The Wound That Wasn’t There Yet

All the way to the palace hill, Saeron felt the cold more keenly than usual.

Neither the thick, dark doublet nor the carefully fastened cloak helped. The night’s rain had left a thin layer of mud between the stones, and the morning wind drove the damp out from between the walls and beneath his clothes.

The city had been awake for more than an hour, yet the squares he had to cross were occupied mainly by people with hands clenched around tools and voices lowered to clipped commands.

Within the palace walls, a different cold prevailed. The ordinary cries of the city did not reach this place. Isolated words cut through the air, uttered with greater care and a solemnity that suggested not prayer, but a curse written in the margin of a document.

The representatives attending the reconciliation assembly had been arranged before the entrance.

Every kingdom in Valen had sent its people.

Saeron watched them through weary eyes, studying not only faces and clothes, but the placement of feet, the set of shoulders, the direction of each gaze, and the distance left between one person and the next.

Meran Vey stood out among the others like a crack in an even wall. He was not a delegate, yet he moved between them with the confidence of a man who knew where each of them ought to stand.

He wore a black cloak over the doublet Saeron had seen only a few hours earlier. The high collar, silver fastenings, and pale cuffs looked exactly the same.

Saeron glanced instinctively at his neck.

It was clean.

Meran was alive.

Of course he was alive.

Saeron forced himself to look elsewhere.

Beside two southern delegates stood a woman representing one of the western courts. Her fingers rested lightly on the hilt of a ceremonial rapier. She smiled at each representative in turn, but her eyes never lingered on any of them for more than a second.

Saeron paused at the entrance.

He did not belong to this world, but he was no longer merely its observer.

He had been summoned to deliver three sketches for the commissioned work. He knew, however, that this was not about art.

The unity he was meant to preserve on canvas existed nowhere beyond official declarations and poses. Saeron saw people eager to inscribe their own names in history, preferably at a neighbour’s expense. Their bodies bent in courteous gestures, but the muscles of their faces worked like those of predators just before the bite.

Averan Sorn emerged from a side corridor.

As at their previous meeting, he wore dark, unadorned clothes. He held a bundle of documents in both hands and acknowledged that he recognised Saeron with only a brief nod.

“Master Saeron. His Majesty is expecting your sketches.”

Saeron raised a slim portfolio bound in grey cloth.

“Three versions. As instructed.”

Averan nodded.

“Please wait by the colonnade. The audience will begin once all members of the Council have assembled.”

Saeron walked a few paces into the vestibule.

The delegates began to take their appointed places. The representatives of Ardelon led the way. The other delegations followed, separated according to a ceremonial order designed to appear natural.

Meran was invited inside just before Saeron.

The narrow corridor leading to the Hall of Shadows seemed colder still than the square. They passed beneath a glass vault where the air stood motionless and light glanced off the surface as though from a sheet of ice.

Whispers passed among the envoys. Someone mentioned tension on the northern borders. Another spoke of a dispute over tariffs and the right of passage.

Meran listened, but did not take part.

His face remained calm, almost ascetic, but the fingers of his right hand kept rubbing together, as though he were trying to remove invisible dust from them.

Saeron remembered that same hand resting beside the seam of the black doublet the previous evening.

Then the red mark on the painting.

At the entrance to the Hall of Shadows, Averan halted the procession.

They waited.

Meran turned his head.

“Master Saeron.”

Saeron nodded.

“Were you working last night?”

The question struck with too much precision.

“Yes.”

“On the composition?”

“Among other things.”

Meran raised his brows.

“I wonder which of the versions you will present first.”

“That depends entirely on the light.”

One corner of Meran’s mouth lifted.

“Light can be fickle.”

“Then one must change one’s point of view.”

Averan signalled for them to continue.

A moment later, Saeron entered the Hall of Shadows.

Meran followed him inside, alive and composed, as though the night had left no trace anywhere beyond Saeron’s studio.

The Hall of Shadows smelled of freshly buffed wax and old, damp marble.

A long oval table stood at the centre. At its shorter end was a chair upholstered in dark velvet.

When the doors opened once more, the conversations fell silent.

Rhaevan III entered.

He needed no crown to distinguish him from the officials.

He was tall and broad-shouldered, heavier than in Saeron’s portrait. The ceremonial doublet concealed a thickened waist, but not the mass of his chest or the breadth of his shoulders. His short-cropped dark-chestnut hair was silver at the temples.

He moved calmly. On his first step towards the chair, his right leg remained a little stiffer than the left.

Saeron noticed.

No one else betrayed that they had noticed anything at all.

The king sat.

Averan bowed his head.

“Your Majesty, as ordered, I present Master Saeron and three versions of The Image of Unity.”

Rhaevan first swept his gaze across the delegates. Only then did he look at the painter.

“You have the sketches?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Show me.”

Averan turned the first board around.

On the paper, an elongated table stood along an axis of light. The delegates sat on either side, divided by space and the emblems of their own states.

Rhaevan pointed to an empty section at the end of the table.

“Why is there no one here?”

“The League of Jahrann has not yet confirmed the name of its representative. I did not wish to create a man before the League itself had done so.”

The corner of the king’s mouth twitched.

“A safe answer.”

He ran a finger over the empty space.

“Except emptiness has a meaning of its own.”

“I know.”

Averan revealed the second sketch.

The delegates were leaving the hall after signing the agreement, but each was heading in a different direction. Their gestures remained ceremonial. The composition did not.

Rhaevan studied it for a long time.

“Is this the true image of Valen?”

“If you are asking how I see it today, then yes.”

A barely perceptible movement passed through the room.

“True art is not always beautiful,” the king said. “Today, however, we do not need truth alone. We need an image of a future we have not yet managed to reach.”

“And if they do not believe it?”

“First they must see something they can believe in.”

Averan moved the final sketch into view.

The delegates stood close together around the table. Light from the high windows connected the figures more than their gestures did. The differences remained, but from the proper distance they could be overlooked.

Rhaevan leaned forwards.

“That one.”

Saeron had expected the answer.

“I began the underpainting from it yesterday.”

Averan looked at him.

The king raised his brows.

“Without permission?”

“With the deadline I was given.”

“And if I had chosen another?”

“I would have lost a day’s work.”

“My day.”

“Paint cannot tell who is paying for it.”

Someone at the table shifted uneasily.

Rhaevan looked intrigued rather than offended.

“How far have you got?”

“The architecture. The arrangement of light. The first places. One figure.”

“Which one?”

Saeron looked at Meran.

“Meran Vey.”

Meran did not move.

“Why him?” Rhaevan asked.

“His position was one of the few the Chancellery did not intend to change.”

The king placed a hand on the third sketch.

“From today, you will continue with this version alone. Vey will provide the final arrangement of figures, the heraldic devices, and the remaining details.”

Meran answered with a bow.

“I shall do everything I can to spare Master Saeron from repainting half of Valen.”

“One quarter will be enough,” Saeron said.

Several people looked away to hide their reactions.

“You have seven days to bring the underpainting to a state in which I can see the entire arrangement,” the king said.

“Seven days is not long.”

“Three weeks is shorter still if we begin with eight.”

Saeron nodded.

Rhaevan looked at the composition once more.

“I am not asking you to paint love where there is none. I want the man who looks at this painting twenty years from now to be able to believe that, for one day, we were capable of standing beside one another.”

It was not clear whether he was speaking to the painter or to the people seated at the table.

“The painting is meant to outlive the meeting,” he added. “The meeting need not outlive the painting.”

Averan gathered the remaining sketches.

The audience was over.

The delegates began to leave.

At the door, Saeron passed Meran. He looked at him a fraction too long.

The official noticed.

“Is something wrong?”

“Your collar.”

Meran touched the cloth.

“Crooked?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

Saeron looked him in the eyes.

“Nothing.”

The light in the corridor was so sharp that it hurt his eyes.

The marble walls reflected the glow of the candelabra, multiplying shadows at every turn.

Meran was waiting at the first junction.

He held a slim portfolio beneath one arm.

“You came to terms with the king’s decision quickly.”

“It was not mine to make.”

“Perhaps not. But you will be the one to paint it.”

He took out a sheet of paper.

The plan of the table bore so many corrections that the original arrangement could be discerned only from traces of erased ink.

“They have changed the order for the fourth time. Jahrann still has not named its delegate. One of the envoys refuses to stand with his back to the window.”

Saeron examined the document.

“The painting will not show who was afraid of the window.”

“He will know.”

Meran rubbed the edge of the portfolio with his thumb.

“I will bring the revised plan tomorrow. The final one no later than the morning of the third day.”

“The final one?”

“That is what I shall write at the top.”

Saeron almost returned his smile.

“That is more honest.”

Meran studied him for a moment.

“I saw the way you looked at me during the audience.”

Saeron went still.

“A painter looks.”

“Several times.”

“If the first look is not enough.”

Meran adjusted his collar.

“Is there something on my face?”

“No.”

“Good.”

Footsteps sounded from deeper in the corridor.

Meran lowered his voice.

“I know you do not like to lie in paintings.”

“That opinion is spread by people who have never paid me well.”

“Sometimes a lie lasts longer than the truth.”

“I heard a similar lesson this morning.”

“From the king?”

“From myself.”

Meran looked at him more closely.

“The palace does not like surprises. Especially the kind that can later be hung on a wall.”

He adjusted his cuff.

“And please do not make me younger.”

“I had no intention of it.”

“One correction fewer, then.”

He nodded and headed towards the side stairs.

Saeron remained alone.

A moment later, he tasted metal in his mouth.

He swallowed.

It did not go away.

For the next two days, Saeron scarcely left the studio.

The Image of Unity took shape slowly. First the architecture. Then the table and the light. The delegates emerged from the pale ground one by one, faceless at first, like people who had not yet decided on which side of history they meant to stand.

Meran remained the most fully realised figure because Saeron had begun with him.

The wound beneath his left ear did not change. It dried with the other layers of paint, as though it had belonged to the composition from the beginning.

Eiran checked it every morning.

Saeron pretended not to notice.

On the first day, Meran sent a Chancellery clerk with a revised heraldic list.

On the second, he came himself.

He stood before the painting and assessed the composition from a distance for a moment. Then he stepped closer.

Saeron was mixing paint at the table.

Eiran froze on the other side of the studio.

Meran looked first at his place among the other figures, then at the face.

“I stand out too much.”

“Because the others are not finished,” Saeron said.

Meran moved closer still. The shadow of the high collar and the darker modelling of the neck merged with the thin line of the wound well enough that, from where he stood, it did not draw the eye.

“The face is good.”

Saeron said nothing.

“You have not made me younger.”

“I promised.”

Meran turned away from the canvas.

He had not seen it.

When he left, Eiran closed the door.

“We should tell him.”

“What?”

Eiran pointed at the painting.

“The truth.”

“Which truth?”

“That one.”

Saeron looked at the wound.

“We do not know what it is.”

“We know it depicts him.”

“It depicts paint on the neck of a painted man.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only answer I can prove.”

Eiran clenched his jaw.

“What if something happens to him?”

Saeron did not answer.

For the first time, he thought that silence could also be a decision.

On the third morning, Meran was meant to bring the approved plan and the missing coats of arms.

He did not come.

Saeron waited at the table with the pigments prepared. Eiran checked the list of names.

The first bell fell silent.

Then the second.

At last, someone ran up the stairs.

A young Chancellery clerk stopped in the studio doorway, breathing through his open mouth.

“Master Saeron. Secretary Sorn asks you to come with me.”

Saeron rose.

He looked at The Image of Unity.

“Where is Vey?”

The clerk looked away.

He did not answer.

They entered the winter garden by a side passage.

Grey morning light hung beyond the glass roof. Inside, the air was heavy with damp warmth. It smelled of wet earth and roses coaxed into bloom out of season.

Two guards and Averan Sorn stood beside the stone path.

Between the shrubs, face-down on the pale sandstone, lay Meran Vey.

Saeron recognised the black cloak first, then the silver fastenings and pale cuff.

Meran’s hand rested near his neck, his fingers clenched around the collar. Dried blood had stuck skin to cloth.

Tiny pieces of red wax were lodged beneath his nails.

Averan nodded to the guards.

They turned the body over.

The cloak clung to the stone for a moment, then came free with a wet rustle.

Meran’s head lolled loosely to one side. A shallow abrasion marked his cheek. His mouth remained open, as though at the last moment he had tried to draw breath.

He did not look peaceful.

He looked like a man who had not had time to understand why he was falling.

Saeron knew where he should look.

He did not want to.

He looked.

The wound began just beneath the left ear and descended in a thin line along the neck, ending beneath the high collar.

Saeron felt his stomach tighten.

The metallic taste returned.

The wound did not resemble the one in the painting.

It was the same.

The beginning.

The angle.

The length.

The point at which it vanished beneath the black cloth.

Saeron remembered Eiran sketching it on a sheet of paper.

How he had adjusted the line by a few degrees.

A little more vertical.

One of the guards said something to Averan.

Saeron did not hear.

The rush of blood in his ears drowned out even the people standing beside him.

He knelt, but did not touch the body.

Up close, he could see the same fingers that had rubbed together a few days earlier, as though Meran had been trying to remove invisible dust from them.

Now they were stiff, fouled with blood and red wax.

“Master?” Averan said.

Saeron looked up.

The First Secretary was watching him too closely.

“Did you know him well?”

“No.”

“And yet you knew where to look.”

Saeron straightened slowly.

Averan shifted his gaze to the wound.

“Is there something I should know?”

Saeron thought of the studio.

Of The Image of Unity, meant to show a Valen capable, for a moment, of existing without mutual hatred.

Of the only figure that had possessed a face from the beginning.

Of Eiran.

Of the two signatures hidden on the back of the frame.

And of the conversation two days earlier.

We should tell him.

Only now did Saeron feel the weight of those words.

He did not know whether a warning would have changed anything. He did not even know what he might have warned Meran about.

He knew only that he had remained silent.

He looked at Averan.

“Yes,” he said.

The First Secretary waited.

Saeron opened his mouth.

Then, for the first time, he understood that whatever he said next, The Image of Unity no longer belonged to him.