Kip had immediate justifications, defenses, denials—dodges: I didn’t know that stupid prophecy! Who else am I supposed to emulate if not the best and smartest people I know? And last and least true: I’m not trying to be them!
But instead of giving breath to any of it, he nodded, taking receipt of the words, a silent promise to think on them.
But Big Leo kept staring at him.
Big Leo kept staring at him.
It got awkward.
“Big Leo, do you want to know what I like about you?”
The big man pondered, eyes still locked on Kip.
Then, just as Kip was about to tell him, Big Leo said, “No.”
He walked away.
Eventually, Kip turned back to his stars and his fire and his map, but none of them cast the light he needed.
He went to his room, but he didn’t wake Tisis. He knew he should wake her, to talk, if not to make love. He should share the yoke that had settled heavy on his heart. But there weren’t even two hours until he must wake. He let her lie and told himself it was love.
In the place of rest, instead he dreamed.
He dreamed of Andross Guile.
Chapter 28
~The Guile~
40 years ago. (Age 26.)
“I hope my art isn’t boring you?”
Having only recently taken over as the head of my family and thereby made the lord of a house in crisis, my greatest expenditure in coming this deep into the Atashian highlands is in time. And this buffoon—whom I hope to make my father-in-law—is only making things worse. I’ve seen rocks worn down to nubs by the lapping of the sea’s waves more quickly than this man moves us through his art collection.
“No indeed!” I say, and it’s true. The art isn’t boring me.
“Just a few more pieces before we return. We simply must get back in time to see the fire dancers begin, young ’Andross. It’s a treasured tradition on these brisk autumn nights!”
Lord Dariush gives ‘Andross’ the old aspirative at the beginning, so it sounds almost like ‘Handross.’ When I first arrived, Lord Dariush told me he is a casual student of languages, and he loved that my name hearkens back to a rare dialect of Old Parian.
In the full week since then, I’ve deduced that by ‘casual’ he means he’s fluent in six dead tongues, and has done his own translations of several ancient masterpieces. He derides his own efforts as derivative, an idle pastime not worth the parchment he scrawls them on: ‘Still, it keeps me out of trouble. Some hunt fowls, I hunt vowels.’ He’d laughed. I’d chuckled along dutifully.
An affable man, if inclined to laugh at his own jokes. By all reports, he is well loved here.
He is the first obscenely wealthy person I’ve met of whom that is true.
“You do love your traditions here, I’ve noticed. What is this?” The Dariush family has an art collection of wildly mixed quality, a common affliction among the newly rich: astonishing masterpieces cheek-by-jowl with quirky oddities and total garbage likely painted or drawn by family members.
This piece is a very nice facsimile of a Gollaïr. I’ve never liked his work myself. He discovered a technique of imbuing pigments with mildly unstable luxin, making them astonishingly bright—and then used the paints everywhere in his art with no sense of proportion and only moderate skill.
A second-rate natural scientist and a second-rate painter, Gollaïr’s real genius had lain in getting others to believe he was a genius. He had amassed a large entourage, a vast fortune, and a golden reputation.
Then his pupil, Solarch, had shown what one could actually do with the tools Gollaïr had invented.
No Solarchs still survive. It emerged years after his death that Gollaïr had dedicated himself to destroying the young artist in every way. Even Solarch’s eventual suicide had been suspicious, with some saying that perennial bogeyman the Order of the Broken Eye had been hired for the job. Before Solarch’s early death, Gollaïr had secretly, through many different agents, bought up every last one of the young man’s paintings. Then he’d burned them all before the young man’s eyes.
Still, artists being assholes? What else was new?
Later painters had built on his discoveries, so Gollaïr was still considered important, but mostly only to those who cared about the history of art, not the art itself.
Later counterfeiters succeeded in making the luxin pigments stable, and actually made better paints than Gollaïr ever had. So, oddly, the counterfeits lasted longer and now looked much better than any of the originals did. This painting still shone—thus, a counterfeit.
Even if it weren’t a counterfeit, though, I certainly wouldn’t hang his gaudy garbage on my walls.
“You’ve been staring at this one for quite some time,” Lord Dariush said. “I’m so glad. It’s one of the real prizes of my collection. What do you think?”
I really should have divided my time between more paintings if I was going to let my mind wander. He called it ‘one of his real prizes’?
Ugh.
“Is this a Gollaïr?” I ask. Please say you know it’s a counterfeit and you just like it. Bad taste I can deal with.
“Oh yes! An original! You know Gollaïr? Not many people do now.”
Shit. I only wish I could say it aloud. I dream of the day when I have so much power that my sons may say aloud what they actually think.
I purse my lips. “I’m afraid I don’t like his work at all, actually. My apologies. So much of art is subjective, though.”
“Is it?” Lord Dariush asks.
Please don’t try to convince me this trash is objectively good. I hurry on. “I certainly appreciate its importance, and I’m dazzled that someone could make luxins that still shine, what, two hundred and fifteen years later or something?” It’s the closest I can hint at questioning if he’s certain it’s not a fake. I shouldn’t have done it, but I can’t help myself.
“Sounds about right,” he says.
So he doesn’t know it’s a fake.
A counterfeit, as the prize of his collection. It makes him look a fool, and I’ve come so far and invested so much of my precious time that I don’t want to believe it. I can’t marry into a family of fools.
I won’t do that to my sons or the rest of my line. A man has a duty.
But it just doesn’t fit. Lord Dariush came from nothing and is now one of the three wealthiest people in the world. A bad judge of art I can believe, but a fool? Has he just been the largest fish in an inbred backwater up here?
“You really don’t like it?” he presses.
I flash an awkward acknowledgment. “Maybe my judgment of the work itself is unfairly low because of what they say he did to that young artist—what was his name?” Maybe. And maybe I’d rather not be trapped talking to you out of politeness, old man, and would like to see the woman I had intended to make my bride.
“You really don’t remember the young artist’s name?” he asks, teasing.
So he hasn’t forgotten about the Guile memory. So many people do, no matter how they’ve heard it lauded.
I wince and offer a rueful grin. “Solarch,” I say. “Gollaïr ruined him, right? Drove him to suicide?”
“Or had him murdered,” Lord Dariush says. He waves dismissively. “Does that change your judgment of his work? Would you praise mediocre art crafted by someone because they are morally good? Or denigrate greatness because its creator was errant?”