Free Wonders of the Invisible World by Patricia A. McKillip Page B

Wilding? Make me dislike you for this?”
    “No,” he said, surprised. “Turn your head again; you’re out of position. I want very much for you to like me. A little more. Lift your chin. Stare me down. Because I think you are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life, and one of the most intelligent and interesting. I hoped—Chin up, Miss Slade; I have come to steal your realm and slay your people. I hoped you would confess to some truer feeling about me.”
    “Truer,” she said through rigid jaws.
    “You are afraid of me because you are drawn to me. That makes you dislike me. So you turn to the much safer and predictable Mr. Bonham.”
    Her jaw dropped; so did her spear-arm. “Mr. Wilding—”
    “You asked, Miss Slade,” he said evenly. “Chin up, spear up. Remember the exhibit.”
    “You take advantage, Mr. Wilding!”
    “No, no. You, after all, have the spear; you can throw it at me any time. I tell you what is in my heart. Can you blame me for that?”
    He left her wordless. She could only stare at him as he requested, at once furious and vulnerable, willing to skewer him yet unable to move, while he touched her constantly with his eyes, and his brush stroked every hair on her head and every contour of her body.
    Toward the end of the session, when she was drained, angry, and thoroughly confused, he would tell her some improbable yet fascinating story about how he had acquired one or another of his animals. One had been found floating in the middle of the sea, surrounded by the flotsam of a sunken ship, alone in a rowboat but for a litter of fishbones and a bloody pair of boots. Explorers had come across another on a tropical island; it had chased them up a tree, then settled into a vigil among the roots, waiting for them to fall one by one like coconuts. Such things colored her weary thoughts, painted bright images; imagining them, she forgot that she had been angry.
    So when Ned, waiting at the gate, saw them across the garden, she and Mr. Wilding would seem to be amiably chatting like friends and her smile might seem for him rather than in expectation of Mr. Bonham’s face. Even this, Wilding used as a weapon, she knew. The truth lay in his painting: the warrior queen fighting her strong-willed adversary over a realm to which he had no claim.
    The evenings belonged to Ned.
    Tired and content in his company, she had little to say on their walk to Adrian’s apartment. She didn’t encourage questions; she might inadvertently tell him something that would make her posing for Mr. Wilding impossible, and ruin all expectations of the prized exhibit. I must go through this, she told herself adamantly. I will have my reward.
    So she kept her comments light, asked about Ned’s painting day, about his posing with Miss Bunce, and which of her brother’s friends he had met that day.
    “Valentine DeMorgan,” he answered with awe one evening. “He wears a cloak lined with purple satin, and yellow gloves. He keeps in one pocket a slim volume of his poems, all of which are so dreadfully sweet you could stir them into your tea.” Or: “Eugene Frith, the reformed pickpocket turned bookseller. He taught himself to read, Adrian said. And now he is an expert on rare editions. Your brother must know half the city.”
    But she did not fool his painter’s eye, which caught the troubled expressions on her face at odd moments, and the faint lines and shadows left by her never-ending days.
    “You’re tired,” he told her one evening after a few weeks of the inflexible routine.
    “A little,” she confessed.
    “Has Wilding been—”
    “No,” she said quickly. “He wants his painting too much to drive me away.”
    “Or do you want that exhibit too much?” he guessed shrewdly.
    “He’s working very fast,” she temporized. “And his painting will be wonderful. I have been working hard, but that part of my day will come to an end.” She smiled at him brightly. “Then I can pose for you, if you