Chapter 204: A Gift for Patricia
Chapter 203: A Gift for Patricia
Lyria’s POV
The silence after they left was quite welcoming.
I stood in the middle of my chambers for a moment, simply breathing it in.
Then I crossed to the hidden compartment beneath the loose floorboard, lifted it carefully, and retrieved my sketchbook.
I did not think about the tearoom.
I did not think about the King’s gaze or the Queen’s pleasant voice delivering unpleasant things or the sting still sitting in my cheek from the maid’s hand.
I dragged a chair to the window instead.
The window faced the right direction at this hour — westward, where the sky had begun to shift from grey into something softer. The clouds had thinned in places, and where they had thinned, the light came through in long, pale bars that moved slowly across the gardens below.
I opened the window slightly.
Cold air came in at once, carrying the smell of flowers, food, and grass.
I settled into the chair and opened the sketchbook to a clean page.
Patricia’s birthday was in two days. I had only gotten the information after numerous requests that were borderline disturbances to her.
She had not seen the sun rise nor set in years. She had not felt rain upon her face nor watched clouds drift across the open heavens. The only sky she knew was the narrow slice visible through the small, high window in her chamber—a window too small to climb through, too high to see anything but grey.
She deserved more than that.
I wanted to give her something beautiful. Something that might remind her that the world beyond those walls still turned, still bloomed, still held things worth seeing.
And so I was going to draw it for her.
I pressed the pencil to the page and began.
I worked quickly the way I always did when the image was already clear in my mind — the broad strokes first, the shape of the clouds where they had piled against the horizon, the birds that moved in loose formation across the middle distance. There were four of them, or perhaps five. They shifted as I watched, so I committed them to memory and drew what I had seen rather than what was currently there.
The light came next. That was the difficult part. Light was always the difficult part — capturing the way it fell without making the page look like it had simply been left blank in strategic places. I worked carefully around the edges of the clouds, letting the paper do some of the work.
The trees came last. Their shapes were simple from this distance, the details lost, and I did not attempt to recover them. It was better this way, the eye drawn upward toward the sky rather than distracted by the ground below it.
I sat back when I was done and looked at it.
It was good.
I thought it was good, anyway, and I had learned to trust my own assessment of these things over the years since there had rarely been anyone else to ask.
But...
I paused as I frowned at the page.
It needed colour.
Not something elaborate, but perhaps enough because Patricia deserved the colour. The sky deserved it too.
I set the sketchbook down and then went to the hidden compartment.
I searched it carefully.
There was the herb pouch. The small folded cloth. The money I kept wrapped in a piece of linen at the back. Various other small things collected and kept over the years, each with its own private logic.
No colour pencils.
I had known that before I looked. I had never had colour pencils, especially not proper ones. The kind available in the market stalls near Mercer’s Row were nothing like the materials the suitors had been given.
They were blunt and inconsistent and prone to breaking if pressed too firmly, but they were colour and they were something and they were what I needed.
I closed the compartment and sat back on my heels.
Then I opened it again and counted the money.
It was not a large sum. It never was. But I turned it over in my hands and calculated and yes — yes, I could spare enough for a small set of colour pencils without disrupting anything important.
I was already reaching for my coat when I stopped.
I sat very still for a moment.
I could not simply leave the palace. Not now. Not as things stood. Before, I had been a shadow.
I had been invisible and unremarkable, the kind of person a palace swallowed whole without noticing. I had moved through the streets of Mercer’s Row and in and out of the Tallow and Tide with the ease of someone the city had long since decided was not worth watching.
That was finished.
Whatever I was now — Moon candidate, princess in name, second, nobody, all the various things I had been called in the past several hours — I was visible in a way I had not been before. The scrying veil had seen to that. The kingdom had watched everything.
I could not just walk into Mercer’s Row without the risk of being recognised.
And there was Helen too and everyone at the Tallow and Tide.
I could not go there as Iria anymore.
That door had closed the moment I was exposed as the King’s daughter.
I closed the compartment and then moved to the bed where I sat.
The thought of everything almost consumed me and then I shook my head.
I should not focus on sad things.
It was only pencils. There would be another way to give the drawing colour. There must be.
I rose slowly and crossed back to the window.
The sketch still rested on the chair, incomplete but not beyond hope. I picked it up carefully and studied it once more.
It was not perfect.
But it was not nothing.
I would find a way. I did not yet know how, but I would find one.
Carefully, I placed the sketch between the pages of my sketchbook and carried it back to the hidden compartment. Then I replaced the floorboard, pressing it down firmly.
I sighed. There was nothing to—oh, I could visit my mother.
A smile overtook my face at the thought. It had been a while since I saw her after all.
With that thought in mind, I changed once more, wearing my cloak, masking my scent too, and then sneaked out of the chamber.
