The Overmorian jolts awake from a dream in which she is screaming and clawing at a locked door. There is blood, and blades, and the world is bloated and corrupt like rotten meat, swollen with the squirming of something Beyond, some terrible returning divine, a vast blind monstrous maggot that unravels the Real with the mad chorused whispers of her butchered father, brothers, stepmother.
She bursts through the barrier of sleep, frantic flailing translating into no more than the clumsy sweep of an arm, her screaming squashed to the fuzzy mudanity of a single incoherent noise of protest: “Mnuh—!”
“Shhhhh,” Ahrina kanru-Weststone says, and reaches over to lightly scratch her scalp.
Salonica whimpers a little, squeezing her eyes closed. The room is dark, only a candle on the table illuminating it; she groggily infers it’s gone midnight, therefore no longer her birthday, and enough hours past the evening for a hangover to ravage her waking head.
The horrors are unkind to her sleep, and birthdays doubly so. She spends few enough nights in her own chambers — those concerned with public morals rail against her endlessly for Ahrina; but she would go mad, she thinks, if not for the meagre relief of seldom waking alone. She posed earlier, she dimly remembers, sprawled along the couch she has woken on, wrapped — only, and barely — in a silken dressing-gown, the intent and heavy-lidded elf reproducing her licentious likeness in pencils, sketchbook page after sketchbook page.
Of all the things she never foresaw in her life, muse sometimes feels the strangest. She’s not the elf’s only subject — the artist’s rooms are stacked with canvases; birds and Southstone city views, formally composed still lives; but the elf returns to her, again and again, feverish, with ink and pencil and pastel, charcoal and etching and paint. The Overmorian, imperious; the Overmorian, resplendent; the Overmorian, for public consumption. The Overmorian: private, naked, tousled, trussed, debauched.
Some days she fears that she is, herself, no more than a depiction of a person. Paint on canvas, nothing inside. Propaganda. Or, worse, that whatever working her stepmother expected to transfigure her has quietly festered into some indirect success, and that one day Salonica will birth something awful, some malaise or parasite, physical or metaphorical.
She sniffs and drags her arm across aching, leaking eyes.
“Shhhhhh,” Ahrina says again, softly, from the armchair drawn up at an angle to the end of the couch, patting her hair.
Salonica sniffs again, and tries to pull herself together. “What are you doing,” she croaks.
“Oh,” Ahrina says, and waves her free hand vaguely. “The usual.”
Her elven telegraph sits on the table beside her pencils, candle, codebook, and cigarettes. Coils of message-paper wind across tabletop and floor; a dish, and the smell, of ashes says that the most sensitive of messages have already been committed to memory and removed from the possibility of evidence.
Salonica, with great effort and rather a lot of groaning, turns herself onto her side, and makes a pitiable noise. Ahrina, from long practice, deduces that she’s cold, and stands to retrieve a throw from the back of the couch and tuck it firmly around her; then resumes her seat and tangles her hand back in Salonica’s hair.
“What does your aunt say,” Salonica murmurs, closing her eyes.
“Oh, the Northstone Salon have banned me from exhibiting again,” Ahrina says lightly. “I sent them that painting — you remember, I was so intent on capturing the quality of sunlight—”
“The oil of my bare arse, standing goose-pimpled in front of the window,” Salonica says, as dry as she can manage. “Didn’t they already ban you in perpetuity?”
Ahrina only scratches Salonica’s scalp and laughs, and Salonica recognises the distraction for what it is and lets it be. Elven business; spy business. Never mind that she is the Overmorian, richest and most powerful private citizen of the Southstone; its kingmaker; its dark and bloodstained balance sheet. Never mind that she loves an elf, and that she is almost, almost certain, for very much of the time, that Ahrina loves her back.
She carves her way through the years, every dissipated pleasure available to her: each pill and potion, every vintage, every variety of the flesh. Ahrina has seen her, painted her, in every transfixion of ecstacy, of excess, of narcotic despair and alchemical mania. Whenever Salonica reaches for climax, alone or coupled, she cries out for Ahrina’s permission; bestowed reverently, or more rarely, implacably denied, the elf always there in the room, without either of them ever quite openly planning it so. Salonica barely remembers how to weep for grief, no matter that she’s so much rotted away from it; but for want of Ahrina, she barely goes a day without tears in her eyes.
The only thing Ahrina has ever said on the subject, gaze turned tragically upon unfathomable distances of the mind, was quiet and grave: “You are a romance fit to poison eternity, Salonica Vittoria,” she said, and held Salonica’s hands tight for a long time, cried a single tear, and then painted nothing but dead winter trees for a year, refusing to speak on it again. And yet she sits and strokes Salonica’s foolish wine-pained head, and dotes year after year, and does not leave her.
The Overmorian, aware that an entire night here on the couch will pain her come morning, but wearily unmotivated to move, sighs gustily. “I love you,” she croaks, a sticky-mouthed mutter spoken more into the folds of the throw tucked around her chin than to the room, still less its other occupant.
“I love you too, Salma,” Ahrina says nonetheless, absently, her gaze following her finger, running along a telegraph strip; “go to sleep,” and Salonica makes a tired noise, and for now she manages to do as she’s told.
