under the sleeve of the consul’s flowing robe, waiting for a hand and probably a snake to be put in it. But the rest were covered with some sort of polymer clay, in sculpted, flowing lines that mimicked the brush strokes Rafe had put on paper.

He’d drawn them; somebody else was sculpting them. But not here. Maybe because they wouldn’t fit?

I had a sudden, horrible thought. There’d been niches for statuary outside, in the big main corridor, between every two or three paintings. Empty niches. I hadn’t thought much about them at the time, but now . . .

“Those are mock-ups,” I said, my lips going numb.

“Yeeees,” Caedmon admitted. “That was my understanding.”

“How big is the final version?”

He hesitated, but finally came out with it. “Sixteen feet?”

I turned around and walked away.

He jogged up alongside. “Cassie, wars need heroes. People need to believe they can win. That is why the kinetic sculpture is outside. Made in fey workshops, beyond human skill, to show everyone that you have allies among my people as well as enemies—”

“That’s not the sculpture I’m upset about!”

Instead of another goddess gown, my little mock-up had been wearing a breastplate over some kind of leather getup. Huntress garb, I thought, my blood boiling. I didn’t know why Rafe hadn’t just given me a bow and quiver and been done with it!

Of course, maybe he had. Maybe they were off getting sculpted, along with Marlowe’s head and the consul’s damned snakes! And screw this!

Caedmon caught my arm again, halfway down a side corridor, and damn it, that was getting old! I whirled on him. “What do you want?”

“To understand.”

“You want to understand? Understand this. I am not your chosen one. I’m not Hercules; I’m not my mother; I’m not some savior come to make everything okay again! I’m just me, and I can’t have any more people depending on me! I can’t have them looking to me to save them when I can barely save myself!”

“I understand—”

“Do you? I already have a court I don’t know if I can protect, a bunch of little kids who will die if I screw up! Do you understand that? Do you have any idea—”

But of course he didn’t. What the hell was I thinking? Caedmon looked like some kind of god himself, which he sort of was, because god + fey is a hell of a lot less diluted than god + Roger freaking Palmer! And, of course, I’d taken after my father, who was good at running scams—and running, period, when those scams blew up in his face—but not much else.

Which was why he and Mom were dead and I was here, and probably about to screw up massively because I was due, and—

I felt when it hit, an incipient panic attack boiling under my breastbone, tightening my chest, threatening my breathing. My head went swimmy, and I simultaneously wanted to throw up and start laughing hysterically. There might be something wrong with me, I thought, as the corridor started closing in.

And then snapped back to normal when a fussy-looking little guy burst out of a door just up the hall. He looked spooked, like a mouse with a hawk after him. Which wasn’t far from the truth, I thought, as Mircea’s voice followed him through the opening.

“—constantly undermining my authority. I won’t have it!”

“You won’t have it?” The consul’s usually honeyed tones sounded more like the lashes of a whip. “Parendra is a consul; you are not. You would do well to remember that.”

“I am head of this army. He would do well to remember that!”

Caedmon and I looked at each other, and he made little hand motions that somehow managed both to be comical and to convey