Brand and Nel were inseparable. They spent their days talking about art, and in the evenings, Brand consistently called her into his private room. Seri ought to be worried, but Brand was still on his best behavior. He was quick to make Nel comfortable and never raised his voice. Seri didn’t think it was an act either. In that delicately balanced scale of desire, Brand’s adoration of Nel seemed to outweigh everything else.

Which had its advantages. Nel put Brand in a good mood, and when he was in a good mood, he was less likely to lash out at Seri.

Today Nel and Brand had dragged out half the bowls from the kitchen and were mixing paints. They were laughing. Their plans to paint outside had been disrupted by a thunderstorm, but Brand, undeterred, had brought their art into the dining room: sketch paper and wooden planks, reference books and a couple dozen brushes and palette knives, of all shapes and sizes.

“Seri, Gretchen, you’re welcome to join us,” Brand said.

“Yes. It will be fun,” Nel said.

Seri sighed. She was tired. Shooting pains in her body had kept her up for half the night, and now there was constant itching on her back. Small, hard bumps were starting to form there, too. She’d checked her bed for fleas but found none. She suspected the bumps were the beginnings of scales.

Gretchen, too, seemed pale and tired. She’d long since finished eating her lunch and was simply gazing listlessly at the crumbs on her plate. By contrast, Nel and Brand were bright and happy. They simply lit up. Seri wished she had that quality. That she wasn’t so dour and miserable.

Well, why should she be? If they were having fun, so could she.

“You don’t mind?” Seri asked.

Brand looked up sharply. “You want to paint?”

“Yes.” Seri pushed the plates to the side of the table.

“Wonderful!” Nel exclaimed. “Now all we need is for Gretchen to join us. Gretchen, do you want to paint?”

Gretchen made a half-hearted gesture.

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“We’ll need more canvas! And easels!” Nel ran from the room.

Brand was still staring at Seri, frowning.

“Did I interrupt your plans with Nel?” Seri asked.

“No,” Brand said. “Is that why you asked to join us?”

“No,” Seri said. “I just wanted to try something new.”

Brand blinked, and his expression softened.

“Nel and I have been sketching our canvases for the past few days. Did you want to try drawing first, or just skip to painting?”

“I think… I’ll just paint.”

“All right,” he said with a nod. “I’ll show you how to mix the pigments.”

Mixing paints was fine. Seri could do that. But then Brand tried to explain color theory and composition, and Seri started to feel like an idiot. She had no idea what he was talking about, no matter how patiently he explained it.

Seri did not want to mess up the nice canvases, so she painted a flower on an old wooden board. She felt she ought to know how to paint a flower, because she saw flowers every day, and yet when she tried, the paint blobbed and smeared.

“You’d think I’d know how to paint a lily,” she groaned.

“I can see the shape of it,” Brand said.

“Don’t patronize me,” she said. “It’s awful, and you know it.”

Brand, naturally, could paint flawless flowers, even without looking at the book for reference, but Nel was especially brilliant. She, out of everyone, got the colors to come out right. Even Brand was impressed.

“You really are good at this,” he said fondly.

“Really?”

“I’m serious. If you were given some study, you could be a painter.”

Nel blushed.

Gretchen, meanwhile, proceeded to stoically paint her board half black and half gray, making no attempt to make any sort of a picture.

Seri, feeling like she had done nothing but made a piece of wood uglier than before, decided to make herself useful and start cleaning up the brushes.

“You don’t have to do that,” Brand said.

“I’m just trying to be useful.”

“I don’t want you to be useful,” he said, with a slight edge in his voice. “I want you to enjoy yourself.”

Seri put down the brushes.

“Are you not enjoying yourself?” Brand asked.

“I wish… I wish I could make something beautiful.”

“You just need to practice.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Seri said. “I’ve never been good at anything. My sewing is ugly, my cooking is barely edible, I can’t arrange rooms. I’m just not good at making things pretty.”

“I’ve had your cooking, and it’s fine,” Brand said. “Plus, you garden.”

“I don’t make the flowers beautiful. They just come up that way.”

“Seri,” he said gently, “you’re too hard on yourself. What does it matter if you make beautiful things or not? You are beautiful. Isn’t that enough?”

Seri flushed. She did not want the compliment to affect her, but it did. It made her stomach knot, and a warm flutter erupt in her chest. She hated that feeling. As bad as it was when Brand was mean to her, it was worse when he was nice. It made it so easy to like him, so easy to hope…

…and so much harder when that hope came crashing down.