The Proviso (103 page)

“Oh,” Giselle said brightly as Eilis watched all
this in shock, “did I forget to tell you Bryce works stone?
Congratulations. You get your wall. Bonus!” Eilis flinched, because
that was such a Sebastianism, but Giselle didn’t seem to notice.
“Bryce has actually studied Hadrian’s wall. Personally, I’m glad he
has a new project. He’s clad everything in our yard and I had to
put the brakes on so we’d have a patch of grass.”

So Eilis and Bryce spent that day marking out where
she wanted it to go, how she wanted it contoured, where she wanted
it to curve. On the weekends Giselle and Bryce or Knox and Justice
didn’t come to see her, there was a tribe party and she had been
welcomed with open arms. A hundred-plus people using any excuse to
have a party was an understatement. Eilis had suddenly been beset
by family she’d never had and she enjoyed every minute of it.

Nobody talked about Sebastian. It was as if he
didn’t exist and Eilis found herself wishing, wanting, waiting for
a word, anything, to know that she hadn’t dreamed him up.

When she finally asked Knox about him, he slid her a
glance and said, “I don’t think you want to know my opinion, Eilis.
If you want to know about Sebastian, talk to Sebastian. It’s not as
if he hasn’t been trying to get you to talk to him.” She felt like
she’d been spanked and put in a corner with her nose to the wall,
but Knox didn’t seem to hold it against her.

As autumn came on, she slowed down quite a bit but
kept her grass immaculate. This wasn’t a chore so much as a
soothing activity, what with her lawn tractor. Hadrian’s wall was
coming along nicely, but would have to stand over winter as Bryce
wouldn’t work stone in the cold.

The last Saturday he worked on the wall before
putting it all away for the winter, he came into the living room
where she and Giselle lay on the floor poring over fashion
magazines as if they were both twelve years old. He dropped into an
overstuffed chair and said, “Eilis, what are you doing Wednesday
night?”

“Nothing,” she said, a little depressed that she
didn’t have to think about it.

“Good. I’ll pick you up at six. Casual.”

Eilis looked between a very smug Giselle and a very
blank-faced Bryce and opened her mouth, then closed it again,
deciding not to waste her breath.

* * * * *

97:
TUATHA DÉ DANAAN

A triptych twelve feet high and twenty-six feet
across hung by heavy cables from the high ceiling in Kirkwood Hall
at the center of the Nelson-Atkins gallery.

It was titled
The Goddess and Her Lover
, and,
by all accounts, it was a magnificent work: explicit in its
sexuality, layered with symbolism, bold in its use of color and
lines, extraordinarily detailed.

It wasn’t for sale.

Buyers offered auction houses tens of millions of
dollars for it; Ford, through his agents, had declined to speak of
it, much less entertain the offers. He had loaned it to the
Nelson-Atkins Gallery for as long as they wanted to display it,
with certain conditions for the first few weeks of its debut:

It had to be facing a large blank wall.

It had to be lit to very stringent
specifications.

Music had to be playing while the gallery was open,
and only select pieces of classical music would be allowed.

The top third of the painting, spanning the width of
the panels, was a woman, nude, her skin an iridescent white-gold.
When the light wasn’t at all right, it was beautiful. When the
light was perfect, it sent millions of prisms out onto the wall in
front of it and duplicated the contours, shades, and nuances of her
body perfectly.

Her eyes were vivid: one green and one blue. Her
mouth was full and red, one corner of it tucked in a tender smile.
Her hair was gold. Each of those features, too, twinkled in green,
blue, red, and yellow on the wall, along with her brilliant
body.

Her hair was a rich, vibrant gold, light and airy,
floating around her face, shoulders, and arm as if on a breeze. Her
pubic hair was only a tad darker. Her face was incredibly detailed
and it was wondered at that a woman so perfect had a broken nose
and a scar that made her look as if she were crying.

She lay on her side on a bed of clouds. One didn’t
know where her skin ended and the clouds began; indeed, one breast
seemed to be cloud. Her head rested on a lazily outstretched arm
that dropped off the left edge of the canvas as she looked down
upon the earth, her face etched with great love: the love of a
mother to her children. Her other arm dangled over the bed of
clouds.

She was very pregnant.

Her bottom knee was bent slightly and her top leg
stretched out beyond the right edge of the canvas. Behind her sat a
man whose back, it seemed, leaned against the right edge of the
canvas, and his shoulders rose above the top edge of the canvas. He
was gray and dull, blending into the shadows, his impressive
musculature vaguely delineated in slightly darker gray. It seemed
his carved chest and ribs, what could be seen of them, were
criss-crossed with scars. His arm lay over her broad hip, his huge
hand, strong and wide, stretched out across the lower part of her
pregnant belly, two of his fingers curling deep into her pubic
hair. His knee rose from behind the valley of her waistline and his
other arm lay across it, a myriad of paint brushes and knives
dripping with vivid colors, laced through his fingers and spearing
up out of his fist.

The lower two-thirds of the panels showed the earth
in all its seasons. The narrow left panel was winter; fields lay
fallow under snow, the watery sun lay low along the horizon. A
large stone altar ran bloody with the sacrifice of a boar, a nude
priestess raising the animal high above her head. Bonfires blazed
behind her and her bloody altar.

The large middle panel was of spring fading into
summer over the course of three-quarters of the canvas. Rain poured
from beneath the bed of clouds over an immense landscape of spring
crops, flowers, blossom-covered cherry trees. A nude woman squatted
upon bricks—half of her in the spring rain and half of her in the
summer sun, her head back, her face contorted in pain—giving birth,
the Goddess’s lazily dangling iridescent hand catching the bloody
child that fell from the mother’s hips in her palm easily, dripping
blood through her fingers onto the soil. Under the child’s and
mother’s commingled blood, the grass was thicker, richer,
greener.

The summer sun was highest of all and the land was a
rich green, simple, restful.

The narrow right-hand panel was of autumn, its
fields stripped and barren. A nude huntress drew an arrow back and
took aim at something beyond the right edge of the canvas, a slain
doe at her feet, bleeding into the ground.

A masterpiece, it was called, a testament of a Man’s
love for a Goddess and her love for her children.

* * * * *

98:
WANTED: ONE SUPER-EGO

Sebastian’s heart was breaking. Eilis wouldn’t take
his calls. She didn’t answer his emails. If she actually happened
to be at work, she made herself scarce if he came into the building
and her employees were all the warning she needed to know when he
came in. She wouldn’t let him in her gate. He went to all the tribe
parties he could manage, but she was never there.

Now he knew how she’d felt when he’d shut her out
after leaving her at Christie’s, and he felt sick.

All he wanted to do was explain. If, after that, she
still felt the same way, he’d let her go because he hated feeling
like a stalker. Sebastian was almost out of options, except for
this one.

He needed Giselle in a way that she had never needed
him. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t in a power position,
didn’t have any leverage, and wasn’t above groveling for her help.
He understood why Knox had hung onto her all these years; no matter
what, Giselle would never have said “suck it up” to Knox.

And she didn’t say it to Sebastian when he
hesitantly presented his request. She said, “Ask Bryce.” Sebastian
raised an eyebrow, but did as she directed. Kenard had shrugged and
immediately said, “No problem.” Then Giselle had hugged Sebastian
and told him things would work out.

That was when he caught a glimpse of the Giselle she
kept hidden away from him, that nice, sweet Mormon girl he hadn’t
seen for years, the soft-hearted girl to whom he’d said “suck it
up, princess” to harden her, to keep her from getting hurt so
easily, and never respected that part of her that couldn’t be
hardened.

This was the Giselle who’d taken under her wing a
girl who needed her protection and love—without question, without
hesitation—and who had protected and loved her from the first day
she’d met her.

The Giselle who’d taken care of Eilis with such
tenderness and selflessness and love after the shame Sebastian had
made her feel, which was the first time Eilis had ever known such
kindness from anyone—the Giselle who’d wept over Eilis and with
Eilis and was the mother Eilis had never had, who’d braided her
hair and rocked her and sung her lullabies. Who’d been the only
person Eilis had ever told her history.

“Sebastian,” Giselle had finally said, thoroughly
exasperated with him for wanting to know what Eilis had told her,
“it didn’t happen. In her mind, in her
soul
, none of it
happened because you decluttered it all and took out the trash, I
scrubbed her clean, the tribe validated her, avenged her, and
filled her back up with all the love she could take. It’s gone. The
trash truck has been by and the trash cans are empty. You don’t
need to carry it any more than she does.”

“Well, what about you?”

She shrugged. “I can sympathize. I can remember what
she told me. I can cry about it here and there. But it didn’t
happen to me, so it’s like a sad novel I read and put back on my
bookshelf with the rest of the books I keep but never read
again.”

Sebastian supposed he could understand that, when
she put it that way.

The Giselle whose warrior soul was fed and driven by
her love for her family, for whom she’d sacrificed everything she
had—and had nearly sacrificed her life. Twice.

Sebastian’s missionary training came back to him in
a flash:
Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father
is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their
affliction.

He felt a deep, deep shame in knowing that Giselle
had kept this part of her from him all these years because he
would’ve ridiculed her for it. He remembered the time he’d caught
her reading her dog-eared scriptures and praying, alone and quiet
in her room, and he’d mocked her for that; he knew she still did it
and always had, but she’d made sure he never, ever caught her at it
again. She hadn’t locked her door the night she’d taken Kenard as
her mate, but she’d
always
locked it to study and pray.

That told him more about himself than it did about
her. Knox had been right about him. And Knox! Sebastian closed his
eyes when he thought of the depth of what Knox had done—for honor
and love. He’d sacrificed everything he was, everything he believed
in, everything he owned to right the wrong he had done to the Faery
Queen he’d married and it stabbed Sebastian in the chest. Whether
Knox would yet survive it alone, without help, was anyone’s guess,
but Sebastian would make sure to be there to pick him up and put
him back on his feet if he fell.

Sebastian coddled his clients and was gracious to
strangers; he treated them better than he’d treated either Giselle
or Knox, who’d both been part of his soul since he was six years
old, and they’d loved him unconditionally.

Still deep in his guilt and shame, Sebastian showed
up at the appointed time and place, keeping to himself, mostly
hidden in the shadows, but people were too engrossed in the art to
pay any attention to anything else. Hundreds of people streamed
through, gasping, exclaiming and he couldn’t enjoy it, even from
the shelter of his anonymity.

He couldn’t bear to look at that painting, though he
knew it was his finest work. Nothing he could ever do now would top
that. Of course, he couldn’t stop painting, but everything after
this would be anticlimactic for everyone. That painting represented
his soul, what he believed, who he loved and why.

It was also a catalog of his deficiencies,
weaknesses, and character flaws.

One of the music pieces on the short list to be
played during exhibition hours was the chamber version of
Carmina Burana
. While the gallery was reluctant, it had
complied and the effect had been so powerful that soon after the
opening, it had applied to the Kansas City chorale and the
percussion section of the Kansas City symphony to perform live on
Friday and Saturday nights for a premium price that people were
more than willing to pay.

Every once in a while, someone would tap the
canvases slightly with a pole to make the prisms dance.

It was displayed as performance art—exactly as he’d
intended.

“What are you going to do with it when it’s taken
down?” Giselle asked him quietly, sneaking up on him—or probably
not, since he was lost in thought and the music called to him.

“I don’t know,” he murmured. “I guess I could store
it in Knox’s barn, but that’s falling down. I have nowhere else to
put it and the only places with spaces big enough are in galleries.
Maybe I’ll leave it here on permanent exhibit. Maybe I’ll let it
travel. Maybe the Louvre will show it. Who knows?” He looked down
at her then. “Giselle,” he said softly.

She looked up at him, startled, suspicious, and he
hated himself for that. “What.”

“I’m sorry.”

Softening with confusion, she stared at him. “For
what?”