The Painted War (7 page)

Bianca put down her paintbrush, looked up at the bright Luminosan stars glittering through the secret workshop's high windows, and sighed. She and Marco had reported back to Raphaeli about what they had seen when tailing the Baron, but the Captain was just as stumped as they were. Without any more leads, Bianca had agreed to get on with some commissions – hopefully focusing her mind would allow some answers to come to her.

Bianca looked round at her grandfather's cluttered studio, now packed with apprentice artists. Cosimo and Lucia had decided that the equipment in di Lombardi's private refuge was so much better than Filpepi's that it would be silly to go on working in their old studio. Some of the apprentices were still in the studio, but a few paintings and the small clay sculpture of a pair of dancers that Rosa was working on had been moved across to the secret workshop, and Cosimo and Lucia themselves were still sorting through the notes and tools and mysterious inventions.

Bianca smiled as her gaze set upon Marco, flat on his back, peering curiously at the underside of the underwater steam cart – despite Lucia pointing out that he was a tumbler, not an artist, or a mechanic. Bianca suspected he wouldn't leave unless Lucia physically picked him up and carried him out of the door.

Bianca had wanted to continue searching the studio for inventions and recipes that might be useful when Oscurita finally attacked, but Lucia had pointed out that if the Oscuritans didn't invade then Lady Stellata, an influential – and argumentative – aristocrat, would want to know where her commission was. Cosimo had also said, rather more gently, that it couldn't hurt for Bianca to do something normal, just for a few hours.

The evening was wearing on, but she didn't like the idea of going to bed – everything was too unresolved and she felt as if she'd achieved exactly nothing except create more questions.

She looked down at the Stellata commission she was working on – an intricate painting of a tree with a different bird perched on every branch. When it was finished, the birds would flap their wings and puff up their chests as if they were alive. Bianca was working on the trunk of the tree, adding rough bark and knots and the occasional tiny insect or sprig of moss.

It was important, intricate work and she knew she should've been happy to be trusted with it, even though she was working almost exclusively with shades of brown. But another thought kept pushing to the front of her mind, elbowing aside anything else she tried to concentrate on.

‘I think I ought to go back to Oscurita,' she said aloud, breaking the silence in the studio. She turned around on her stool to face the others.

Rosa looked up from shaving paper-thin slivers of clay off the frock coat of one of the dancers. Her expression was kind, but she shook her head. ‘I don't think it'll help for you to go back there, Bianca.'

‘I need to talk to my mother,' Bianca said. ‘I can't just sit here not knowing if she's all right, not knowing  …  anything about my father.' She stopped herself from saying ‘not knowing if my father is the Duke of La Luminosa'.

‘Your mother gave you a pretty specific instruction, though, didn't she?' said Marco.

Bianca deflated. ‘Yes. She made me promise not to go back unless I had no other option.'

‘There you go, then,' said Lucia briskly.

‘Isn't there another way you can contact her?' Marco said slowly, and Bianca saw Lucia roll her eyes. ‘Didn't Edita manage to talk to you through a painting, before?'

‘That's right,' Bianca said, brightening. ‘I was drawing her portrait and it came to life and spoke to me.' Her face fell again. ‘I don't know how it was done, though.'

‘Well,' said Lucia, snatching up a blank canvas from a pile by her side, ‘if you're going to do it, then do it. Don't sit there moping about it.' She swapped the blank canvas for the bird painting, and shook her head when Bianca turned a grateful smile on her. ‘I'd rather save the work for an apprentice who can concentrate properly,' she said. ‘Hurry up and talk to your mother.'

‘I'll try,' said Bianca.

She seized a palette, a stick of sketching charcoal, and a whole armful of different magical paints from the cupboard of painting supplies. Cosimo sighed and made a mark against the ones she'd taken on the inventory list he was making.

Bianca sat in front of the blank canvas and tried to see the drawing in front of her. It was a strategy di Lombardi had taught her, almost more like a meditation than a painting technique. The point wasn't to decide where every line was going to go – it was to convince yourself that there was a completed picture buried under the surface of the stiff white fabric, and all you had to do was find it.

Bianca tried to see her mother on the canvas, as if it was a mirror and Saralinda was standing just behind her shoulder.

She reached out with her hand and began to sketch, very lightly, tracing the lines of her mother's face that swam in and out of focus in front of her. The expression Bianca had seen on Saralinda's face most often was either soft-eyed love or grim determination, but for some reason she now found herself drawing Saralinda's eyes shut and her head slightly tilted, as if she was dozing peacefully.

Bianca kept adding detail to the portrait, hoping that whatever Edita had done to contact her through her painting, Saralinda would be able to do the same.

Bianca forced herself to stop fiddling with the shading on Saralinda's cheek, knowing that if she touched it any more she would add something that would hurt the picture, not make it better. She very deliberately put down her charcoal stick and picked up di Lombardi's paintbrush, holding it gently in front of her and staring at the various magical paints she'd laid out on the table beside her.

There were some she could use in her sleep:
animare
for basic movement,
respirare
to give the illusion of regular breathing,
ether
to add space,
shimmer
and
glimmer
and
luce stellare
for different kinds of light,
saltatio
to make the subject of a painting dance.

There were a few others she wasn't so sure of. She guessed a
profumo
would add a scent to a painting, but didn't know how to use it. There was a
riflettere
,
too, which looked like a jar full of liquid mirror. And finally, she had taken a vial of the precious, pure
lux aurumque
– the pure oil of the glowing golden flowers that only grew in Oscurita.

Bianca used the
ether,
then the
respirare,
until her drawing of Saralinda seemed to stand out from the canvas, breathing deeply. She added some
animare
to make Saralinda's head move slightly as she breathed, and then  … 

Nothing.

Bianca was stumped. She had no idea how to use the picture to communicate with Oscurita.

Lucia came over. ‘That's a wonderful sketch,' she said. ‘Now, please, give me the paints so we can all get on with our work?'

‘I'm not finished,' Bianca said. ‘Please, just a little longer.'

‘What are you going to do?' Lucia asked pointedly.

‘I  …  I  … ' Bianca seized the vial of
lux aurumque.
‘I don't know, but I can't just give up.'

‘Come on, that's enough now,' said Lucia. She grabbed several of the other paints from the table, but Bianca didn't care. She was going to have to make the paint for this herself. She just didn't know how.

‘Please don't waste the
lux aurumque
, Bianca,' said Cosimo gently. ‘We still don't know exactly where we're going to get more from.'

‘If you'd let me go to Oscurita I could've brought you some back,' Bianca said, a little childishly.

‘Don't you have something of hers you could use as an ingredient?' Lucia asked. ‘Perhaps that would make a connection between her and you.'

Bianca turned to blink at Lucia in surprise. That was a good, genuinely helpful, idea!

‘Well, if you're not going to let us get on with our work, we might as well try and help,' she said, rolling her eyes. ‘
Do
you have anything that belongs to your mother?'

Bianca thought of the medallion that opened the passages between Oscurita and La Luminosa – her mother's gift to her as a baby, which she'd let Edita trick her into handing over.

‘No, nothing,' she said.

Lucia gave an exasperated sigh. ‘What about
you?
You're her daughter; your blood is her blood, right? Would you prick yourself with a needle?'

Rosa looked uneasy. ‘Are you sure you want to mess with that stuff without knowing what you're doing?'

Marco's head suddenly popped up through the door of the underwater machine, like a rabbit sticking its head out of its warren. ‘You've used your hair before, remember? In the recipe di Lombardi left you!'

‘Of course!' Bianca remembered the
storia
recipe her grandfather had given her. When she'd painted it onto the canvas, it'd moved all by itself, forming pictures to show her the story of their escape from Oscurita during the war.

She reached up and carefully pulled a hair out of her head at the root. She thought for a second, and then flipped open the vial of
lux aurumque
and dropped the hair inside. It fizzed and sparkled, and then dissolved altogether, leaving the glowing golden liquid streaked with swirling spirals of chestnut brown.

Lucia let out a frustrated gasp. ‘No, Bianca, don't contaminate it all! Are you crazy? Give me that.' She made a grab for the
lux aurumque
, but Bianca pulled it back. ‘You've spoiled the whole vial! You know how many magical paints that ought to have made?' Her hand snaked out and seized Bianca's wrist, and her other hand snatched the vial, which slipped out of her fingers. Bianca made a frantic attempt to catch it, which only sent it shooting up into the air, turning over and over in a display of juggling that she certainly couldn't have managed if she'd been trying.

The artists and Marco all watched and winced as the golden oil flew out of the vial and splashed across the portrait of Saralinda. For a moment she looked like she was wearing a glowing golden mask over her eyes, and then the precious fluid sank into the canvas and vanished completely.

‘Bianca, I'm going to kill you,' Lucia growled. ‘I don't care what the Duchess says, you're grounded for a month. You're going to be cleaning the studio from top to bottom –
including
the sulphur pots!'

‘That was not my fault,
you're
the one that chucked it in the air,' Bianca snapped.

‘
You'd
already contaminated the whole vial –'

‘Girls!' said Saralinda.

Bianca and Lucia both turned, slowly, to find Bianca's mother looking out at them from the charcoal drawing. She was still mostly made up of sketchy black lines, but her eyes were blue and startlingly real.

‘I know this is a dream,' said Saralinda, ‘but even so, don't fight over a vial of
lux aurumque.
' Bianca's hands flew to her mouth. ‘When I'm Duchess again I shall plant a whole field of the flowers and send them to you in their hundreds.'

‘Mother!' Bianca gasped, tears springing to her eyes. ‘Is it really you?'

Saralinda looked around the room for a moment in confusion. ‘Bianca? What's going on? I'm quite sure I'm asleep right now. Are you really talking to me?'

‘Yes!'

‘How odd,' Saralinda said. ‘And who are these people?'

‘This is Mistress Lucia and Master Cosimo,' Bianca said, shifting aside to let her mother see into the studio. ‘They're running the art studios here, now that grandfather and Filpepi are both gone. And this is Rosa – she's Head Apprentice,' Bianca added, beckoning Rosa over. Rosa stepped up to the painting nervously, brushing at her dress and trying to pat down her gravity-defying curls.

‘Good, um  …  Hello, Your Highness,' she said, bobbing a curtsey.

‘Nice to meet you,' said Saralinda.

‘Oh, and Marco's here,' said Bianca, as Marco climbed out of the underwater machine and hurried over. He leaned into Saralinda's line of sight and waved.

‘Oh, hello, Marco! How nice to see you again.'

Marco beamed and blushed.

Cosimo put a hand on Lucia's shoulder. ‘I think we should give Bianca and her mother some space to talk.'

‘You're still in trouble,' Lucia muttered. Bianca beamed at her, not caring how many sulphur pots she'd have to clean.

‘Are you all right? Did you get to the Resistance safely?' she asked her mother.

‘I'm fine. Pietro was right, I was much less suspicious by myself. I managed to slip past the guards easily. The Resistance have been gathering supporters while I was in prison – far more than I knew. Half the city is secretly on our side and the other half will come over to us as soon as they realise we have a chance of defeating Edita.'

‘Does that mean it's safe enough for me to come and see you?' Bianca asked.

Saralinda shook her head. ‘Absolutely not! I can't have you putting yourself in danger, now more than ever. Promise me you won't try to come here.'

‘I'll promise,' Bianca said, ‘if  … ' She glanced around at the other artists and Marco. All of them had the decency to pretend not to be listening, but she knew they would hear her. She took a deep breath. She'd come this far – she had to follow through. ‘If you tell me who my father really is.'

Saralinda's eyebrows shot up. ‘Oh! What  …  erm  …  Right now?'

‘I really need to know,' Bianca said. ‘I'm sorry to do it like this but I  …  I heard something that made me think maybe I know who it is and I can't go on behaving as if I don't.' Bianca was aware of Lucia and Cosimo exchanging glances with each other. To their credit, they then moved further away, into the recesses of the enormous studio.